Idol Empire Alpha (+ Beta) Update & Announcement of Engine (Patreon)

2019 is now well under way and with this it is time to bring you all up to speed of what we're up to.

With the festive season and disruption now out of the way we've returned to the development of Idol Empire with our next milestone being to get the alpha build online. This was going to happen this week however following some internal testing we've now decided we'd like to wrap up all the current fixes pending (including one particularly annoying crash) before doing so, it is therefore the next build we compile that we plan to release at the $25 tier. We're making good progress and suspect this won't take much longer however we ask that you bear with us a bit longer while we wrap things up.

The beta builds will then follow ideally not too far behind once more features are implemented allowing for a greater and more stable view on the gameplay package to date keeping the focus on game balance, the straggler bugs and tweaking details. The hope will then be on a Q3/Q4 2019 release but this is hardly set in stone at this stage as there is still much to do.

Finally the engine we've chosen for Shining Song Starnova: Idol Empire - the decision was made for it to be GameMaker Studio. 

The primary reason we've gone with GameMaker is that in our tinkering we had easy access to documentation and knowledge that has allowed us to find a good footing with different techniques as well as getting reliable performance across the board in terms of the prototypes made. We're still building up our confidence around getting the most out of the engine but we're happy with the results we're getting so far.

This also opens up new options in terms of end product platforms with consoles particularly in mind. They won't be our primary development focus but at some point in the future it is something we would like to start doing, based on discussions so far doing so with GameMaker is sounding promising but nothing will be materalising just yet and so this will likely be a topic we revisit another day.