The final furlong: Sproglet vs Glyph Quest which will make it into the world first?

And we're off! Glyph Quest is in the hands of the app store guardians and we have just reached 38 weeks pregnant, Sproglet could be here at any moment.  So with up to 14 days for submission to be approved and the same wait for our due date, the race is on!

Crunch

For Glyph Quest the last week has been non stop, all cannons blazing, condition one set on the good ship Tiny Flat - crunch was officially here.

Now how in the world did we end up in self enforced crunch?

We've known the due date for the baby for a long time, it just always seemed so far away.  It was next year after all - that's ages away.  And Glyph Quest spent the longest time being just two weeks away from finished, two more weeks of knuckling down would have this bad boy ready to go.  OK so suddenly it's January, suddenly that lofty deadline of 'before the baby is here' is now only two weeks away (well, 'ish') and Glyph Quest still needed that final push.

Players pick to be a Witch or a Wizard.  We still don't know which Sproglet will be...

Now crunch is never really a good thing, crunch when you work from home is equally a terrible idea, crunch when you work from home AND are heavily pregnant is just asking for all kinds of trouble... but then at least I could nap whenever and no one would mind!  For how exhausting it has been (for Alex too, he's been able to put far more hours into this than I could) the pay off has been huge.  Massive leaps in content and polish day by day, getting the task lists down to nothing, and even adding a few bonus bits (yup we are still suffering with 'wouldn't it be cool if...' syndrome).

We had to tell ourselves to stop.  We've being trying to 'put it in a box and ship it' for days now, but keep getting hooked in playthroughs and finding small tweaks we could make.  Finally (4am Monday morning) we pushed the button.  

And the weight off both of our shoulders is lifted, mostly.

The weight of the baby bump is still increasing.

Next Steps

It's all about those chains and reversal bonuses!

So what do we do now?  Aside getting the flat in a state ready for the little one (the housework may have taken a backseat during the crunch...), and maybe taking a day to catch up on sleep, there is of course plenty we need to be doing.  Least of all some sort of marketing push.

We are very proud of the game we have made, and all bias aside it is really good fun and addictive, everyone who has played it so far has agreed with us on this!  But Alex and I can only put it in so many peoples hands, we are confident that if it's your kind of game you will enjoy it, we just need you to find it!

So the website is up and running, twitter and facebook accounts made and of course we are both blogging about the adventure - so that's social media covered.  Now we just need to push these, get a new trailer out, hit up the press and so on.  Simple right?

And then of course there is the possibilities for updates; new play modes (local turn based multiplayer and an endless mode have both come up in 'wouldn't it be cool if'' conversations), Game Center leaderboards and achievements (we are baffled at how Alex and I have got this far and not added achievements) and of course support across more devices (Android, Windows even Vita maybe).

So it seems 'stick it in a box and ship it' is a bit of a misnomer.  I would say the hard work is done now - we've made a game that we both love and want to promote - but now we have to promote it and with all of zero experience in self promotion it should prove another interesting challenge.

Hopefully we'll have created enough of a buzz before baby arrives.  Sproglet vs Glyph Quest - place your bets now!