Status Update

Hey Sky Trader Fans! December has been a rough month... we recently submitted Sky Trader to Valve for pre-release review, and it unfortunately didn't pass. The fine folks at Valve discovered a critical bug in our final build. We hadn't found it because it wasn't present in our editor, but it happens every time in the executable. The bug was related to our inventory system and it actually causes a hard crash where the application abruptly terminates. We worked on it for about a few days, but because of the nature of the bug we weren't able to effectively determine the exact cause. Pulling out a large portion of the inventory code fixed the issue, but unfortunately a trading game without an inventory system isn't very fun! We had to choose between continuing to diagnose a very tricky issue and stepping back and rebuilding the inventory system from the ground up to make it more robust. After some deliberation, we chose the latter. The system we are building out is much better than the old one in a lot of ways, but there is quite a bit of work remaining before it has feature parity with the old system. As such, our planned December release is at risk. I am pretty sure the Steam Store crew takes some time off at Christmas (this was the case in the past, not sure if it still is), so even if we did finish next week it might not get reviewed. I wish I had better news for you... the development of Sky Trader has been full of ups and downs, and I really appreciate all of you who have stuck it out with us! We will do our best to keep you updated as we work through this. Happy Holidays, JJ