Gearbits has launched! After two years of development, the game is ready to go. Making the game has been fun and a valuable learning experience. Let’s hope that the Steam release won’t turn out to be harsh lesson.

I started making Gearbits because it was the type of mecha game I wanted to play, but didn’t exist as far as I knew. Now it exists but because I happen to be the one who made it, I can’t ”Play” it like normal. Thankfully, a lot of people have said that Gearbits is also the kind of game they would like to play. So I’m hoping that everyone else will have fun with it, and my sacrifice won’t be in vain.

The game has now launched, but there are still things that you can do to help with it. Play the game! Post about it and tell all your friends. And remember to leave a review on Steam! I’d like to know if you liked the game or not. If you didn’t, I would have preferred to know about it during the last year of public testing, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Here’s an opening animation I made for the game.

So, now that the game is out, what’s next for Quackpond games? First. I’ll take a break from game development for a while. I’d like to take some distance and have a proper break, but most likely I’ll be back sometime next week.

I’ll post detailed future plans later, but the short version is, that I’ll write a post mortem for Gearbits and then I’ll either start working on my next game, or if Gearbits is successful enough, I’ll make some content updates for the game.

Another point that Is pretty much tied to the future of Quackpond games is the Unity situation. Most of you are probably familiar with it, so I’m not gonna get into it. The short version is that a lot of developers are moving away from Unity because of changes to Unitys policies.

Gearbits is made with Unity. I’m not changing the engine for Gearbits, but for my next game, I’ll start learning Godot and I’ll do everything I can to move away from Unity. As I said earlier, Making Gearbits has been a learning experience. I’ve learned a lot about Unity during the last two years. It’ll be a massive pain to start a new engine, but I feel that I should at least explore the alternatives, because if Unity becomes the only option, next time they announce some shenanigans, they might not back down.

I released the game earlier this morning. And in doing so, I neglected to think about timezones. So that means that the 10.10. release date that I chose 50% because it looks cool, won’t be showing up on the Steam page. Oopsie! But if that’s the only thing that’ll go wrong with the launch I’ll be happy.

If you'd like talk about the game, you can join the discord server. https://discord.gg/hrBBEBfx The invite is good for seven days. I don't know what to do with the Discord server now, since I set it up to communicate with the testers and the game has now released. We'll see what happens with it, but right now I can't be bothered to do anything about it.

Thanks to everyone for your support over the development. Here’s hoping that Gearbits becomes a success and i’ll be able to make more games in the future.