Hey Sky Trader Fans,

Well, what can I say... it's hard to excuse disappearing for over a year. A lot has happened for me both professionally and personally, and I finally seem to have ended up where I started. It has been a great regret of mine that I was never able to deliver the game I promised you so long ago... so without further ado I present...

Sky Trader 2019

My vision for Sky Trader has been forced to evolve with the dissolving of our original team. I have taken over all art responsibilities, and as such I have moved to a new art style for the game. I loved Nick's work on the original game, but it wasn't something I was able to reproduce on my own very effectively... that said, I am really happy with the way the new game looks and I hope you will enjoy it too.

I've also made several significant changes to the gameplay... most notably the switch to a top-down view. There were several factors that went into this, and I'll write an update detailing them in the next few weeks, but it has actually turned out to be a lot more fun to play than the original!

As far as timelines go, I won't make you any promises... development is progressing quite quickly right now, and I'll be sure to post regular updates as things unfold.

To those of you reading this, thank you so much for sticking it out! I'll post more updates about this new direction over the next few weeks, but feel free to fire off any questions in the meantime!

Best Wishes,

JJ

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