The paperwork I mentioned before is all cleared up, I've done most of the technical integration with Steam, so why isn't the game on Early Access yet?

I'm not happy about the delay either, so I think I should just be honest and transparent: flight stick support.

Many players who have bought or tried out the game on itch.io have been excited about being able to use their flight sticks. This is completely natural, it's a flying game after all! Unfortunately, the input library I'm using, which has excellent cross-platform support for gamepads (much better than what Unity gives me natively) it doesn't natively support any flight sticks. The way the input library is made, this means they don't work _at all_. The only way I could support them is if I personally owned every flight stick on the market and wrote some code to support each one. This is just not practical.

In the past, I hoped to remedy the situation with a "controls.ini" file, but it's proven to be error prone and hard to understand. I wanted to use an in-game menu to rebind controls.

Unfortunately (that's the second time I said "unfortunately"!), the same input library does not support rebinding of unknown controllers... that is, it doesn't support rebinding flight sticks, which is the whole reason I wanted to add the menu!

Looking back at the disappointment with flight stick support in the past, and the likely fact that many (most?) Steam players will want to use their flight sticks the moment they buy the game, I feel like it's a _mandatory_ feature before I can release on Steam.

If you've read this far... the bottom line is: I have options to remedy the situation (fix the input library myself, or learn and integrate a different one), but each one requires a good deal of extra work. I feel like the game isn't going to get out until July, which is disappointing, but that's better than launching without flight stick support. I hope everyone understands.

If you prefer keyboard, mouse, or gamepad controls, which are 100% supported already... I'm really sorry! Please go buy the game on itch.io, you'll get a Steam key when the time comes.