Welcome to Herald – an interactive period drama about colonialism. Well, technically it’s about a steward by the name of Devan Rensburg. He serves aboard the merchant ship, the HLV Herald in the 19th century. Or he would, if developer Wispfire hadn’t made one tiny miscalculation in their plans to launch the game on Steam this week.
The choice-driven, 3D point and click adventure was all set to release on February 16th. With the help of 594 backers, Wispfire raised €17,617 during their 2015 Kickstarter campaign. The weeks leading up to the launch were a flurry of excitement for the team. They released a series of interactive vignettes for fans to get a sense of the types of choices they could expect once aboard the Herald.
Unfortunately, Wispfire managed to overlook one small detail in their launch plans. Submitting Herald to Valve for review.
“…we realized we had been so swept up in making sure Herald would be as flawless as possible that we forgot to press probably the most important button on Steam – meaning Valve has yet to review our game Herald: Book I & II for release.”
As such the Steam release of Herald Book I & II has been delayed until February 22nd. Wispfire announced the ‘delay’ in a Kickstarter update under the disclaimer: “Warning: the content in this message is unbelievably stupid.”
Review keys, along with backer and DRM free pre-orders, were unaffected by the mishap and should work as intended. This is by far not the worst delay I’ve ever seen, but it is pretty funny to see how one tiny oversight can have such a huge impact on a project.
Live And Learn
Most backers have taken the news in stride. They commiserated in the comments section about times they’d managed to overlook something critically important. In game development, as in life; no matter how much you prepare, something can still go wrong. Usually, on the release date.
