This is going to be a bit of a rollercoaster of an update. We're going to laugh together, cry together, and probably end up in a pottery class together. But before we jump into it, we wanted to let you all know that a few of us are going to be at PAX East this weekend! Look out for the 30-something-year-old nerds in Pixel Noir T-shirts and say hi if you see us!
It seems like ages since we were at a con! We won't have a booth this time around, but we'll be floating around!

Getting Down to Brass Tax

As mentioned in update #72, we ended our business deal with BadLand Publishing due to a myriad of reasons. Here's an overview of what BadLand was supposed to provide and what we've been able to source ourselves:
There are several big gaps we need to close. If we launch without a publisher, there's no guarantee we can accomplish all of this. As you can see above, since we dropped BadLand Publishing, we were able to successfully fill a few gaps:

• We hired Elevated Play, who is currently helping us in QA/testing the full Steam release. Switch testing will be our next order of business likely starting in May.
• We've acquired porting equipment for Playstation and Xbox (Switch is still pending).
• We had talks with a few potential publishers, no deal with any of them so far (but we'll keep you posted).
• We're still on track and working our collective asses off to finish full development by the end April.
• A few of us are starting to transition to backer rewards fulfillment. The team is going to kick this workstream off with finalization of the official Pixel Noir OST.

As we have no publisher yet, we're not in a strong position to go live with the finished game. As a result, we are officially delaying our Steam launch to Q4 or earlier. The decision to pull back our launch date was due to the fact that we've poured years into this project and want to have a strong launch for our passion project. To recap: we're on track to finish with the game as promised, we just need to line up marketing support before we can launch. So bummer: yes, but worth the delay: absolutely yes because it will get into more hands in the long run as well as set us up for delivery of more of the things we had promised with our previous publisher! If you have a publisher in mind for Pixel Noir, PLEASE let either them or us know so we can move forward here...the sooner we get a publisher lined up, the sooner we release! In lieu of all this info, we will do two rad things: [olist]

We'll update the Early Access on Steam sometime in May or June. Less bugs + more polish = more fun!

We will look to accelerate distribution of the OST as part of our fulfillment to backers who purchased digital merchandise. It doesn't fill the void left by a delayed launch date, but if we can't launch, by god, we'll start to deliver on some of the other promises we've made. At the end of the day, you guys have supported us through thick and thin and we appreciate you all. Hopefully you will enjoy some of the sweet tunage from our composers Kunal Majmudar & Hiroki Kikuta. [/olist] Once we get the OST out the door, we will transition efforts to the Arrange Album, which has some incredible talent on it! Here's a sneak peek of the lineup for the Arrange Album: [previewyoutube=zC7bB2wT5JE;full][/previewyoutube]

Development Updates

Our next stop on the update rollercoaster ride is dev team updates! Because of the work that has been done in coordination with Elevated Play as our QA support, we've been able to identify many new bugs AND we've already managed to fix a majority of them. By the time we update the Early Access on Steam, our goal is to have as few bugs as possible.
"Uhh, I'm stuck.... Alittle help here!?" Dungeon switch mechanics: We had to reimplement some of the dungeon switches due to issues with saving/loading resulting in soft freezes galore--particularly if you spawn when inside the environment after unlocking some of the doors or extending bridges. [previewyoutube=xAeelP87gmQ;full][/previewyoutube] New item added to game: We added the new item "Chili Pepper" to the game- a minor item that heals some HP but also causes Enrage status, which speeds a character up in the ATB bar and makes them auto-attack when their turn is up. Enrage is similar to what "Berserk" does in Final Fantasy 6:
Woof: "Let's get pissed off and start swinging!!" Achievements: About a month ago, we added the rest of the trophies into the game. In the Early access there's 10 trophies you can get but in the full game you'll have 30 to try to obtain!
This one goes out to all you completionists out there! Quality of life: We put in some small quality-of-life features. A simple save data overwrite confirmation and an easier way to erase save data. We also put in a way to equip gear within shops.
Just trying to make things easier for ya!

That wraps it up for this update!

As mentioned above, we'll keep you guys in the loop if we sign with a new publisher--and in the meantime, we'll get going on some of the backer rewards! As always, we appreciate you all and the journey of epic proporations that Pixel Noir has taken us all through. If you're excited about Pixel Noir, here are three steps you can take to make sure you're in the know: 1. Wishlist Pixel Noir on Steam! 2. Join our SWDTech Games Discord server for a constant stream of screenshots, granular development updates, sprint summaries. You can even chat with the development team! 3. Follow our daily progress on our official Twitter bot.
Our next official update will be on July 27th, however we will likely put out a smaller update before this one with more details around the OST/Arrange Album as well as an update on a Publisher (if there is news to share). From our 16-bit family to yours, we hope everyone is having a great 2023 so far! //Team SWDTech