DI MONTHLY #2: It's A Little Easier This Time

The adventures of a lone newsletter in the vastness of the internet continue. What troubles shall our brave hero(es) encounter next? Well, right now, not that much.

Welcome back to the Distant Illusions Monthly newsletter!

This edition is going to be light on breaking news because of, well, fairly self-evident reasons. Let's get into that.

OPERIUS DX IS OUT HOLY SHIT

After roughly 300 years, the accursed game of pain and suffering is out. On Steam. And also itch.

Go get the game on Steam!

Or itch.io!

If you haven't gotten the game yet, now's the time! Go buy it, play it, and most importantly, leave us a review! Steam loves reviews, as per Gaben's 11.5 commandments he gave in 2007 (“2. Thou shalt receive appraisal of thy indie peers; otherwise the algorithm shall pound you into the dirt where you belong, you console peasant.” It's right between “1. The cake is a lie” and "4. This is where the list should continue numerically."). We really need to get to the 50 review threshold of Steam and we're only at like… what? 8? Ouch.

Now, some of you might be wondering, what about Switch? Wasn't the game going to be released on Nintendo eShop too?

Look… It was hard enough getting it finished on one device, let alone two. So the Switch version is releasing...tomorrow. And in Japan a week after that. Along with the soundtrack. A patch for the Switch version will also come out that fixes some issues and will be out sometime in between the two.

It's been a bit of an ordeal. We'll elaborate a bit on the technical side of it with upcoming blogposts, so if you like numbers, rendering APIs, and things you would most likely encounter in a book with a REALLY boring title like “Hardware Bandwidth and Other Tales of Rendering Bottlenecks”, look forward to Mors' post on that relatively soon.

There's not that much more to say on that. I guess I'll move onto the next topic…

The Livestream (RIP) and What's to Come

Yes, alongside the game's Steam launch, we also did a livestream! It, uh, certainly was live! And it contained zero crashes!

I'd link a VOD of it, but it turns out that we, uh, forgot to record most of it. So if you somehow have recordings of the lost parts, you can chip in by sending a mail to contact@distantillusions.com with the subject “I found something equivalent to your embarrassing prom night video. Send me $500 or I will publish it.”

In the stream, we talked a bit about what's to come. A bit. I'll be candid, we don't have much to show yet. But just as a little heart to heart, between you and me [INSERT RECIPIENT NAME HERE FOR VIEWER RETENTION], we have a bit of extra special teaser image to show, just for you. Have a look.

Oh, fuck, sorry, I accidentally corrupted the file a bit. But I'm sure the idea still comes across, right?

We're not wasting any time in going full throttle to the next project. This has been in the works for years at this point, as many of the Distant Illusions hardcore fans (there is at least a double digit amount) no doubt are already aware, considering how long we've been teasing it.

I will write some posts diving into the technical side of the engine soon, which will hopefully act as guidance to other devs working on their own engines. We ran into a lot of unforeseen consequences of simple decisions early on, which is partially why the game has taken this long to get announced.

We'll have more to share with the next game, Unnamed 3D Platformer (potentially final title pretending to be a working title) very soon. Like, really soon. Insert audience participation begging here. Wait shit I wasn't–

Forum and misc.

We're also working on a forum. Yup. This is practically a forever topic too, since we started teasing it like, 6 months ago?

It's actually practically done, aside from the visuals. We've been messing around with it for quite a while, and it's functional, if a bit crude. We're hoping to have it published this month, so feel free to share the news about the forum to any friends and non-friends alike, as long as they like being a part of a niche and potentially harmful online community.

In general, stuff like this is pretty hard to test, so we're hoping for a lot of interaction and a lot of bug reports when the forum launches in a public beta. Whenever that is.

There will be some smaller site updates that will drop pretty soon after this newsletter, in preparation for launching the forum itself. Some of them may be out by the time this one goes public next week. Who knows? We certainly don't. Look, we're pretty burnt out from the launch, okay?

In conclusion

Acta non verba, which means “act unlike Vert”. The newsletter is a little on the shorter side this month since all the things that were really exciting have been shown off already, and the things that will be exciting aren't really ready to be shown yet.

By all accounts, the next month will be really packed. There's so much stuff that's on the verge of being finished right now, which will all hopefully be rapidly released into your faces like the end of an extended public masturbation session, followed by several months in jail.

So stay tuned (pun intended but you won't get it yet), there's going to be a lot of blogposts and news being released in the coming weeks.

And if you haven't yet, go get Operius DX on Steam! Unless you're one of those people specifically waiting for the Switch release. Then, uh, go to bed and try not to think too much about how tomorrow is monday and you have to go to work before playing the funny videogame.

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