OKAY I have underestimated the Steam Review process and we are looking at a 3ish week delay in releasing the intro chapter.

 Here’s the TLDR and Plan: 

-I severely underestimated the review process for publishing on Steam and I am worried that I am endangering the critical day 1 success of TCM’s release waiting for Steam to approve my build in the 11th hour. 

-Because of this, I am pushing the release back until June 17 and I'm waiting on steam to change the date on the store page.

-I am extremely unhappy about this but it's what’s best for the game 

-I have to emphasize: the intro chapter is complete, no content work is needed 

-However this time gives me the opportunity to focus on bugtesting 

-And give me time to make it SteamDeck compatible 

-And apply for “Great on SteamDeck” verification 

-And other various Steam integrations like community avatars, cards, etc, full controller support, cloud saves, etc

I’ll try to keep this brief for clarity’s sake- the last few weeks have been REALLY rough in trying to finally wrap up UI implementation after delays, receiving and shipping kickstarter merchandise to about 150 people, and preparing to launch on Steam. So here’s the deal, Steam has to review a game’s build before it will allow it to be published on the storefront- meaning Steam needs to look at all the game files + make sure it runs properly before you can publish. It does this in two stages. In the first, it looks at your storefront page to make sure all the graphical assets and copy are the way they should be/don’t contain anything they shouldn’t. TCM passed this stage months ago. The second review is where we’re at now. TCM’s release build was submitted last week and I was told to prepare for 2-4 days to clear. After 5 days we were rejected because of a packaging error I made, so I fixed it and resubmitted. It’s now 5/20 and we’re still waiting for approval. I’m gonna level with you, this has been stressing me out pretty bad for a few weeks- not just in preparing for submission but waiting for answers and progress. With that being the case and knowing that Steam’s not likely to process much work over the weekend, I’ve decided to push back the intro release a little. I’m not happy about it but I don’t want to fumble the game in Steam’s algorithm by having Day 1 issues like bugs/etc due to a lack of testing via Steam’s interface. I thought this review process would go faster and I expected to be able to use Steam’s tools for testing on their platform earlier. Lessons have been learned.