Some of you probably remember that we had initially planned to release Face-Plant Adventures this spring. But getting the game finished took a little longer than we expected and so the game was not submitted to peer review until mid-June. At the end of that month, the review progress was well beyond 90% when someone found an unexpected fail reason. We fixed the issue quickly and resubmitted the game after the usual one-week waiting period.
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| When will be the day when you press A to play? |
The second time around, we removed the german localization to speed up the process but unfortunately forgot to delete the german marketplace description as well. This meant that although the game could be reviewed in English only, at least two german App Hub members would need to pass the game or else the review progress would get stuck, which it did, of course. Yup, App Hub is set up in way that will not indicate such contradictory settings, which the system should prevent in the first place. When we contacted support about this we got no response, of course. So for three weeks, more (english) passes than we ever needed kept coming in but they wouldn't count towards the overall approval. We already began to fear that we would have to resubmit the game again, delaying the release even further, when finally some german App Hub members passed the game end of July / beginning of August. (If you want to know more about why it's complicated to support multiple languages in XBLIGs, read this post by Game Makers Anonymous.)
A month later, you're reading this, wondering why the game still hasn't been released. One of the main reasons for this is that Peter's and my day job employer had to approve of our private project, too, which also took much longer than we expected. End of last week, we got our chief's "go" and can now finally announce the definite release date:
Help this plant to chlorophyll-fill its destiny!
