Whelp, Riptide GP2 is in the can, and we're shipping it out to Android and Apple phones and tablets around the world this week.
It's always a little bittersweet finishing a game. It's not like baking a cake, where the timer pings and you pull it out and put frosting on and it's done. With a game, it's never really clear when it's finished. You keep going over and over the list of features and little polish items you wanted to squeeze in, trying to decide if it's worth pushing back the final date a little bit further to make room for this one ... last.... thing.
And that list doesn't get shorter. Every time we cross something off the list, we add something else. You never actually cross the last item off the list. You can always polish a little more. Eventually you just reach a point where you make yourself stop -- or somebody else (like a publisher) makes you stop. And then you ship it.
I'm really, really proud of Riptide GP2. Ralf was saying the other day and I agree -- it's the best game we've made so far. I feel like we took all the lessons from our previous four games and rolled them into this one effort. There's a ton of content, a lot of variety, a great multiplayer experience, and -- if may say so myself -- it looks really good.
So, we're done and now the fun part starts -- hearing the reactions from fans and reviewers out there who hopefully like the game. That's the thing about mobile, in fact you're actually never completely done, you're always fixing and tweaking and adding features based on player feedback, and rolling those changes into updates.
Speaking of updates:
You may notice a big fat "Coming Soon" button on the main menu. That was a big-ticket list item that we decided a couple of months ago to push into an update rather than try and squeeze it in for launch. I'm not going to say what that feature is yet. But suffice it to say it's a feature I'm really looking forward to, and will extend the gameplay experience a ton.
See? It's done. But its not finished :-)
