I’m happy to announce here that Catchup will be released on August 7th, 2014.
Last wednesday I put together the gameplay trailer (above) for Catchup and showed it at our local IGDA Twin Cities meeting. I’ll be showing the game again tomorrow night at our Multiplayer Mixer. Then next month, the week after launch, I’ll also be heading to GenCon in Indianapolis to show off the game on their expo floor.
This is definitely the most work I’ve put into a game. (If I were following my standard launch M.O., I’d have already pushed the release button in iTunes Connect.) This time around I’m trying to follow more “game release best practices”. This is mostly because I feel like this game deserves more attention. There are a couple of reasons for this, and the first is that it’s an absolutely great board game that I really like playing! Of course every game I make is one that I want to play, but it’s extra true in this case. I can’t wait to have dozens of async games going of this. (One of my beta testers has already reported playing over 25 games in one sitting, which speaks well toward engagement. Don’t worry if you signed up to be a beta tester, we’re going to be starting the “official” beta testing push sometime later this week.) The second reason for giving this extra marketing is that I think this app is some of my best work. It’s definitely well into the realm of the quality and polish that I would prepare for client work. I’ve been trying to squash every bug as soon as I see it. (There are of course one or two that I haven’t had time to fix yet, but nothing major.)
Another contributing factor to officially spending more (time, effort, & money) to market this game is that Nick Bentley, the game’s designer, has committed to doing so also. He’s already started writing about the release, offering an extremely generous “stretch goal” if we can reach 10,000 downloads. He’s going to be helping out with trying to get reviewers to write about it, and joining me at GenCon. My feeling is that getting 10k downloads is basically next-to-impossible unless we get an app store feature. But if we can get there, I have lots of ideas for additional features, including a very cool new game mode Nick has already been putting some thought into balancing and designing. I guess another reason for all this buzz and pre-release is so I can play that new game mode. I hope we can make it happen.
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