Hi folks!

So I guess I’ve kind of given away the main bit of this in the title. There’s a bit of a story behind it, but the TL;DR is that Sprite Lamp for Windows will be launching on Steam on the 25th of this month! Yes, that’s in a few days – this Thursday in fact. I’ve got an application pending for a Humble Widget too, so while I can’t 100% confirm it, I’m hoping that it will be available via Humble Widget (at www.spritelamp.com) on the same day, or at least soon after.

There’s a bit of a story leading up to this which I’m going to tell now – not because it’s particularly interesting, but just for the benefit of people who like to stay informed about adventures in development.

Recent events

My initial plan was to launch a bit earlier, on the sixteenth. I just had a couple of things to do, and one of them was to ask the fine folks at Valve how to tag it as ‘early access’. This would have been on something like the ninth of this month. What I learned when they replied is that Steam’s Early Access feature is for games, not software in general, and as such Sprite Lamp can’t make use of it. Sprite Lamp is in a pretty good state now I think, but there were definitely some bugs still there and I was also hoping for some wider feedback on the UI and general usability issues, so this was bit of a rude shock (NB This was my fault, not Valve’s). I briefly considered delaying, but on further reflection I concluded that:

1. The serious bugs that remained were probably fixable in a week or so of furious coding.
2. Though the software will continue to improve in the future, it’s at a point now that people will find it useful for their development, and by delaying it I’d just be keeping it out of people’s hands unnecessarily.
3. I’m inclined to be pretty nervous about launching products and that’s probably making me cringe away from this situation a bit, but I should correct for that personal bias of mine and just get on with it.

So, steeling myself to a week of reasonably full-on bug fixing and polishing, I got into it! At least, I wish that’s what had happened. What actually happened was that my computer died. Totally random, by all appearances, but not ideal timing. No data loss, but certain set things back a bit. I was back up and running in a few days, delayed the launch by a small amount, and got to work. Fortunately, I was right about being able to get through the bugs on my list in a few days, and that brings us to where we are now. Despite a slightly hair-raising last couple of weeks, Sprite Lamp on Windows/Steam is ready to go!

MacOS and Linux versions

So, I mentioned in my last post that I was going to stagger the launch, because it’s a small team and I’m not familiar enough with MacOS and Linux development, and in general, it’s scary enough launching a product on Steam without throwing in multiple OSes at the same time. However, I’m pleased to announce that the MacOS build is making really good progress. I’ve had my head in Steam stuff for a little while now, but the MacOS port has made enough progress in my absence that it’s time for me to get back into that side of things (that is, it’s reached a point where my knowledge of Sprite Lamp’s codebase will speed things up greatly). Though I’m reluctant to make solid announcements, I’m pretty confident that we’ll have at least something beta-ish in a few weeks, and I’m hoping for the proper launch within a month of the Windows launch.

The Linux build of Sprite Lamp has historically been way ahead of the MacOS build, but I’m afraid that will change at this point. However, it’s definitely going to be following the MacOS build pretty shortly.