March to the Moon Passed!

March to the Moon has passed the XBox LIVE Indie Games review process!  All I need to do now is publish it and put it out.  But I'm going to hold off for a little longer.  I'm going on vacation very soon and I'd rather be around to check and see how things are going.  I also don't want to spend my vacation worrying about how the game is doing.  Even after getting it out, the work isn't over.  I'll be getting some activation keys and will want to hand them out to people that do reviews of games to try and get the word out.

Now I'm just doing some final coding to make March to the Moon work with Indie City's SDK so that players can get achievements.  After that's done I'm going to finally be able to dive into my next project, a game for learning Japanese!  I was never really happy with My Japanese Coach.  I think I can do something more useful.  I'll have some screenshots for you next week, since I've already started it up.  I actually am going to be re-writing it because it's currently using FlatRedBall.  After fighting with FRB to get things loaded up smoothly on the Xbox for March to the Moon I've rather soured on it and would rather just go it alone.  I had started rewriting March to the Moon from scratch so that it would load faster, but in the end, since it passed I decided that was way more work than it was worth.

I also learned something very important from trying to contact the press and trying to sell March to the Moon.  It's a good game, but unless things are top-notch or really stick out they're not going to get very far.  My sum total of two sales on Indievania (which I will never see any cash from) speaks to that.  I'm going to be making some changes to my original design for the Japanese game.