Expeditions: Conquistador Post-funding Update #20

If you’ve been wondering what the Expeditions: Conquistador team has been up to, you’ll be pleased to find this new post-funding update available on their Kickstarter page, which includes the news of a deal they’ve struck with bitComposer for marketing and distribution, and if things go well, even a German localization. Here’s a snip:

A week or so ago we let slip on our forums that we’ve signed a deal with bitComposer to bring the game to market. This deal has changed precisely zero things about the game. We didn’t want a publisher to interfere with our product (hence our use of Kickstarter to fund a considerable part of it) and bitComposer didn’t want to interfere with our product, so that all worked out nicely. Just to be absolutely clear, we already had multiplayer done and polished by the time we signed this deal, that was entirely our own decision and bitComposer had nothing to do with it.

bitComposer brings three things to the table: they’ll fund a German localisation if the game sells well enough in English and Spanish, they’ll help us out with marketing, and through them we’ll get access to a greater range of distribution than we could reach on our own, including physical distribution via Amazon as well as in shops. Yeah, apparently some people still buy their games in shops go figure.

So what’s with the delay? Well as you may have picked up from our embarrassingly uncoordinated attempts to explain it, there is more than one reason for that. First, the delay was because we were talking to bitComposer. Then the delay was because we were waiting to work things out with some major distributors, and though we’re still waiting on that, we expect to be able to release the game this month.

Throughout the delay, we’ve been fixing the new bugs in the Mexico campaign and polishing everything off. Other than bug fixes, the polish mostly took the shape of extra animations (new animations for the horse, turn animations in combat, a cheering audience for the tournament, and so on), a whole lot of interface tweaks (better Info screen layout, some flashes to call attention to resource changes during dialogue or probability changes in the Camp Management screen), a few more sound effects (mainly different GUI sounds so you don’t get sick and tired of that one sharp click we had before), and we even managed to fit in a little more environment art while we were at it.