MoonWard Android release delayed to 27.09.2025

Hello everyone! Not gonna lie, this kind of hurts to write. We'll get to that but first:

The Android release of MoonWard is delayed to the 27th of September 2025

To everyone excited and expecting the release - I'm sorry - things have been moving slower than I hoped, life has been getting in the way, the demo at MegaCon required more work than I thought it would and finally, I realised there was in fact quite a lot more work than I originally planned for. Between all of the above and needing to be done at least a couple weeks earlier so I can send copies and codes to reviewers, I decided to push the release. Again, I'm sorry guys, please bear with me just a while longer.

This Sucks

Yeah, it does for me too. I was hoping to avoid a MoonWard delay, but here we are. In all honesty I've been struggling a bit, both physically and mentally, to get everything to a shippable state and it started becoming quite overwhelming in the last few weeks. I'm fine now, but I was feeling quite down for a while. It felt like it didn't matter how much I rushed and progress I made - there was just always so much more left.

And don't get me wrong, there still is, but I think I've come to terms with it now. This is my first major game release and I've always put a lot of myself into my art so it was never going to be completely smooth. I did expect something to snap... but it still got to me. Like I said I think I've come to terms with it now. Let's talk about something a bit less depressing.

What Now

I've had to change my roadmap significantly. In a nutshell, I now plan on releasing a patch on the 12th of August, I have to be done with the game by 8th of September, then I'll have a week of QA and bug fixes so I can send review copies around the 15th of September. Any additional QA, release admin work and work on the release trailer will be done between the 15th and the 27th. I'm trying very hard to give myself some wiggle room but some bits will still be a little close. At least the game will be ready by that point and I can push some work to after release. Speaking of finishing the game!

What's Left

Quite a lot actually! Below is a list of grouped tasks from my task tracking software, and an estimated time they'll take to finish. These are in order of urgency, top being most urgent:

• Marketing (ongoing, 1 day/week): 10 days

• Work for Demo at MegaCon Expo: 2 days

• Write Side Stories: 4 days

• County 4/5 Bounties: 3 days

• Patch 0.9.69: 4 days

• Review and Edit Stories: 2 days

• Assets and Content for Stories (images/audio/items/enemies/bosses/etc.): 2 days

• Add Main and Side Stories to Game (and testing): 3 days

• New County 5 Hexes: 1 day

• End of Game Logic: 2 days

• End of Game Cinematics: 3 days

• Extended Intro Video: 1 day

• Tweaks and Remaining Small Features: 2 days

• Bugfixes & Polish: 6 days

• Release Admin: 2 days

• Release Trailer: 3 days

You don't have to do the math, this totals to 50 days, which is exactly 10 weeks and there are 10 weeks between Monday the 21st of July and Saturday the 27th of September. I feel quite confident with these estimates. That's mostly because there isn't that much writing left. I've never had issues estimating technical work or even art and video, but when it came to writing I was way off. Additionally, there are a few things that this list doesn't account for.

• All estimates are 20% higher than what I expect them to actually take. It's a software development thing - you should always slightly overestimate your tasks to account for unexpected problems.

• I won't be working 5 day weeks. Duh.

• Some of these will overlap slightly.

Hoping no major issues pop up so between those three I should be able to gain at least a week back, meaning I should be fine for the 27th. Worst case I might have to push some stuff to come out post release.

And that's about it. I was really dreading writing this post but now it's done I feel a bit relieved. I hope you better understand why I made this choice and that there are no hard feelings. One last thing before I go, I wanted to thank you all so much for your continued support! It really does mean a lot to me!

Like always,

stay awesome!