After almost eleven months of hard work, today is the day we are releasing QBob: Remastered to the world!

The last bit of content in the game was getting John in the “booth” to record new dialog for the final boss. There are a dozen or so new insult, taunts, and mad ramblings to which QBob will be subjected.

Most of the past month or so has been spent building up our Steam Store presence with tons of graphical assets, creating a few trailer videos, undergoing lots of Valve content reviews, and porting the game to other platforms. Much of the hardest work her on this final stretch has been building the game for MacOS and Ubuntu. Craig did all of the work getting the MacOS game working. Apple makes it very difficult to create anything (despite what hipster Web devs may say). I handled the Ubuntu port using a virtual machine and it was easy-peasy. In theory, that build should run natively on Steam Deck, but I have no way to test it.

Finally, I created a thirty page manual for the game. I would like to have a few of these printed up to distribute, but that’s going to be kind of expensive.

So now, without further ado, here are the links to everything QBob: Remastered that is being released today!

After having finished the bulk of the game (see the last QBob report), I have been spending the last month or so getting the game ready for distribution on Steam. And, as of today, I can finally announce that the game has its very own live Steam page!

Before I dig into the details, I’d just like to say for the first time (and definitely not the last): please go to the QBob: Remastered Steam page and add it to your Steam wishlist. Wishlists play a big role in getting new games noticed and, even if you never buy the game, adding it to your wishlist will be a great help.

As of this writing, it’s very much a work in progress. But you can’t imagine the amount of effort it took to just get this far. I couldn’t have done it without Craig, who helped with gobs of corporate paperwork. The other bit that took a bunch of effort was generating the dozen or so new art assets for every possible store location the game banner can appear in.

One of the biggest new features that I have added to the game are achievements. There are twenty-two total and they range from super easy (RTFM, flip through the entire manual) to well-nigh impossible (1cc the game on hard difficulty). Each achievement has a custom icon and they have been successfully linked to the Steamworks API.

There is also an in-game fallback if the build of the game isn’t linked to steam. You can’t believe how excited I was when I saw that little floater pop up in the lower right corner for the first time.

I also did a full gamepad support pass to allow the entire game, from menus to high score entry, to be accessible without the help of a keyboard or mouse. Now, I fully admit that playing the game with a gamepad is not ideal, but Steam really pushes gamepad support, especially for making titles compatible with Steamdeck.

There are still a couple of items to complete. I’d like to get cloud saves enabled, which, in theory, is just a matter of mirroring the GameMaker local storage folder to Steam. I also need to make a short game trailer video which is going to require me capturing a bunch of gameplay footage and editing something together. Then there’s the soundtrack and game manual PDF. Back to the grind.