Episode 3 Release Date Pushed Back (but here’s why)
by Cez on Jan.23, 2011, under tsl

In a previous post I made on the forums, I spoke of how certain we were of our January 29th date. I had my little plan with enough breathing room to get caught up if we fell behind. And it looked beautiful!

They say you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch. And now we are here, with just under a week to the date we announced, and lo and behold, we’ve got a few unhatched eggs—in other words, a build that is not ready to be released to the public. Though Episode 3 is technically playable and does look nice, it still needs that extra layer of polish to really make it go from good to great. We want it to be really great, and more importantly, that’s what you guys deserve. But to get it there, we need a little more time.

To make Episode 3 as awesome as it can possibly be, we’ve decided to move our release date to early February. We’ll announce the exact date soon when we release our trailer for Episode 3, which I think is easily our most exciting and tantalizing trailer yet!

Episode 3 is a massive beast and it’s been an interesting and very educational experience working on it. To give you an idea of the scope, Episode 3 is more than twice the size of Episode 2. We hired 20 new animators to crank out Episode 3 and work on the 1500 hours of animations that were needed to make this episode much bigger and much more exciting; Episode 2 only had around 350 hours of new animation and 5 new animators! To get this amount of animation done in the time we did them is definitely a new milestone for us and I’m really proud of the work that our team, old members and new, have put into this Episode. We are now down to about 100 hours of animations as we polish the work and make the animations as good as possible!

All together, this means you can expect a much longer episode, packed with more intricate and difficult puzzles, a centerpiece action sequence, more beautiful cutscenes, another Isle to explore with new scenes and characters, and much more! “My Only Love Sprung from My Only Hate” definitely holds a special place in my heart as probably my favorite episode of the series (yet!).

In an effort to avoid having any other pushbacks, by the time Episode 3 is released, our team will already be hard at work on Episodes 4 and 5. Some interesting things have been going on with the later episodes. Since we launched the series and have been getting feedback from the fans, we’ve rethought the game’s grand finale and have made some changes to the ending. This means what was once Episodes 4 and 5 have been combined into the new Episode 4, and we’re working hard to build almost the new Episode 5 almost from scratch. This new final Episode will bring the game to a much stronger conclusion, and it gives us the chance to incorporate pieces of the larger game we’d always hoped to make. And even more exciting? In Episode 5, we’re adding a second playable character—but you’ll have to wait until then to find out who it is!

And finally, to leave you with some good news, we have new screenshots of Episode 3, and we now have the free PDF version of the 2011 TSL Calendar available for download in the Fan Club, featuring some great artwork both by our team members and the fans! Some months even offer sneak peeks at places yet to come, so I hope you enjoy it, and even though you’ll have to wait a little bit longer for the game—I promise it will be worth the wait!