We've applied!
3/2/2019
As of five minutes ago, I just submitted our application to the ID@XBox program. As mentioned in the previous post, we fully intend to bring Jet Fighter Neon to the XBox One, with some new features added. Right now, Jet Fighter Neon is fully functional on our development XBox, using UWP. There are some quirks that we'll have to iron out, like actually being able to save your game state, but we're working on that. We want to publish to the XBox using XDK instead of UWP because we want to be able to incorporate some of the various features from the XBox into the game, like achievements. Being that as it is, we felt that now was the rigth time to apply to the ID@XBox program so that we don't end up writing the code for UWP and have to rewrite it for XDK later. I'm sure some of you may be wondering why we don't just target UWP. From what we've come to understand there are several features of the XBox that are only available to XDK, and we want to be able to tap into those features. Overlooking the features, we feel that the PC and mobile game markets are just flooded. We feel like we, as a company, would stand a better chance in the XBox gaming market. Besides, targeting UWP adds additional concerns of building our game for PC and mobile, increasing the complexity of the code. This does not mean that we won't rebuild Jet Fighter Neon for the PC or windows phones later. But before we do that, we need to see that the game is being recieved well enough to warrant it. Jet Fighter Neon was chosen to be the first game we produce for XBox One because the game is already feature complete. This allows us to focus more on the XBox feature integration. Our plan is to complete the XBox feature integration first, then we'll work on the new game features that we have planned. This way, we can ensure that the game we are publishing on XBox lives up to our own development standards. Speaking of development standards, we've improved those as well. We've adopted some internal development policies and practices, designed to help ensure that the products we release are as bug free as they can be. Of course, no company can every guarantee completely bug free software. You players have a knack for finding bugs that testers and developers miss. So when a bug does get released into the wild, our new policies also dictate how we should respond to those, and how quickly we should attempt to resolve the bugs. We haven't updated our policy page yet, but it will be updated with the new policies soon.