If you followed my previous journal entries and posts in the forums, you'll know that the Pets system was supposed to come out shortly after the end of the Summer event's test run of the core features. Well, as with most things, that plan hasn't exactly worked the way we wanted it to and we've ended up spending an extra month trying to finish everything we wanted to do for the launch. Unfortunately, even our super human attempts at that have not completed the project in the timeframe we had for it so it is going to be delayed a bit more.
Now, before you get all worked up and try to put blame on someone, this isn't an issue of someone not letting us finish the project. The problem with continuing is that the main developers for Pets are Codemonkey and myself, but we're also the main developers for site events. Our biggest event of the year, Halloween, is quickly coming up and we want to make sure that we have enough time to make it super awesome and amazing with the least number of distractions possible. If we were to continue working on Pets right now, we would eat into the time we've set aside for creating Halloween and we just don't want to take that risk. So it sucks that we can't get Pets out now but we determined that Halloween deserved its full amount of attention so we can give you the best event possible.
Don't worry though, Pets is /not/ being cancelled, just delayed. Once we get through Halloween/the holidays, we'll pick Pets back up and complete what we have left. It may even be a benefit for the whole project as the extra time may even give us a chance to add features for the launch that we were initially not going to include. We've worked far too much and hard on this to let it fall by the wayside so as soon as we can, we're going to be back on it again. Until then, I hope you can understand why we had to decide what we did and that you can agree it'll be for the best in the long run.
Stay tuned, I'll be sure to throw some juicy Halloween hints soon. The epic battle between two legends draws near, whose side will you join?
- Kenny