Review & Patch

Survivalist has had it's first review, at thexblig.com!  Here are the quotes one would put on the back of the box, if it came in a box, which it doesn't:

"Survivalist is one of the most impressive XBLIGs ever produced."

and

"Survivalist is an intense experience, one of the most content-packed, feature-rich games on the indie channel. It is not to be missed."

 :-)

Regarding the upcoming patch, I'm pretty confident now that I've tracked down and found a fix for the "out of memory" error people were getting after playing for a long time.  I was tearing my hair out at one point trying to figure out what it was.  It's been a busy week.  There are a few other fixes I'm getting in there as well.  It's pretty much done now, I'm aiming to submit it on Friday or Saturday, then it will probably take a few days to be approved.

If you do get this "out of memory" error in the meantime, just quit out to the Xbox dashboard, restart the game, load your last savegame and it should be fine.  Some people got worried that their saves might be broken because they tried to load them without quitting out first.  The reason that doesn't work is, it's a memory leak, something has used up all the spare memory and won't let go of it, and the only way to free it is to reboot the entire game, basically.  Once you've rebooted the game everything should be fine.

Memory & Insulin

Some people have reported that after playing the game for several hours they get a crash with an error message that starts with "System.OutOfMemoryException".  I'm currently looking into this.  It's a difficult bug to find the cause of because it takes so long for it to happen.  I have some theories (memory fragmentation?).

I'll be releasing a patch next week to (hopefully) address this, and also a few other issues.  The main one being that it's too hard to find insulin, and it doesn't last long enough when you do.  It's supposed to be quite hard, but I think I went a bit over the top.

Releasing a patch for XBox Live Indie Games takes a bit of time, as you have to wait 1 week between releases and also it has to go through the peer review process.  So it won't be out until I guess next weekend at the earliest.

It's available for download right now...

...and the box art looks absolutely awful.  Somehow the JPG compression they used has hidden the character's eyes.  Here's what it should look like:

Survivalist is now Available! (or will be within 24 hours)

I just clicked Publish!

That means the game will soon be available to download on your XBox 360, once Microsoft's servers have processed it.

I really need to start updating this blog a bit more.