People have been speculating for some time that Skullgirls wouldn’t make a 2011 release – a lot of this due to our unorthodox “gameplay first” development approach and willingness to show work in progress. We’re strongly dedicated to quality and feel more time can be spent polishing the game, so with Autumn Games’ blessing we have decided to delay Skullgirls’ launch until early 2012.

Don’t worry – development is proceeding apace, and we’ll announce a firm release date as soon as we can. The vagaries of digital distribution and the submission process make that impossible at this point, but Skullgirls should be launching early in the first quarter of 2012. Even though this is a relatively small delay, there’s a lot it will let us finish up and polish in the final months of the game’s development.

There are a lot of reasons behind this delay, but the overriding one is that we’re just trying to make the best game we can. As tournament attendees and forum-goers know, we’ve done extensive tweaking and added new features based on community feedback. While many of these things are individually small, they add up over time and can delay other tasks – some companies call this “feature creep,” but we call it the extra polish that takes a game from “good” to “great.”

Here are a few of the changes and features we’ve implemented or will be implementing based on the community’s feedback:

• Gameplay speed changes – 10% faster!
• Lots of new effects and overall presentation improvements
• Upgraded backgrounds to 3D
• Additional music from Michiru Yamane
• Requested color palettes
• Accidental pause prevention option – hold Start for 15 frames to pause
• PlayStation 3 custom soundtrack option
• Button macros to help when playing on a pad
• Innumerable balance and gameplay tweaks
• In-game art galleries

We’re still listening to your requests and may be adding more beyond these, but we aren’t listing them here because we can’t confidently confirm that they’ll be ready for the game’s initial release. However, you can expect more new features and community-driven polish in free updates.

So there you have it – early 2012! We’re doing everything we can to ensure a smooth launch and make sure Skullgirls is as good as we know you want it to be.

We appreciate your continued patience, and we’ll see you on the internet.