Well, it's been a bit quiet round here hasn't it? We made a big push for that XNA 3.1 submission deadline in Feb. and despite receiving our first solid passes from the majority we stumbled into an unforeseen issue with regards to the single Japanese Kanji used (mainly in the HUD). Some members of the community felt that we should have submitted the game under the Japanese language option as well as English as we have a Kanji character in there. Personally I felt that was not necessary as it was a single character and stating the game was in Japanese would be misleading (and could possibly lead to a failure when Japanese speaking testers found that the game actually wasn't in Japanese). The argument was that for all they knew it could have been a racial slur or rude word or something like that. So we failed review in the end. Ah well.
It was silly on my part really. The symbol was used as a bit of oriental flavour and a visual cue, not something you needed to understand as a word. I had forgotten over time that it was even a word from a language to be honest. I'd grabbed it from an unused idea for one of the pick-ups (too small to be legible in the end) so what it said (shield) didn't really make sense where it was anyway as it was to indicate that your special ability is ready to use.
It's taken us a few months but we've now updated the engine to XNA 4 and worked around the issues that raised. Everything seems to be stable and we've fixed a few bugs in the process. The Kanji has been replaced by an approximation more representative of it's task and hopefully this will be enough to get it through the peer review. As anyone who scrolls through the previous posts can see though, I'm not going to hold my hopes too high. There is always seemingly something to halt the process. One day this thing might actually make it on to the service!
It's in review right now so anyone out there willing to go peer review it this time round, thank you. If you have done this several times over the past year, you are a hero. Respec.
