oasiz: Hi, dev here.

I don't really use social media/etc. besides of discord so I can't comment on communication through those but I will share what's largely a summary I did on discord on 20th and reposted above but I've added some bits here..

* "GOG build" was basically prepared quite early on but some showstopper bugs bumped the steam version a bit. -- This was the "end of week" initial prediction. (This is basically identical to steam but lacks the token effort steam dll integration) gog == 3drstore == whateverelse (I'll refer to this as the .zip release)
Some of the bugs were things like the ending not showing properly to other really annoying issues we'd have to immediately hotfix.. Anyway requiring a point release fix and embarrassing enough to have on 1.0 in the first place.
Historically we had to hotfix some our own temporary patchers for 1.1 and 2.0 so we had an incentive to make sure that ashock 1.0 would not not be stuck with a broken 1.0 for days.
This delay was our choice.

* Then major issues with photomode and some medium-level achievement issues were fixed and required 2-3 rounds of testing. Including engine rendering issues that had to be fixed due to some really obscure regressions. I think this bumped the testing/etc.. by another week.
While at this point we could have packaged the .zip release, we expected this to take less than it did.

* As of 20th, there was a stable version internally available for the past few days that is waiting to be pushed but issues with access to new devportal account has resulted in 12-24h turnounds for issue-response communication likely due to timezones. This was intended to allow us quicker update turnarounds in the future.

* Another setback was that the steam achievement API-to-GOG wrapper was broke just recently and the planned GOG-Steam achievement wrapper suffered.

* The new method for devportal also required some self-learning and whatnot since we had never used that before.

* Yesterday we fixed an obscure (but not uncommon) issue where enemies could end up off-map, resulting in impossible 100% kills on the city_3 map. It wasn't exactly too easy to narrow down and required a lot of back&forth for an issue that seems to have been there since release.

Now I'm not sure if the current release has been sent as a typical .zip setup or if it ended up being uploaded through the portal in the end. However part of the poor communication was likely the expectation that it wouldn't be needed at all due to quicker turn around. When things slipped, some updates were shared on discord but without exact dates as the moment we share something, it will spread around and even if we correct it later on, it's unlikely that it will actually reach wide enough quickly and we will still get yelled at for missing it, already like the original "end of the week" :) (To be fair, forums here could have worked better than discord).. Anyway that's some insight on our though process there.

I was away/offline for the first two weeks of october and focused on my day job more now so I'm not 100% sure on exact details beyond that.
Anyway, having worked at service, IMO nothing sucks more than lack of information, communication and the unknown in general so I do feel/understand the frustration.
I can only offer an explanation for now and can only say that sorry for this.

As for the GOG release, it happened officially at 12 CEST, some broken links, pricing, etc.. that seems to be fixed now for the most part after reporting them.

oasiz: Hi, dev here.

I don't really use social media/etc. besides of discord so I can't comment on communication through those but I will share what's largely a summary I did on discord on 20th and reposted above but I've added some bits here..

* "GOG build" was basically prepared quite early on but some showstopper bugs bumped the steam version a bit. -- This was the "end of week" initial prediction. (This is basically identical to steam but lacks the token effort steam dll integration) gog == 3drstore == whateverelse (I'll refer to this as the .zip release)
Some of the bugs were things like the ending not showing properly to other really annoying issues we'd have to immediately hotfix.. Anyway requiring a point release fix and embarrassing enough to have on 1.0 in the first place.
Historically we had to hotfix some our own temporary patchers for 1.1 and 2.0 so we had an incentive to make sure that ashock 1.0 would not not be stuck with a broken 1.0 for days.
This delay was our choice.

* Then major issues with photomode and some medium-level achievement issues were fixed and required 2-3 rounds of testing. Including engine rendering issues that had to be fixed due to some really obscure regressions. I think this bumped the testing/etc.. by another week.
While at this point we could have packaged the .zip release, we expected this to take less than it did.

* As of 20th, there was a stable version internally available for the past few days that is waiting to be pushed but issues with access to new devportal account has resulted in 12-24h turnounds for issue-response communication likely due to timezones. This was intended to allow us quicker update turnarounds in the future.

* Another setback was that the steam achievement API-to-GOG wrapper was broke just recently and the planned GOG-Steam achievement wrapper suffered.

* The new method for devportal also required some self-learning and whatnot since we had never used that before.

* Yesterday we fixed an obscure (but not uncommon) issue where enemies could end up off-map, resulting in impossible 100% kills on the city_3 map. It wasn't exactly too easy to narrow down and required a lot of back&forth for an issue that seems to have been there since release.

Now I'm not sure if the current release has been sent as a typical .zip setup or if it ended up being uploaded through the portal in the end. However part of the poor communication was likely the expectation that it wouldn't be needed at all due to quicker turn around. When things slipped, some updates were shared on discord but without exact dates as the moment we share something, it will spread around and even if we correct it later on, it's unlikely that it will actually reach wide enough quickly and we will still get yelled at for missing it, already like the original "end of the week" :) (To be fair, forums here could have worked better than discord).. Anyway that's some insight on our though process there.

I was away/offline for the first two weeks of october and focused on my day job more now so I'm not 100% sure on exact details beyond that.
Anyway, having worked at service, IMO nothing sucks more than lack of information, communication and the unknown in general so I do feel/understand the frustration.
I can only offer an explanation for now and can only say that sorry for this.

As for the GOG release, it happened officially at 12 CEST, some broken links, pricing, etc.. that seems to be fixed now for the most part after reporting them.