A Call for Adventure

Greetings everyone!

I must explain to you what’s going on, why the game’s progress have slowed down this much.

Many of you had noticed how fast the development was going considered that I’m a lone developer, and I was quite proud of the speed I was keeping, even tho at times I felt that I could go faster, but that’s mostly your usual “never good enough” syndrome that most creators have. To keep up this speed, I didn’t have a job, I was going forth with savings, mostly working 7 days a week, almost all waking hours, at times I’d even work more to finish specific features, maybe to do it in time for a new update video, because I felt consistent publishing of devlogs was vital for exposure of the project, so I’d end up not even sleeping enough for multiple days in a row just to have more hours to work. This schedule clearly can’t be kept for long, and I’m actually surprised that I didn’t end up with burnout, as happens to many creators with similar situations.

The idea was to keep going like this to try growing the community as fast as possible, and when it would have been big enough, to make a kickstarter, since as most people that tried before making such a campaign know, you need to already have a community before, or it won’t work.

Alas the community have grown, and I’m grateful to any of you that decided to follow the development of this game, but not to a point where I can really try a campaign, from the data that I collected it seems that at least various thousands of followers are needed to have any chance of success, and instead we have grown only to a few hundreds, just more than 600 people in total.

After all this time, I have reached a point where it is no longer physically safe to keep going like this a while ago, I went down from 7 days a week to 6 in october, taking that day out not to relax, but to go walking basically the whole day to try fight the physical strain cause by the really unsafe constant sitting, I gained weight and started feeling tired very often, so I was at my physical limit. I feel better now and have slowly started to lose weight again, but I literally walk 20 km on the mountains every sunday just to keep my body working correctly, my body is not very compliant when it comes to being static, as anyone that knows me personally could confirm, I can’t stay still.

Some of you know me directly because I went around sniping potential interested people since the beginning of the project, because as it is largely known, even if your project is interesting the net is so bloated with data that exposure is always a problem, and I had a maximum time window where it was economically safe to do this thing: the ones I talked with know that this is a passion project for me and I never expected, nor cared too much, to make a lot of money, but without some funding such a large project is not economically viable on the long run, simply because I’m not a rich person, I need a wage as everyone else, and the time window is past at this point. Some of you came to me offering single donations, and I am really grateful that you wanted to help me, but as I told to the ones that offered, these few offers wouldn’t make a wage by themselves, and now that I have to go back to a regular job, I can’t know how long it will take to finish the game, because yes, I still want to do it, so I feel that taking any of those donations would have been like stealing, since I can’t give anything back for who knows how long, this is why I never accepted donations, it had to be all or nothing, that’s why the kickstarter is a yes, but the single donations weren’t accepted. At this point it’s clear that there can’t be a kickstarter, maybe in the future I’ll be able to do it, who knows, but I can’t predict if and when.

Since the accumulated mental fatigue I want now to dive more in my other interests, most of you don’t know but I’m a very active artisan for passion, encompassing from woodworking to sculpture, from sewing to animation, I’m not only a programmer and a 3D modeler, actually those things were learned because of my wide range of interests. I need to pair the development of the game with the other things I like to do because I can’t just go on this way, more so considered that I’m searching for a job and as soon as I find it my free time will be very limited.

I know you hoped to play the game soon, and I’m currently working on the trailer, that’s why lately I’ve posted some content without ingame implementation, because I’ve finally reached a point in the programming where the most important stuff is there, stable and working, and none of the things I need to still implement is so important that it could shift the game in a new direction, that’s why I didn’t do the trailer first as most people do, because I wanted to be absolutely sure I wouldn’t show stuff that wouldn’t actually be in the game, I feel that often early trailers give players expectations that are later betrayed because large projects like videogames are simply prone to changes of direction, especially in the first phases of development.

I hope I haven’t disappointed you too hardly, as I said many times to people I talked with, I’m making this game because I wanted it to exist, and I was sure others wanted it like I did, and I don’t want to let anyone down after all the promises made, but as much as I’m sorry for not being able to go forth the way I’ve done in the last year and deliver as soon as possible the game I promised, I just can’t afford to go forth like that, and have to slow down, this means that updates will keep appearing, but at a slow rate.

Hopefully some of you will still be interested in the project even with these new conditions.

Thank you for the time spent reading all this wall of text, I hope it shed some light on any questions you could have about the clear sudden slow down of the development.

Cheers, Numisi