Hey all,
sorry for not posting any updates in the last weeks.
The reasons for this are very personal, but I try to be open as possible anyway. If you are not interested and just want to read the news about the game, please just skip to the TL;DR section of this post.
I have started working on Heart Of Muriet in early 2017 with some breaks in-between e.g. to renovate an old house, earn some money etc.
Fortunately, a very talented artist joined in 2019 and gave me a big motivational boost, as the game started looking awesome and I also had somebody to pitch my design ideas and get feedback regularly.
While the pandemic hit others hard in 2020, we were productive and finished a demo and released it on itch.io. It was featured on the front page, we had lots of downloads and feedback, things were looking great.
As the demo was public we started to work even harder we pushed a big update released the demo on Steam in October 2020. We added more content and polished the game even further for the upcoming Steam Game Festival in early February 2021.
The festival was great, we got a little media attention and the discord started to grow slowly. During the festival, we updated the game almost every day. Things were still fine.
In early March 2021, I realized that something was wrong. The pandemic was still thriving, a neighbour and friend died of Covid-19, and I felt empty and burnt out.
I realized that I didn’t take any vacation in 2020 and was working up to 12 hours a day or more. I knew it was time to take a break, but I still felt the pressure to post updates and to make the demo better.
I didn't dare to tell the community that I needed a break; instead, I tried to still work on the game without any productive output.
Some time passed and I finally took a break, but unfortunately, I felt it was too late to communicate it so I kept silent again. I am sorry for that.
Luckily things are now back to normal; I am working on the game every day, now with a much healthier schedule.
Due to failing to produce a lot of output in past weeks, we are going to shift the release date to the end of the year / very early next year. Also expect more regular updates again, as we have a lot of new features and content in our pipeline.
TL;DR
The developer got burnt out and was silly enough not to communicate it early, took a break and is back on track now. Release for EA has been moved to end of year/early next year. Expect more regular updates again.