Life never is what you expected it to be. Because of some circumstances involving finances, and a recent complete loss of said finances, Runeseeker will be delayed some.
And the finished product is not going to be what is in the screenshots.
I can promise it will be a better project though, although, it's going to change dramatically because of this new future I am in.
It will either be moved to a new engine and made with very simplistic art - if I do this, there's going to be another game created that I will use to get myself used to the engine, which will also be released, probably for free. The end product would be more along the lines of a Zelda clone.
The other option, and if I'm honest, a more exciting one despite the fact that it's not going to be commercially viable at all - is a text adventure. But not just any text adventure, it's going to be the Skyrim of text adventures. Think Runeseeker as it is today, but with this huge world to explore, all in text. Text adventures are not dead. But they are commercially non-viable.
In this form, Runeseeker would be more like a single player MUD. But it'd be extensible enough to have possibly multiplayer support (in some way), as well as the ability for others to create their own quests. Without having a modern UI or graphics to worry about, there are a lot of options here. The battle systems would have to change, but fortunately, I've created a turn based text-based prototype of a battle system years ago.
The nice thing about text adventures is that I can do a lot of really neat things. I'm a computer programmer by trade. My college education was all on theory - discrete maths, turing machines, whatever. I've been trained in such things such as computer accessibility. UX design. What makes things easy for people to use and understand.
One of the pain points with text adventures is the parser. What if we removed this pain point and made a text adventure that was easy to play, but still provides the depth in games that people crave?
And so my dillema - do I go for something commercially viable, or something that's in my heart? Something that I can create and fiddle with, or something that's...going to be done and judged? At least with the heart project, I can rest on my laurels that I'm doing something that's very rare these days, and attempting to make something unique and new out of it.
There are a lot of things to consider, and it's a decision I'm probably not going to make today or tomorrow. But I wanted y'all to know that something's changing, and I'm going to have to nail it down.