Hi all, we’ve responded here and there in the comments section about this, but in the interest of having it all in one place, here’s a bit more explanation behind our announcement of HYPERGUN last month. Hopefully this will address some concerns, and give you a clearer idea of how we’re making decisions behind the scenes.
To those of you expressing concern about having PAMELA and HYPERGUN in parallel development: we hear you, and we completely understand the sentiment. Your support, in many cases from day one of release, means the world to us, and the passion you have for what we’ve been building since then is truly humbling. It's tough to succinctly explain the development process this past year since launch; there's been a lot of ups, as well as some big downs and hurdles which we didn't see coming in some cases. Part of that is because PAMELA is our first game as a studio, though of course that's not an excuse for anything - just background.
The decision to start on HYPERGUN in parallel with PAMELA is definitely not one motivated by greed or desire to burn the community here, in fact quite the opposite. We've been struggling with some significant barriers on the technical side of things (see our posts about a Unity bug, which has been blocking a new level streaming feature that will enable us to improve load times, performance, and reduce crashing) that are at times out of our hands. Seeing (valid) complaints about these things as developers is really tough when we're not able to address them without external support, from Unity themselves in this case.
In light of this, knowing that the core issues causing a huge amount of the frustration in the community/reviews are out of our direct control in this case, we had to make a call on what to pursue during this time. Part of that has been regular updates to PAMELA in terms of adding new content, fixing bugs, and balancing/polish, and of course part of our time has been spent developing HYPERGUN (a much simpler title, in comparison). We felt as though rather than forging ahead on adding huge amounts of new content (and thus further worsening loading times and performance; more content = more stuff to load/render), it was the better decision to wait until we can fully smooth out the foundation to build upon without being hamstrung by technical woes.
Although, we haven’t just been waiting: aside from regular bug fix and content patches, we have been laying out some big plans for the Summer for PAMELA (internally, so far, but we will be sharing these plans in the near future once we're happy and confident in them). Suffice to say that what we're planning is a major overhaul of the game's structure and story, as well as adding new areas, NPCs, armor, and more throughout that period of time.
While we don't expect this to completely alleviate all of the concerns, hopefully it at least gives you all a bit more of an idea WHY we're doing what we're doing. There's no way we're walking away from PAMELA after the 3+ years of time, energy, and resources we've invested into it; you've got our word that we're finishing what we started. We’ve been doing our best to not just tell you this, but show you, keeping up with our bi-weekly schedule of updates. In the past we’ve had several “blackouts” while investigating multiplayer, and developing level streaming (which we were hoping to have launched back in December, were it not for the technical issues), and we’ve made a point since then to avoid keeping you in the dark like that again.
For those of you who’ve stuck with us since launch over a year ago, we hope that you’d agree that the game’s quality, content, and stability has been dramatically improved since then. We’re confident that if you come back 6 months from now, you’ll see some changes that excite you even more than everything we’ve done this past year.
Hope that sheds some light on the situationm and the future of both PAMELA and NVYVE Studios. Thank you so much for the support, feedback, patience, and at times blunt honesty that helps to shape PAMELA into the best game it can possibly be. It really does mean the world to us. Talk soon.