Hello everyone.
I was positioning myself to make serious strides towards getting this game complete when life happened, hard. My family including my baby daughter had to uproot our whole situation and move to Oregon, and my time has until recently been completely used up being a husband and especially a new father, but after about three months of getting our situation well and truly sorted, I am finally back where I want to be and still motivated to complete this game.
It seems like a daunting task, but I have had some discussions with the other designers on ways to streamline the process, cut out certain inefficiencies and generally bring the thing to a level where RogueWare can be truly proud of it as our first game and (necessarily, at this point) our flagship title, in relatively short order, say, by my 36th birthday at the end of June.
As our first title, my coding inexperience, love of design complexity, and vulnerability to feature creep has allowed the process to slow down to inactivity a number of times in combination with other aspects of my life, as this has always been a side project and I have not been able to work on it full-time for various reasons, not least because financially it has never been anything close to capable of supporting and driving our company into the black. Not least because it is not finished.
When we conceived and released FreeHolder originally about seven years ago, we incorrectly imagined ourselves to be in the indie situation that actually existed about five years before then, with people generally willing to put money towards early access games because so few people had been horribly burned by them. FreeHolder was and remains a unique concept, a fun-to-play game, and even now contains tremendously more replay value than the vast majority of early access or full release games that cost as much or much more, but at the same time it is not without some annoying and elusive bugs, and we are now competing with large companies releasing slick free-to-play, pay-to-win games that capture a disproportionate market share because free is free, and furthermore people are much less willing to gamble on early access projects, which is of course completely understandable.
This is not to complain. The support we have been shown by our community at large has been tremendous, and your patience has been extraordinary. And although I wish things could have been different up to this point, the only thing I can do and we as a company can do is pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and try again.
I cannot really move on in my life or as a designer until this game is complete, and I feel like I can actually be proud of it, and so, it will be completed. Expect genuine updates soon. You all deserve it and more.
Thanks again for everything you have done for me, and RogueWare.
Best,
Chris