We know what is on everyone's mind. "Yoltrund was to be in early access for a year or less. The game came out in 2017 though and it's still not finished! What happened?"
This post will explain in detail what has been happening over the past year. But to answer the question beforehand; Yoltrund was essentially put on hold for a brief amount of time, but weeks turned into months and into a year due to a lot of issues.
So, let's go down a list to explain what happened
- The Hohenheim & Diaghaltas update was to be a big update; adding a new mechanic to the game (like how Hekehldahr did) and setting up a huge plot point. The problem was that this update was actually too large and caused more harm than good. We had to redo the update several times since the game was not designed for this scope of work from the start. This started from my bad production skills and not realising just how bad for the game this update could be on the backend. So we had to delay until we could get it working and time continued to go on.
- New projects started to come to light. I know how it looks; we start a poll on what game you would like us to work on next and then seemingly abandon Yoltrund, possibly for something newer and shiny. Granted, we did divert resources to a newer RPG, but in light of it, it won't succeed without Yoltrund's success. And since there's still years of work for that RPG before it's finished, we can take a step back to try and finish Yoltrund.
- In light of recent problems with Valve, we've been unable to push updates that we've been wanting to. Essentially, Steam had given us problem after problem (hence the hiatus of the game Negative Type). However, most of those problems have been resolved and we will resume work as soon as possible.
- Dev Ops encountered several issues. Essentially, the game sometimes wouldn't work in various situations, hence why there is still no Linux build of the game. We wanted to get the Linux build done before the next update and that became nothing but backlogs.
So, what are we going to do in order to fix this problem? Well, we have resolved most issues with the game that prevented us from moving on. We will also be working on cleaning up the game in the coming week to make it run more efficiently before we add this update. If we can get this update working without a hitch, then it should be smooth sailing. At this point, the update is somewhat functional and we're just trying to get it working more smoothly. We also have a new artist on the team who will be helping make the game pretty, especially with big character appearances coming up next.
We have no date for the next update still, but we are estimating mid March, maybe early April at the latest. We will also be toning back a lot of features in order to make this happen. We also have some bugs to squash (the infamous infinite sprint).
Which reminds me; the infinite sprint is actually not a bug, but a left over piece of dev cheats we used to navigate the map. It was a great idea at the time, but we can't find a way to turn it off, which is why it remains. Likely, when we add controller support, it will finally go away (hopefully).
And that should explain in detail what is going on. Expect more updates soon and I myself am personally sorry for leading on this hiatus without any updates. I would expect better of any other developer and should expect better from myself.
Sincerely,
Michael Cox
Lead Developer.