Hi everyone! We ran into a hiatus this year, but we finally took the work we did the last several months and added it to the game, and it includes a new boss stage we worked hard on! You can check it out in practice mode.
As for the delays and the lack of any news on the main game and cutscenes, I’m going to speak personally here as the organizer and "Team Kapptain" of this collab game and address that.
But first…
I started a Patreon to help with NitorInc.!
The Patreon page is right here and has several tier perks related to NitorInc and our discord server. Just one dollar will get your name in the credits of the game! As of right now, this is a personal Patreon that helps support me as a developer as well as my efforts to bring this game to conventions and showcases. Everything else in this project has been volunteer work. But if we reach $75 a month, I can redistribute most of the earnings to our collabers and the Patreon will be converted into a NitorInc. Patreon. I really hope we can reach this goal and give back to our collabers, so every pledge helps!
Anyway, on to the updates. I’ll make it quick and in Q&A form:
Why the hiatus?
Basically me finishing up college, as well as some personal struggles over the last year. In my last semester I had to tackle more work than I anticipated, and I didn’t put enough time into enforcing our collabers to finish their work and communicate with one-another. We tried to handle it by starting more microgames with more collabers, but that turned into too much for us to easily chew. Thankfully, despite being recently out of college, I do have a comfortable job lined up which will allow me more consistent time for side projects. I apologize for the lack of progress and communication from our end during this hiatus, and I have a plan to get our work back on track and stay active.
What’s the plan?
Our current dev cycle up until now has been self-governing with only soft suggestions for deadlines and a new microgame starting every couple of weeks. Starting this summer, our new plan is to start microgames in batches and start enforcing harder deadlines for progress. I would also like to actively seek more people to help me manage the collab and help move our teams along. This is a big experiment, and may take some time to get on its feet, but we believe it can help us create consistent content with new collabers while not being too much for me to pour work into during my real life. And I think our newly-launched Patreon will give us even more motivation to keep working and bringing you content!
What about cutscenes?
We still plan to continue work on cutscenes and story stages, but they hit a big snag when things got busy this year. Major apologies to anyone who signed up to help who hasn’t gotten to yet. In addition to our new microgame plan, I’d like to narrow my efforts into completing at least one cutscene and getting the ball rolling. This is brand new territory for us, so having a finished scene will help us understand how to pace ourselves while making them and will allow everyone interested in cutscenes to start contributing.
I signed up for the microgame collab but haven’t gotten to work on a microgame. Will I still get to go?
We didn’t forget about anyone! As we make microgames, we’re still going down the list of signups we have. However, if this new plan goes well, we may redo our signups and require collabers to apply again when we start a new microgame batch. This would mean our collab would be open less frequently, but everyone who signs up will be given work to do much more quickly. If this does happen, we’ll be manually contacting everyone who signed up for the original collab well before we open new signups, so don’t worry about getting left behind.
That’s everything! Thank you for being supportive and understanding as we experiment so we can fully realize our game. See you next update, and happy microgaming!