We had a great year!

We made a great deal of progress, and are blessed with fantastic supporters - many of whom have assured us that they understand that “The best laid plans o' mice an' men oft go awry.”

That having all been said, I am personally disappointed that we could not reach our goal of releasing a public beta by the end of 2021, as I predicted we would back in March of this year. 

When I made that estimate, we had nine full months in which to work, and as we were only a few systems short of a release, I figured delivery was well within our capabilities.  However, as I detail in this video, things didn’t turn out that way.

The fault does not lie with the talented people we work with.  It lies squarely on the shoulders of Laura and myself, for mistakes that we made in the very early days of the project.

Back then, our goal was to keep it simple.  However, the simple architecture we implemented resulted in gameplay that, under the best of conditions, would peak at around 15 FPS.  When the project went viral in 2019, we finally had the budget to bring on more talent, and figure out ways to ensure faster gameplay and loading.

Just as it is in economics, the solutions presented us with additional problems.  However, as time went on, we were able to find fixes that reconciled our expectations with the limitations of the software, and the problems disappeared from our board, one by one.

Unfortunately, about six months ago, there was a point at which the project became too unstable.  While work proceeded apace on its constituent parts, integration of those parts was becoming more and more difficult.

I did not fully admit to myself that the public Beta was not a certainty this year until the early days of October.  It took another few weeks for us to settle on the best way forward - and due to chip shortages, it took us almost another month to acquire the hardware a core refactor would require.

As much as this further delay is frustrating for us, we know it is doubly frustrating to many of the people out there who follow and support this project.

That is why we continue to stand by our pledge to our supporters: You get every premium you are entitled to, even if you decide to cancel your support.  That is why people who contributed two dollars in our early days still get links to Alphas.  That is why 90% of the updates here on Patreon are open to the public - including the ones where we admit to our failures.

Going into the new year, we will make only one pledge:

THIS WAS THE FINAL DELAY.

As we enter our fifth year of development, we want more than ever to show you this wonderful world and story we all have been working so hard on, for so long.

We thank all those who have accompanied us so far in this journey!  Know that in 2022, a great game is coming - HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Back to work this coming week - more news, next friday!