Countdown aborted... here's why. (Patreon)

[Abelius]: It’s a week before the planned launch on Sep 15th. I have five days left (can’t work this weekend for family reasons), and I clearly see I didn’t aim well at the date.

When I returned from vacation, I thought that 20 days would be all I needed to complete my vision of the first playable LoK:Rebith version. That throwing 12 hours/day at something (anything!) would be the only necessary thing to complete any given job... but I was wrong again.

For example, I allotted one day to make a certain repeatable quest and I’ve been with that one since Monday... and I estimated that because I wrote the intro dialogue between Krys and the Chieftain in just a day.

This time, though, I didn’t count on the added complexity of a non-linear conversation that any repeatable quest should have. And with added complexity, added bugs come as well. About a 25% of my time goes to test what I’ve implemented and another 40% to troubleshoot issues I didn’t foresee or thought already fixed (plugin authors love me...).

In other words, I only allowed myself enough time to be infallible. And now Reality has come to slap me in the face.

What is killing me is that I naively promised monthly updates to you guys, so my word is basically worth shit at this point. A fact that I hate because I left my job to pursue a lifetime career as independent creator and now I’ll be known by all as Abelius: ‘that cockteaser guy that doesn’t deliver on time’.

So why did I set a deadline again? Well, I guess it was to put me under pressure. What I didn’t realize is that I am royally stressed already, because if this doesn’t work out then I’ll be in problems. But I don’t want to bore you guys to death with personal matters.

The fact is that I can’t continue on making promises to myself, nor you. Not if even giving all I have is not enough to keep up with others creator’s update rate.

I’ve looked upon games like ‘Dating My Daughter’, ‘Summertime Saga’ or ‘Big Brother’, without realizing those games are based on assets with a creation workflow that is completely different than ours. I won’t use the word ‘easy’ (by any means!) but the fact is, when they expand their games, they do it in an already known way, also with a certain peace of mind at not needing to get out of Renpy’s capabilities to deliver interesting gaming experiences. 

So indeed, I know we’re not making a simple game here… that’s my only excuse at this point. To the best of my knowledge, only a few of creators are making 2D side-scrollers and certainly even less (if any) are trying to mix adventure and sim elements into them.

A funny fact is that when I started to consider doing a game like this I was awed at the fact that nobody, or very little people, was doing so… Now I fully understand why.

But this is not about remorse. Hell no. Because when I’m not worried about breaking promises I actually enjoy working on this.

Still, I need to change how LoK:Rebirth fits into my life. Because the project can’t continue being my life. It needs to fit in among the other things I can’t avoid to ignore anymore, like family, exercising, paperwork (I’m a freelance now), etc.

Therefore, I hereby declare the ‘Countdown to v0.1’ stopped and useless for all purposes. The work continues, of course, but I won’t give out any date estimates anymore. By the way, Kuja advised me against that on both occasions… and I ignored him twice, like the fool I am.

I know this will hit our Patreon, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Not when there’s not a playable game out there for showing off our work and create new fans. Most of you guys are die-hard fans already and I know we can count of you praying for our success.

But for a Patreon to be really successful and be the livelihood of two or three people, bigger numbers are needed. And those numbers come only with a polished game that offers a great gaming experience, which is NOT our case at the moment. And I’m still strongly against publicizing the game before that happens.

Of course, we’ll be giving refunds for all people who ask. I clearly stated v0.1 would be out this month and now I’m pretty certain that won’t happen. And even though this Patreon business is voluntary and a tip jar for creators to be doing their ‘art’, not ‘selling products’ so to speak, we can’t expect everybody to embrace that philosophy, not when I’m the first to break expectations. And the last thing I want is people calling me a con-artist (in addition to ‘cock-teaser’) and add more guiltiness to my already buffed account. So feel free to ask, please!

What I’ll be doing from now on…? Work about 40 hours/week. Probably more, but without the pressure of a deadline over my head. And we’ll continue to give updates in the meantime so at least you know if we’re approaching the actual release date.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.