Well, it looks like we're not going to get things out by December. We really have been grinding things out and have made a lot of progress, but it's just not going to be feasibly possible to submit by December 31st.
Here's a summary of the situation:
- We're aiming for a March 2022 release: we'll have a specific day to announce once we've gotten closer to March
- We are estimated around 95% done with the game as a whole; you can play from the start to end, minus the True Final Boss
- The main things left to be completed are the True Final Boss, Gold Databank screens, the remaining H-scenes, about half of the game's dialogue, all remaining voicework, and bugtesting
- The voice actors need time to record due to the holidays; this is entirely on me as the writer though, not on them, as they didn't get the script early enough to finish before the holidays
- The game will still cost $20 USD at release (and it will have regional pricing, so most other countries will get it for cheaper)
Those reasons up there summarize pretty well why we're not going to be able to get things done, but it really just boils down to one thing: we underestimated how long the remaining content would take to get done.
If you want to see how much content is remaining to get done, here's a link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S8ErciX34sxY5gc_avunEgWypftNvgk16W3uM_41LqA/edit?usp=sharing
We've got a
lot of new content in, as noted above, but those big remaining chunks are still there and they're still going to take time.
In regards to us claiming we would release the game for free if we didn't release by December 2021 in our last announcement: it was a stupid thing to promise that. Period. It's something we'll never do again, and we did it to pressure ourselves to work even harder with that looming on the horizon.
But we realized that to release the game free, when we're already shouldering a $40,000+ debt would just prevent us from even starting work on Faye's game after Future Fragments has been released, let alone any other future games, as we'd need to get other jobs to pay that debt off.
That said, we don't want to release the game incomplete,
even if it means going more into debt. We're only going to release Future Fragments when, at the very minimum, all core content is complete.
(Yes, there will be DLC and yes, it will be free.)So here's what we're going to do: we're going to continue working and doing weekly progress updates here, and we're going to continue to do our best to get the game out to you ASAP.We do apologize for yet another delay, and we appreciate you all sticking around with us, but we don't want to have the game shit the bed so to speak right at the finish line. We hope you understand, and we can't wait to get this game out as fast as possible while still having it be as good as we intended.
