Sui Generis - Post-Funding Update #25

Postponement

With less than six months left until our planned release date we can see that we're behind schedule. We thought it best to communicate this now rather than later. We also want to reprioritise current development goals in a way that is more satisfying for you and easier to manage.

Rather than rush to release something incomplete or just keep you waiting we thought to release a prelude which only requires a subset of the game's functionality while we take our time completing features properly and fleshing out the game world. While quite different in scope from the final game this will still be a very enjoyable game in its own right. Besides building a small independent plot (which ties in with the world's lore) no work would go into this that isn't required for the main game and most of the team will be working on other aspects of the game anyway. What it will allow us to do is bring a number of core features to completion first and continue developing others and the world without trying to do everything at once.

We have a somewhat atypical development process in that rather than pile on playable content we develop large complex systems that can deliver content more efficiently and drive it more meaningfully. It's never as simple as add a new character, animation, dialogue or object; everything is part of big unified totality that must support all aspects and instances of those things. We've seen how this can be frustrating for our backers because until these systems are complete there's not much to see. This is fundamental to our design though, we want everything to be playable and interactive in many ways, not just one; we want a reactive and dynamic world that feels real, where there's depth and substance to everything, not just surface. We also believe this is a good strategy for a small team like us working on a project of this scale, our limited resources don't really allow for a more brute force approach.

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Zloth said:

Had to blink at that title. At first it looked like "Sub Genius!" And then I come in here and see Rjshae has a title of Bob??

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What we weren't prepared for when we set our release date is the difficulties we would encounter in the Kickstarter campaign and the level of quality people were demanding on every front. We assumed that as an indie team trying to do things differently some things would be forgiven. This critical response has driven us to achieve higher quality standards than we were originally aiming for and this has been very time consuming

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