This update offers an insight into the Isilbright Herbalist Guide and also presents some of the joinable NPCs you will be able to meet in the Backer Beta, as well as some of the concept art that our artist has been working on for the Rillow. The party members shown will be featured in our major gameplay video as well, which will be included in our next Kickstarter update on May 16th, 2019. This video will offer a significant overview of an early section of the main quest of the game, as well as highlighting new features and existing elements that have not been shown before.
The release of the Backer Beta is unfortunately delayed, and we are not able to give you more information at the moment. We will have specific details on the release date of the Beta in our next update.
There are two main reasons behind the delay: an internal and an external one. The internal reason has to do with project management risks: certain types of game engine bugs take more time to fix than what we estimated in our initial plans. For example, we could not publish the gameplay video today because Fog of War started having serious issues two weeks ago as an unexpected side effect of refactoring, and it took us considerable time to fix.
The external reason has to do with the funding schedule of one of our private investors. To be brief, while their investment is guaranteed and ongoing (the condition for the investment was a successful Kickstarter, which you helped us reach!), they proposed an altered schedule of funding milestones in January, and this negotiation is still in progress.
The combination of these internal and external reasons led to the delay of the Backer Beta. We haven’t posted an update recently because we knew there were going to be some issues with delays but we didn’t want to provide incomplete information on what players could expect, and it looked like our negotiations with the investor could have finished at any moment.
Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, but we are nearing the end of negotiations and will give you specifics on the delay on the 16th. No worries, however! The delay of the Backer Beta does not endanger the future of the project in any way.