A Dragon Named Coal has run into some production problems as explained in the latest update.

ADNC On Hold

After a lot of thought and consideration, our team has decided to put A Dragon Named Coal (ADNC) on temporary hold for the time being. We’ve been actively developing the game for almost five years with a lot of success, but we’ve hit some roadblocks we can’t easily overcome. On the other hand we’re changing gears to work on a less ambitious title that should allow us to come back to ADNC when the time is right.

Is A Dragon Named Coal dead?

No, the project is still very much alive. We’re still actively revising the gameplay and tweaking story in our spare time. We just don’t have the necessary resources to complete the project as it exists now. So it’s going into hibernation as we work on a connected title. A project that should help us reimagine ADNC’s IP in a more affordable and time effective manner. As the story has never been meant to be exclusively about Coal, but a much larger world with a lot going on in it.

What happened?

At this point you’re probably wondering “What happened? I’ve been seeing progress updates and new artwork over the years.” We’ll try to explain that below. As we’ve run into a couple huge blockers preventing us from producing content in a timely manner.

Animation

One of the biggest problems our team has faced since the projects conception has been animating characters. It’s one of our highest production costs. Because of the game’s action oriented nature, animations are complex and require a lot of tuning. 2D sprite sheets require a large number of time consuming hand crafted assets. We’ve worked with multiple pixel art animators to try and fix this, but we’ve had trouble keeping consistent quality and style. 3D provides a lot of tools to make animating much easier, and we’ll probably be headed in that direction for future animating. As 3D’s skeletal rigging systems provide much more cost effective tools to animating an action oriented game.

2D tooling code became too large

Custom tile systems, combo trees, and many other libraries have had to be written for this 2D project. Over the years our code base has become too large for our team to support. 3D provides many of the tools we’ve had to hand craft. The complexity level may be higher, but the amount of code we’d have to maintain would be far smaller. Allowing our team to focus on more gameplay related coding and less tooling (which makes a big difference for a two person team).

Also the live action combat system of ADNC has become quite complex and beyond what a single programmer can handle. The system was supposed to be a 2D re-interpretation of Devil May Cry 4, but recreating something like that was much more difficult than expected. Mostly we had a chicken egg problem with going from prototyped combat to fully animated character. What we ended up with internally was a sub-par and rather buggy experience. Endless edge cases were killing us. For example there were a lot of issues with AI being able to navigate around correctly. Some games like Dust Elysian Tale have solved this issue, but we found because of some of our more complex AI systems, things just weren’t meshing like we’d hoped.

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