Game News, 2023-11

We've written a lot over the past few years about our development plans, about Statehelm and orcs, about housing, about what comes next and what we need to get us across the finish line. It's an uncomfortable position -- we're so *very* close, but we're not there yet so we ... Just! Keep! Pushing!

But life doesn't always make it easy to push. Today we need to share some bad news with you, and to talk about how that's going to affect game development. But first I need to briefly fill in some history.

The past few years have been rough. 2020 was a bad year for a lot of people -- the pandemic disrupted all of our systems, including mine. I have really bad ADHD which makes it hard to buckle down and do hard work. Over the years I've created lots of tricks and techniques to get around the ADHD and get work done -- I was really proud of myself for those tricks! But in 2020, when Covid hit and my family started getting sick and -- well, you know what 2020 was like -- my mind-tricks stopped working on myself, and Sandra wasn't herself either. 2020 was a very low-productivity year in terms of new development.

Then 2021 came along and was even worse: Sandra's health declined rapidly; she would eventually be diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. The only bright spot in development was Nick, the programming contractor we'd found. He was amazing to work with, leaving me to focus more on design while he did the hard work. He helped make 2022 development more productive than 2021, bringing the UI and interface up to a high bar... but there wasn't a ton of new game content that year either.

In terms of productivity, 2023 has been better! Sandra is still dying of cancer, sure, but she's been able to work more of the time, and so have I. However, the second half of the year we've run into a new problem: we've run out of cash. In the past when money was tight, Sandra and I would stop paying ourselves from the company funds and survive off of savings. But there's no more savings: cancer is stupid expensive, even with health insurance. At the same time, money from the game has slowly dwindled over the past three years, owing in part to the lack of new game content. Our big sale this summer was a lot of fun, but it didn't hit the goal we needed to keep everything going. At this point, we're out of money to pay for full-time development.

This doesn't mean the game is shutting down! Thanks to the influx of monthly VIP money, we can afford to keep the game running indefinitely with basic support and bug-fix updates. But we no longer have any full-time employees, and our part-timers have reduced hours.

This means that right now, we won't be able to devote significant time to developing major new content or features. Instead we're switching to part-time development while we regroup, save up some money, and figure out the best way forward. We aren't pausing development -- we have a brand new dungeon we've just launched, and we're going to support that dungeon with fixes and improvements. We also have seasonal content and events planned through the end of the year. Next year, we'll see where the finances are and look at our options.

In the longer term, yeah, this could be the end of Project: Gorgon. But not necessarily! Our playerbase is cyclical, which is something I've always liked and encouraged due to our extremely long development time. Our players get bored and wander off for a year or two, then come back and get involved again. That's why we've just launched a new mega-dungeon and level-cap increase, to give returning players something meaty to sink their teeth into. My hope is that we'll see an uptick in VIP memberships. It really wouldn't take a lot more VIPs to let us continue development in some form. In the meantime, we'll keep the servers running and the smaller updates coming.

So we'll see. We haven't given up yet! But if this is the end, I want to say how sorry I am that I couldn't complete the game I promised. And how grateful I am that you supported us all these years. Thank you. I will never forget what you've done for us.

- Eric

PS - if you have questions, please visit our Discord and ask them in the town-hall section. I'll do my best to answer them. We'll update this dev blog with a FAQ section, after we find out what the frequently-asked questions are.