The slowly burning candle

The ‘we’re still alive!’ post is cliché, I know, but that’s exactly what this is. Let me bring you up to speed as to what’s going on.

After Galacide‘s release, our lives were upended. That may be an understatement, but revenue wasn’t enough to support expenses. For most, that spells liquidation and reduction, but we tried to avoid that. Fortunately, I’ve worked with some fantastic people in the past, that helped some of our developers stay on solid ground. In addition to finding temporary work with a talented bunch of developers, I worked to sub-lease our office, and now everyone is at home again!

A few months later, the team is working hard on a sequel for a wonderful AAA game developer. We can’t say which right now, but we’re happy to be working with them to this day. The rest of us have put out small updates, including achievements for Blade Symphony (more to come) and dove head-first into our aging infrastructure.

Here are a few things that we’re still hard at work on, but have no ETA for:

1. Update to Galacide’s engine version, with bug fixes.
2. Transitioning Blade Symphony to free-to-play.
3. Migrating Blade Symphony’s website to a more manageable and updated version.

We’ve received questions about Blade Symphony free-to-play, and I won’t be answering them here. However, rest easily knowing that current players and past purchasers will have plenty of content exclusive to them, as well as some additional thank-yous from us for supporting development all of these years.

There’s been some excited conversation recently, and I also want to share a wishlist of things that we’re working on, but aren’t a big priority:

1. OSX build for Galacide: This isn’t very difficult, I just haven’t got around to updating our build pipeline.
2. Multiplayer Galacide: This is a bigger undertaking, and as such is longer-term, but there’s a few of us that really want this.
3. Older version of Blade Symphony for the few of those that are nostalgic.
4. 64-bit Windows Blade Symphony support: This is happening, but isn’t a priority for a while.
5. Linux Blade Symphony support: This is likely, but same as above, we want to finish much of the cumbersome and boring free-to-play things.
6. Dystopia Engine Update: This is going to happen at some point, because a fair bit of people can’t play the game. We have newer versions of Source that we’d like to put Dystopia on, which may allow us to 64-bit and Linux-port it too.

I hope you didn’t read that last list and think all it is certainly happening, because it may not, or maybe not right away. However, we want to do as possible (while we can,) to support those who have helped us out for so long. If you bought Blade Symphony or Galacide, were a PHAN Club member or Dystopia supporter, then this is our last hurrah to you for your love, patience and gratitude. More updates to come.