All of the things we've had to keep under wraps have finally been unveiled to the public, so we thought it'd be a great opportunity to catch folks up on the workings of our studio for the past couple of years! A "State of the Studio" sounded too grim, so we're calling it a State of the Union instead, which still works, because we're just the two of us, and are married and spend all of our time making our games anyways. Link: https://medium.com/p/51a84536d604 A TL;DR if you don't want to read a 4,000 word essay on running an indie studio (though you shouuuuuld)

• We wrapped our full time work on Slay the Princess The Pristine Cut about a month ago, meaning we've been back at it for Scarlet Hollow for a little while now, but we've also been juggling that with unpacking at a new place and planning an actual wedding to make up for the one we had to do in our tiny apartment for covid reasons! A lot of life events had to be put on hold to make room for the 80 hour work weeks that were needed to keep the lights on for our studio. But everything is finally starting to stabilize!
• Prior to Slay the Princess being announced, Scarlet Hollow's funding was in a precarious spot (we were each making $5 an hour and that was going down every month). But now with Slay the Princess' success, we're able to comfortably self-fund the entire rest of Scarlet Hollow's development, meaning we get to stick to our original vision without publisher interference and without running the risk of having funding pulled. I'm not sure how much folks have been following studio closures in the game's industry this past year, but they've been absolutely merciless. While it was a struggle to stabilize without outside support, we're now in a much better position to make the games we want to make moving forward, which means we won't have to pull any punches with Scarlet Hollow's final acts ^^
• We'll be getting out the first alpha builds for Episode 5 to testers later this year, probably mid-fall.
• Episode 5 will come out some time in 2025, but we don't want to pin down any specifics until we're confident about our timing.
• Expect more regular updates as we move into July and August right now there's still a lot of script to go, which isn't very exciting from a sharing perspective (Episode 5 is multiple fantasy novels in length.)

I know how frustrating it can be for something you can care about to take longer to finish than you'd like it towe've also felt a lot of that pain over the past few yearsbut it's important for us to do our work the right way and free from any external compromise. And thanks to all of your patience and support, now we can do that! So from the bottom of our hearts thank you all so much. You mean the world to us, and we're so excited to give you the best possible version of Scarlet Hollow! ~Tony and Abby

[ 2024-06-17 18:55:51 CET ] [ Original post ]