June & July Update - Health issues, future plans. (Patreon)

Hey everybody - DD here.

I want to apologize for such a delay on this post - a lot has happened in the past couple of months and both Julian and I are only recently coming off some big medical scares.

For a long time now we've had lingering health problems that we kept off to the side, but after ignoring things for so long, they started to catch up and finally required getting looked at. We always were hoping to grow things so we could finally hire on some additional assistance to speed up development, but after 2020 rolled through, things started getting tighter and tighter here.

While we were fine to take more work if we needed to just to keep things afloat, this often would impact schedule for game work and create a really awkward balancing act. Just a few months back we finally had to just hit the brakes to spend some time to build savings. There were a lot of people who heard about our health situation and helped provide support that allowed us to get some things looked at, and we greatly appreciate it.

Admittedly - it was kind of unbelievable. In the past we got used to the idea of not mentioning any health concerns, since doing so often had support drop and would just make things even harder. You guys really saved us here, and I mean that. You absolutely saved us with all the support over the past couple of months and we cannot thank you enough.

Development for our projects has always been an uphill battle, and constant roadblocks keep getting introduced. Small factors could radically impact our budget - and in most cases it didn't even to be related to the work we were doing. We want to work on Tough Bippy uninhibited, we want to finish it, and we want to ensure you guys get one heck of an experience with it. After having such a big scare these past few months, Julian and I have been thinking really hard about how to approach things in the future.

While we're not going to be changing operations over here on Patreon - we are going to be looking into finding a publisher. We've tried a lot to keep this maintained as a purely independent project, and we were willing to make compromises and cut back on a lot in our lives just to ensure development. With health failing and productivity slowing, it's clear we've needed to approach this differently.

Ideally with the right publisher we could have a solid budget to work with, have full time dedicated towards focus on the game, and we could hire on the few additional folks we've needed for a long time now. Of course, that's IDEALLY... there's also a lot of room for things to go wrong. Plenty of publishers that hover around independent developers don't tend to offer the best deals, and in worst cases, may just try to buy out the rights to your work entirely and strip it away from you. There's a lot of pros and cons that can come with a publisher - and it's why we were dreading if it really did have to come to this.

We want to ensure that you guys get to see this game get made, and for the next few months we're going to be preparing material to show to publishers. We've already received a few offers that we'll be looking into once we get a bit more ready, and we'll be giving you guys updates over here on material we're arranging and how the publisher hunt ends up going. We still intend to honor all Patreon tiers and keep you all up to date over here, but we know the news of this may be disappointing to some. We really did want to leave this project entirely as independent, but realistically this seems to be the only way we're really going to ensure things being feasible. 

You guys really saved us these past couple of months and we want to return the favor by really doubling down and getting this game made once and for all. We'll still be wrapping up Wan Wan TV plans that we had made for the summer (since we were nearly done there) but after that - we're 100% prioritizing publisher hunting and arranging materials for it. We'll have an update post next month regarding the WWTV material, and after that you can expect posts showcasing pitch material as well as information on whether or not we have secured someone yet.

I want to thank everyone for remaining so patient even through so much chaos, and Julian and I really cannot thank you guys enough for helping us through a really rough window. We know a lot of you really want to see this game, and we really want to see it happen as well. We're going to try the best that we can to bring you guys the best game that we can.

Seriously - thank you all again. You really saved us these past couple of months.

We're going to try the best that we can.

~DD