Hello, friend!
I missed you! How've you been? Today is one of those "yummy news" / "yucky news" type of days. I'll keep this as succinct as possible so we can both get back to being productive!
The Yuck (Early access delay)
At the beginning of this year I went from a sort of "floating homelessness" to moving into my parent's basement. Since then I have not left this house for nearly 8 months so that I could focus entirely on delivering Soul Saga to you.
Thousands of Soul Saga's fans have let me know they've been eagerly awaiting the world I've spent half a decade creating for you. Unfortunately, it's with a heavy heart that I must temporarily suspend development of Soul Saga due to a critical Unity 3D native engine bug that is crashing many common areas of gameplay. You can see a small sample of the bug in the picture below.
Unity Game Engine Woes
This bug is what is known as a "native" crash, which means that there is something wrong inside of Unity's core source code. Because Unity is "closed source", I am unable to look at the code myself or even recruit help to fix the bug because I cannot gain access to the source code unless I pay a (very) large amount of money.
For a while now I've been exchanging e-mail's with Unity's QA representative. The representative has been sympathetic and courteous regarding the situation, but unfortunately no tangible progress has been made to resolve this bug.
Some key points of the correspondence have been:
- I have sent a bug report and project with the reproducible bug to Unity.
- The Unity team has acknowledged and reproduced the bug on their end.
- The bug has also been reported by other developers, but appears to be rare.
- Neither I nor Unity have been able to find a temporary "work-around".
- Unity has said there's nothing more I can do to resolve the bug.
- There is no timeline on fixing the bug.
- I can only wait until Unity's core development team has time to fix the bug.
This native engine crash is affecting both the compiled game build (the files you receive) and the engine's editor (which I create the game in). The breadth and consistency of the crashing is now blocking productive development, preventing me from both releasing early access to you and even continuing to create the game.
Moving Forward
The thought of losing the world I have literally sacrificed my life to create puts me into an emotionally numbing shock. There is nothing for me outside of this project, and for it to not release would mean that my entire life was wasted. If you've followed my updates over the past half decade then you know that I am no stranger to bad luck and life-altering circumstances, but I have always pushed forward with a singular dream of delivering Soul Saga to you. So I hope you understand when I promise I will, somehow, get my world to you, that you understand the weight that promise holds.
For now I will utilize this "downtime" to mainly focus on two major goals:
- Research alternatives for delivering Soul Saga's world
- Focus on delivering other Kickstarter rewards
Which finally brings us to some good news...
The Yum (Soundtrack release!)
Soul Saga's Soundtrack is released! Over 70 tracks and nearly 4 hours of JRPG "ear candy" are now available. If you pledged for the soundtrack during the Kickstarter, you should be able to access it from Humble Bundle (following these instructions). If you'd like to support development further you can pick up a digital copy from either Humble Bundle or Bandcamp.
Let's chat (on Discord)
Remember that you can join myself and the community in our Discord chat. I'm active every day there and try my best to answer any questions you may have.