Hi everyone,
For the past few months, I haven’t been working on Sapiens, and the time has come to talk about that.
Sapiens development is now on hold temporarily. I will return some time next year.
I still very much intend to release 1.0, and then continue to add to Sapiens for the rest of my life. You’ve all seen the roadmap, we know what is planned in the game, and none of that has changed. The game is not abandoned, it’s a solid early access title. It just has a very long development timeframe.
OK, but why the pause?
For context, I have been working on Sapiens as my main full time project for around 11 years now.
I was working on the conflict update last year, and it was coming together, you can play the current state of it on the unstable branch. But I hit a wall when I realized how fun conflict will actually be when it is complete. Yes you did read that right, it is shaping up to be a really fun update, but I can sense how much it is teasing at what’s coming next. It isn’t done, I can’t release it without finishing it properly.
And rather than get excited about that, I felt dread. I couldn’t do it. I saw 4-6 months of hard work to get conflict where I wanted, and I didn’t have the energy to do it.
This is not a new thing, I have hit motivation issues just like this in the past. So I did what I always do, I worked on a few side projects, took some time out.
And I’m good now, I’m working as hard as ever, making great progress. But I got distracted while working on my side projects, one of them became my new main project.
It’s not all bad news though. My new project is Blockheads 2. This will be very exciting for Blockheads players, but it should also provide hope for Sapiens players. I have returned to The Blockheads, and I will return to Sapiens.
I am sorry to anyone who has bought Sapiens expecting something beyond what they have got so far. But I am also sorry to the hundreds of Blockheads players who have emailed me over the years begging for an update. This is the right thing to do. Apple will do something to break backwards compatibility soon and The Blockheads will be lost. That can’t happen. I need to rebuild Blockheads on a new platform to keep it alive, before returning again to carry on with Sapiens and The Blockheads together.
At the end of the day, Sapiens and The Blockheads are made by one man on his laptop in rural New Zealand. I don’t do this for money or fame, I do it because it brings me pleasure to make other people happy. Right now I can make a lot more people happy by working on Blockheads, and that will make me happier too. So it makes sense for me to do that.
I love Sapiens. It is far from done, and I have a solid plan to keep adding to it for years.
Thank you again for your support, I will be back.
Dave