Hello Everyone!
First off, for those that don't want to read through all the details, here's the essential: Spiral will release as a single experience; it won't be episodic anymore.
I'll go next with probably the interrogation most of you now have: no, it won't change our planned 2023 release date! We're not immune to delays, but we're also a cunning bunch. When we first created the page, we decided to go with the worst of both worlds, assuming it was best to give a pleasant surprise rather than a bad one! If we had decided to commit to the episodic format, the actual first episode would have been released this year, not in 2023 ^^
Now, as for why we decided to drop the episodic format? Well, since the very beginning, we wanted Spiral to be a single experience. However, since we're self-funded, we were aware that it would take a lot of time and investment, and eventually, we decided to open the door to the idea of releasing it episodically to help fund subsequent episodes. Not to make sure they would be created, that was always a certainty for us, but rather to accelerate development and bring Spiral to life earlier.
It came, of course, with the caveats that a lot of people aren't fans of the episodic format, especially publishers! Our goal was, is and always will be to do what's best for the game and its development. This is precisely why we're dropping the episodic format for good. In the past few months, we realized that while the first scenes of the game were nearly complete, so many things could still influence or improve them while we worked on the rest of the game, and releasing them now on their own would prevent them from being as great as they would be in a full release. And in addition to that, we've already been able to pick up the development pace, and things are looking good.
That's all for today, but if you have any questions, feel free to reach out!
Take care