Code 7: A Story-Driven Hacking Adventure · published
Hello and belated happy new year everybody!
Time flies, doesn't it? We want to take the time to talk about the last months and what was / is going on with development. Let's start with some solid info:
Now let us talk about why. We've been working on the game for almost two years now, full-time and with a lot of dedication. Since the Kickstarter campaign, we pushed ourselves even more. We wanted to make a great game and we wanted to make you, our players, and of course all future players, happy.
The last months before launch we worked a lot, like A LOT. 7 days a week, 90 hours a week. If you don't know, this is called crunching. It is the worst thing you can do to yourself, a game or a studio but still a lot of developers believe this is necessary to achieve a good game. But it's wrong. It's working on borrowed time and it destroys you physically and mentally. We learned that the hard way.
After pushing through gamescom, we saw that barely any news sites picked up the game and sales were quite mediocre. So all this work felt like it was almost in vain. Luckily, we received wonderful feedback from you all, which gave us hope for the future. But still, we ended up having a big fat burnout. And it was really rough.
We couldn't really come up with creative ideas, couldn't work on the easiest task. We somehow managed to finish and release the winter update but it took us longer than we had hoped. We decided that the only way out of this, was a long vacation so we both took the whole January off to recharge.
Now we're back! HA! RENEWED!!!
It's good to be back and now we have the creative juices flowing again. For the future, we promised ourselves to keep to human working hours, not work on weekends and also don't push ourselves too much with deadlines. Don't worry, we don't want to slack off and take like 2 years for one episode. We're aiming for Summer / Autumn this year for the next episode.
We want to thank you all for being so supportive the past year and all the kind words that you've sent us. We will continue to create the best game possible (just maybe without sacrificing our soul...?)
Special thanks to all who participated in / shared our Christmas Charity Sale. During that time, we earned roughly 1120 $. We will round this up to a donation of 120 $ to blista (in case you forgot: we said we'll donate 10% of our revenue, see the previous update).
Don't forget to join our Discord Channel , to stay up to date and chat with us!
Cheers,
Zein & Kevin