Development Status Update

Curious Odyssey Fest

First off I'd like to extend a huge thank you to the Curious Odyssey team for including Alice is Dead in their event! We're always grateful for an opportunity to get the game in front of a new audience. Be sure to comb through the full event to scope out other odd and interesting games!

Development Update

Now for the real meat of this post!

I imagine many longtime fans and followers of this page have been frustrated with the sliding release date. We've only ever tried to broadly estimate a release year, and even that has been difficult to stick to. For now I have very broadly set the date to "2027", as I'd like that date to reflect the reality of our uncertain development schedule.

This project has never been full-time for anyone involved. We knew it would be a large undertaking just to re-do the existing art in the game, let along attempting to expand the narrative and better stitch together the 3 original games. These were originally made without a real plan, being made up 1 release at a time. We want to really make an effort to turn Hearts & Diamonds into something much more cohesive. An immediate challenge has been hand-painting scenes to a commercial standard. These are something like 4x the scale of the original versions, and are being much more richly detailed and dressed with interesting set pieces. This means each scene can take DAYS to paint.

This is where "doing this in our spare time" becomes an issue. Not only is it a huge undertaking, being done in spare time. It is also being done alongside Hyptosis' own career outside of game development (gotta pay the bills somehow!)

He's discussed this in the AID Discord, as well as his Patreon - and I got his permission to copy some of that over to here:

[c]I wanted to let everyone know, we are STILL planning on finishing Alice is Dead, I'm 1/4 through my final year of medical school, currently sitting at a 95% average too! I'll have my license at the end of this year, then I will be able to dedicate 3 to 4 days a week back to Alice is Dead.[/c]

[c]Thank you all for sticking with me, this will give me a stable safe job and I'll never have to focus on my games for income ever again. I can just make games and art for the love of it again, like back when I started 20+ years ago![/c]

[c]Love you all![/c]

[c]-Hyptosis[/c]

As you can imagine, medical school is no small undertaking! We have naively hoped there would be time to tackle the art entirely in Hyp's spare time. But "spare time" is a luxury that the work, studying and grind that medical school doesn't really afford.

The upside is that when he's done his school around October, he'll have steady employment and predictable hours. Two things that will be much more conducive to pursuing indie development!

We apologize deeply that this project has ended up drawn out SO long, and that we didn't do a better job communicating what's going on behind the scenes. It may be slow going, but that enthusiasm for the project has never waned! We can't wait to launch back into production, and promise to provide more consistent updates at that time.

Thank you all for your support and patience! -Graeme (2 Left Thumbs)