Dev Update #4: Why It's Taking a While

Hi everyone, David here again! Believe it or not, it's almost been a year since I revealed We Harvest Shadows to the world at gamescom 2024. It honestly bums me out a bit because I had been working on this game for about three years prior to the announcement, and I'm realizing there's a lot left to do. I really wanted the game to be out by now, but unfortunately I need more time. I wanted to explain the situation, because ultimately it all comes back to one big decision I made a while back.

So, the demo came out, it was a hit, my dreams were coming true, and I was super grateful for that. But I really didn't know if the game would garner any attention before that moment. My other games and online school were barely making money, so we were withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars from my retirement account. It was a pretty stressful time... and luckily, the gamble paid off. My game almost has 300,000 wishlists now. THANK YOU! 🙏

Even with the insane hours and money I poured into the demo, there were still critical bugs and performance issues we could not figure out (the demo currently runs at a blazing 10 FPS on Steam Deck). It took three years to get an imperfect demo released, and I knew the full game would have to be better in every conceivable way. I desperately did not want to release a half-finished, bug-ridden game. There's a famous quote that describes the situation: "I didn't come this far to only come this far."

I was also super burnt out. This was by far the biggest, most ambitious game I could ever imagine making, and I just didn't have a lot of gas left in the tank. I needed help. Or I needed to compromise the full vision of the game, and hope players wouldn't be too disappointed. I really didn't like the idea of Early Access because the story and ending are so important to the whole game... I wanted it to feel like a complete experience on day one.

Kickstarter was considered, but I talked to other devs who ran successful campaigns and they convinced me it wasn't ideal. It would hurt my launch momentum due to Steam keys not helping the algorithm, it would take a lot of time to fulfill rewards (instead of working on the full game), and it still wouldn't be enough money to hire the right people. It made more sense to keep scraping by with my own retirement funds.

So anyway, it eventually boiled down to a big crossroads:

1. I use the rest of my retirement and finish the game as fast as possible. I would be happy with a "Mostly Positive" from player reviews on Steam in that case.

2. I go with my dream publisher, get a large budget, work with the best people I'd always wanted to work with, and make this the best version of itself possible... but I would need to accept that it would take much longer to finish.

As you can probably tell, I went with option 2! And I don't have any regrets! Having enough funding to hire talented people has made this so much more enjoyable for me. It means we can update the engine and rendering pipeline so that a simultaneous, optimized PC/console launch is possible. It means the game will be the most cinematic, gorgeous, memorable experience I always wanted it to be. Speaking of talented people, check out this sweet animation