Hello Villagers!

A couple weeks ago I announced that Village Monsters would be missing its spring release. It’s a major bummer, but it was the right thing to do for the game.

In this post I’ll expand a bit on why it was delayed as well as outline the new schedule. If nothing else I want to be transparent and accountable.

Why the delay?

I usually love the start of a new year – a clean slate is so motivating! But this year… this year was rough.

January began by gifting me a severe case of influenza that knocked me out for two straight weeks. What followed was a train of misery – my wife got sick, my kid got sick, the house was majorly damaged in a storm (twice), and everything else that could go wrong did so all at once.

By the time things slowed down it was the middle of March and I was no closer to release.

I’ve also discovered a fact most other devs know already: there is undeniably some kind of temporal paradox surrounding indie game development.

It’s like the more I work on the game the more there is left to do. This isn’t even a joke – I’ve completed nearly 1,000 tasks this year, yet my backlog of “To Dos” has actually grown in size. I’m far from a perfectionist and I’ve been vigilant in preventing feature creep… so how can this be?

I don’t have the answer to that yet, so for now I’m just keeping my head down and grinding away at this hydra.

What’s the new schedule?

Release

Village Monsters will be releasing in 2019.

I’d like to release in Autumn (perhaps during the spookiest month of the year), but I’m refraining from making promises I can’t keep.

Post-Release Updates

Village Monsters will have substantial support after launch. You can expect new features, plenty of improvements, and as much community involvement as I can get.

I’m planning on a year’s worth of free updates, but it’s too hard to predict that far out. Instead, here are the first 3 months:

• Month 1: Bugfixes, quality of life improvements, and any last minute features that missed the release
• Month 2: “Town Hall” meetings to come up with ideas for new features + a vote on the next update
• Month 3: Release of first major content update

Thanks for sticking with me so far! The end is in sight, so I’m going to make these next few months count.