Change of Management

Today, we have an announcement for you that may be a little shocking, although it has been a long time coming internally. As of today, Signed and Sealed With a Kiss will now be developed entirely by Reine Works, who originally funded the idea, as its original developer, Anomalis, has effectively been disbanded.

Although this is a long post, we’d like to assure everyone that there’s no cause for concern. We’re making a number of positive changes to the development of SSWK. For the sake of absolute transparency, however, we felt that it was best to outline the entire situation, including some of the grittier parts of the behind-the-scenes from the past few months.

How does this affect development going forward?

• Due to differences in management policies, as of now, we’ll be working to make sure that everyone is compensated for their work on Signed and Sealed With a Kiss, both going forward and retroactively.
• We won’t be removing any previous team members, but we will look into hiring additional help in certain areas.
• We will be taking another look at the game’s present budget and raising it if necessary, in order to ensure that it meets the quality of standard Reine Works releases.
• Anomalis branding and references will be slowly removed from the game and its storefronts.
• We can now guarantee that the game will be available on other storefronts, such as Steam, post-release. We will also look into providing Steam keys for those would prefer them over the itch.io download (note: this is presently only in regards to those who ordered on IndieGoGo). However, this will only be in the weeks leading up to release.
• After the game’s budget has been confirmed, we will come back with a clearer plan of action for the game, and it will be posted on IndieGoGo as an update.
• The estimated release date will likely be pushed back by a few months while we work on getting any new team members up to speed and making a number of quality-of-life changes that we were previously unable to under Anomalis.
• We will be working on putting together a more transparent way for everyone to follow the game’s development from now on. For example, a public progress tracker. This is because we don’t want anyone to have to worry that development will halt.

Okay, so what in the world actually happened?

At some point in the last year or so, the hierarchy for Anomalis collapsed. There were too many ongoing projects that everyone on the team was working a little on and then cycling around. It was impossible for anyone to get any large amount of work done when they kept switching back and forth.

Closer to the end, some semblance of order was restored, but this was only because people who were not supposed to be involved with the group’s management stepped in, out of the goodness of their hearts. For that, the credit entirely goes to Ashe and Maddy, who have been working tirelessly to prevent everyone’s work from disappearing into the void.

On Reine Works' side, we've started with making sure everyone is delivered Signed and Sealed With a Kiss in the best quality we can manage. So, from now on, we hope that we’ll be able to get the project done more smoothly, thanks to the fact that we can now manage the project without worrying about our previous plans with Anomalis.

Moving forward, we are still in discussions, but we’re also working to minimise the work that was put into previous Anomalis projects going to waste. If you happened to be waiting on any other Anomalis titles, we ask for your patience while we continue to sort out what we can.

Please direct all comments, questions, and concerns about SSWK either to anomalis.games.fuzzberry@gmail.com or reineworks@gmail.com.

Thank you.