Posted October 19, 2024 by Rain Droplet Atelier
Unfortunately, there's no way to soften this announcement - as the title says, the release of the game will be delayed until approximately Q3 of 2025.
We understand that people waiting for the game will be incredibly disappointed. All of us are disappointed as well and we want to apologize to everyone supporting us. Our Kickstarter Backers have already been informed of the delay, so we wanted to make sure our non-Kickstarter supporters were updated as soon as we figured out a revised release period.
For those who are curious or would simply like to better understand why there is a delay, the answer comes in the form of health issues.
We haven't been the most publicly vocal about it, but the team has been hit with quite a few and often continuous health problems over the past year and a half. We had briefly mentioned it in the year-end round up, and have been keeping Kickstarter Backers up to date with more details. To summarize - we have been dealing with the widest spectrum of issues from minor health (e.g. colds and infections) to major scares (e.g. severe covid and immune system issues), a few hospital visits, and 3 injured wrists. Between the 4 of us, we somehow have been working on a total of 5 fully-functional hands.
After looking at where we currently stand, we'd realized that the only way to meet the original deadline was to further risk our health, and given the tenuous situation we were already in, it was not something we could knowingly do. As such, we decided to delay the release and give ourselves more time to complete development at a steadier pace.
We still want to focus on development but we understand it is unfair to those who expected their pre-order merch around January of 2025.
Our plan for that is, instead of a large batch of shipments, we will do incredibly small fulfilments over the course of a few months starting in February 2025. That way, we aren't taking time away from periods of intense development but also not pushing people that have supported us to the wayside.
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To end on a positive note, there have been no other major issues with development. We have been very cautious about maintaining our team, our processes, and our game-related assets and files, so development is steady on that front! For those that want to keep up with minor development updates or new progress, please make sure to check our twitter account as we post there more frequently.