Hi guys! This is Glair. This post is for those of you who would like to know what is going on with Mannequin Academy. Please know that I will be happy to answer any questions you might have, we reply to all of your comments and love talking to you :)
Short version is that we are not abandoning Mannequin Academy, there will be updates in the future, but the project's ambitious scope makes it impossible to estimate when it will be completed.
A slightly longer version is that Mannequin Academy is a dream project of Aedian, it was conceived almost two years before the two of us formed Aedian Glair studio. The story was always intended to be as big as it needs to be. We both were very naive as game developers, hoping that we could finish it relatively soon. We didn't exactly know how many words we needed to write to tell this story, our earliest estimate was 80,000. As we moved past the 60,000 words mark we realized that the story only barely moved forward so we thought, naively, that we needed to add another 60,000 (a total of 120,000 words) to wrap it up. So we poured all of our attention and effort into writing the remaining 60 thousand only to see the finish line move further and further away. We now know that Mannequin Academy needs at least 200,000 - 250,000 words and that assumes giving up some non-essential elements that we initially thought should be included. Some of you might have noticed that, when we started writing the character routes, they seemed less inspired. That is because by that time we felt overwhelmed with writing five parallel romance branches with their own sub routes. We really want to make each romance option unique as we initially envisioned it.
The art was completely redrawn FOUR times while we were writing the story. While the earlier versions of the art and CG's were "ok", Aedian felt that they needed to be better and I support Aedian's decisions as I believe that we should try to deliver the best game we can. You can imagine how this consumed even more time and contributed to the overwhelming scope of Mannequin.
In summary, Mannequin Academy is our biggest and most ambitious project. All our new projects have a limited size and approximate word count limit built into them. Mannequin is limitless and we still feel that we don't want to apply the cold logic of the project management principles to Mannequin Academy. Cutting corners and removing features isn't how we imagine it should be done. We want to revisit some parts of the story and improve them, especially the recent updates.
We sincerely hope that you don't mind seeing us work on other smaller projects as we tackle this gargantuan beast of a project in small steps. We can't promise when we will deliver, but we WILL deliver Mannequin Academy in the style that it deserves. As for our smaller projects we made a commitment to finish them based on precise schedules, which means we are developing a stable workflow of finishing existing projects and starting new ones.
Finally, once again, a big heartfelt thank you to all of you for supporting our work and sharing all those encouraging comments! We won't fail the trust you put in us.
Love, Glair