Past, present and VUEture

Shortly after the launch of this campaign, we enthusiastically revealed "Formula V" to backers - a fast, futuristic top-down racing game we have been working on and hoped to release this year. We were obviously very excited about the initial success of the campaign and, in the hope of possibly smashing a few more funding goals, we made some retrospectively unrealistic promises.

While the funding is a tremendous productivity boost and allows Jorge to spend between one and two days per week exclusively on our projects, the pledged amount has been pretty stable and only slightly increased since then, so we're still mostly working on these things in our free time.

To get to the point, the hard truth is that there has been hardly any substantial progress on the game this year so far, while we were busy improving the engine, development tools and working on smaller demos and games instead. It seems that we have pulled a classic Sean Murray on this one by getting too excited and talking way too early about what we were hoping to be able to achieve in the near future. Unfortunately, it is simply not possible right now to finish a project of these proportions in reasonable time, so we've been setting our priorities accordingly on the aforementioned smaller scale projects and improving the engine and tools for other developers.

This does not mean we're cancelling the project, we still want to see this game come to life badly ourselves. We're just delaying it indefinitely, hopefully removing any kind of unrealistic expectations both on your side and on ours.

We're sorry (and a bit disenchanted) for not being able to fulfil our promise of a true AAA Virtual Boy homebrew game just yet, but we hope you like what we managed to achieve so far as well as what we're going to show in the near future.

Speaking of which, let's have a quick look at our near-term roadmap! We are currently putting the final touches on the release of VBDE 1.3.0 and VUEngine 6.0. There is only a single performance issue in the Platformer Demo that is still holding us back from releasing, so we should be done pretty soon. After that is out of our way, we plan to concentrate on finishing our multiplayer side project to finally get something playable in our backers' hands.

Once that is done... Well, we'll see. No promises this time, promised. ;-)