Counting the days until they set you free again.
It’s not very often that a game’s development gets derailed by said dev going to prison (even if you fully expect it to happen to one at some point in the future). But such has happened to Fortune’s Run, an Early Access first-person shooter on Steam.
According to the game’s developer, Dizzie, who put out a post regarding the incoming hiatus, the whole thing relates to things that occurred long before the game began development.
First of all, I have some stuff going on I need to make public as it’s going to interrupt development. I’ve been sentenced to prison for the next 3 years. It’s a long story, but I’ve lived a very different life before I was a game developer, and I wasn’t living very well. My case is about 5 years old now, I have been going through the legal process the whole time I’ve been working on this. I have finally been found guilty and sentenced, and I’m going away next month. It’s a shame, but it’s the consequences of my actions. I was a very violent person and I hurt a lot of people in my life. Unfortunately, the sentence isn’t going to help with that at all, but I guess we all know that.
So the game isn’t TOTALLY dead, but unfortunately due to even further bad things happening, it’s unclear what will happen.
While there was someone helping Dizzie, she left the project after recovering from an injury due to a botched surgery. This meant that QA and some level work all fell to Dizzie after she left.
The other developer has left the project. Once she recovered, she decided that she was no longer interested in game development. She was in charge of QA and a few level segments, all of which has been abandoned and I’ve been forced to get by on my own for the past while. It’s been very difficult to do alone but I actually managed, by basically not sleeping, to complete all of the work in time so that it could be released before I’m sent away.
The sad news is that things will essentially be left just short of the finish line. But the good news is, once Dizzie’s out of the joint, there’s very little work left to get things to a full release.
Since we decided to part ways, development will be completely interrupted until I’m released. I know many of you will be upset and disappointed but please understand that there’s absolutely nothing I can do, these wheels were in motion long before I started making this game and it’s just been slowly unraveling in my face the whole time. I want to underline that I’m no longer in financial dire straits since our game actually sold OK, so I should be able to afford rent once I get out, so there’s a chance that if you wait a few years I’ll be able to cap off the release. In fact, there’s not very much content left to work on, I’ve been making stubs and prototypes of the missing levels in my spare time.
I am extremely passionate about this stuff and I’m never going to stop making games. I’d like to finish this one, but I don’t know what will happen. I’m going to do my best, because I love this game and I want to finish it. Seriously, I just want to finish it. Finish it already, Dizzie!
She goes on to thank her supporters on Discord and Patreon, as well as everyone who bought the game in Early Access on Steam.
Fortune’s Run is a science fiction FPS; rather, a specific kind of FPS called an immersive sim. If you need a point of comparison, a good example would be something like Deus Ex. There’s some RPG mixed in there, too. It’s worth noting that the game has very positive ratings, and even those sad to see development being (temporarily?) shelved are incredibly positive about the game’s future.
Alongside the sad news, Dizzie dropped a separate blogpost with patch notes, which are considerable. So even though it will be 3 years before the game sees another, it should help to tide things over.
Source: IGN
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