It's been a while.
12 months ago
– Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 04:00:06 PM
Hello Kickstarter backers, it’s been a while. An update is long overdue.
But first the TLDR: It’s been rough, the project has slowed, but it’s not dead.
The past few years.
Our vision of QuestHaven and it’s scope has changed a lot from when we first brought it to Kickstarter. With your help we raised above our funding goal, but we knew that the full version of QuestHaven we envisioned would need more funds, and for a while were on the lookout for external investment. We eventually found an investment group, we can't go into details due to NDA's, but the short of it is that we increased scope, and the investment itself never came through. Being on an increased scope path, with limited funds, has been a source of many issues we have faced in our development.
While the $150,000 was a good initial sum, a significant portion of that went to pay out ad-spend, fees, sponsored videos, and other expenses we incurred during the Kickstarter campaign itself. Add to that a team of 7 and overhead for over 2 years, when you do the math the development path was longer than the budget.
So, we started doing work for hire, it diverted some of our development hours away from QuestHaven, but the money from these contracts along with some personal funds we were able to keep developing QuestHaven.
Things were moving forward, until they weren’t. Our main client started to miss payments, they reassured us that the payments were right around the corner, we believed them. Over time we were owed more and more. The team kept developing, even though their income was affected, we are very grateful for this, and for many other sacrifices they made. They stayed around weathering the storm for longer than we had any right to expect from them.
We also tried other approaches to raising funds, including a few smaller scoped D&D related Kickstarter concepts. As interesting as they were, we ended up scratching because we don’t feel comfortable asking for more funds without having fully delivered our vision for this project. These included a campaign setting which we thought we could tie into QuestHaven, a set of magnetic maps for a game board, and a box of customizable low poly minis.
The state of QuestHaven
In case you missed previous announcements, the beta is out, you can build maps and play with your friends. There are bugs, maintenance issues, and the UX is a lot clunkier than we would have liked. We are not happy with the way the character sheet system worked out. But it’s there.
We were close to releasing a patch towards the end of last year, but between having to let go of the team, and being overwhelmed by my personal finances, the last 10% of the patch kept getting postponed. That being said here are some of the things we worked on.
A dice selector for you to choose your preferred set of dice (including the Kickstarter and Galaxy dice sets that many of you have backed).
An improved object sorting system and toolbar.
Figure radial menu that allowed switching combat and non-combat poses, as well as arming/disarming.
We also made a new top-down camera system, along with some other miscellaneous features and bug fixes. Unfortunately my screen recorder isn't cooperating today and I don't want to delay this update any further. We shared a video about it on Discord last year.
My Personal Situation
I’m going to switch to “I” now.. at this point in time I feel a deep sense of responsibility, towards you, the backer, but just as concerning for me is the debt towards those who have worked on the project and are owed their fees.
I’ve also been hesitant about sharing my personal situation, but for some time now the game has gone from being developed by a team, to being a solo development when I get the time, so I feel it is relevant.
I haven’t really been paying for myself for quite some time, and my home expenses were being in a large part carried out by my loving wife.
About 6 months ago she started dealing with some health issues, they have affected her ability to work and have created significant health expenses from multiple hospital visits and diagnostic tests. I won’t go into further details about this out of respect of her privacy.
The only reason I bring it up is because it’s affected and will keep affecting my available time for development. She has been dealing with reduced mobility, so taking care of her has been roughly a 4-hour daily commitment for the past few months. While we still don’t have a diagnosis, things have been getting better and she’s back up on her feet.
I’ve recently started a part-time development job, I’m hoping I get enough hours in to stabilize my financial situation and pay off some debt. Being able to keep the lights on at home is a must for me to be able to continue developing.
As for my limited game development hours, I’m taking a break from QuestHaven for a few more weeks. I've decided to participate in a game jam. I feel like completing a short term game proejct will help me get back in a better headspace for developing QuestHaven. If the theme allows, I will be testing a procedural generation system during this jam that could be repurposed into QuestHaven.
All the systems that need to be built and maintained for QuestHaven area daunting if not impossible task for me as a solo developer, to the point where I've been in a bit of task paralysis regarding QuestHaven.
Moving Forward
So, what does this all mean for QuestHaven? Well, as I said earlier, I’m not giving up. That being said I won’t be making any promises either. I’m going to stop worrying about getting investment, and put on the developer hat instead. At the same time my hope is to be able to find the right people to keep this project alive by offering them equity in the project. There will be hard choices to make, things that may be out of reach without finding the right specialist. For example, the project really needs an optimization oriented technical artist for example if we ever have any hope of being standalone VR compatible.
Lack of Communication
In part, the lack of communication and more regular updates has been a choice. I’m aware it’s not the Kickstarter way, but we were looking for outside investment, and were concerned that potential investors might decide to back off if they read about our difficulties. It’s been tough balancing the need for projecting a strong image towards investors and a transparent one towards our backers.
Unless one of you knows anyone interested in investing in a VTT, we are forgetting about the investment route at this point.
As for future communication, I'm hesitant to promise that the updates will get significantly better, particularly on Kickstarter. I will try to do shorter updates on Discord.
