Contingencies falling apart
On the last update, I had a recovery plan in place that would let us take a fast turnaround towards recovering the investment that didn't come to light.
The contingency plan involved a little bit of money that was coming through alongside a few arrangements that would keep things stable enough to put in a two month burst of energy and full focus across the team.
Things are always fragile when you've not got much to work with, and after a few arrangements falling through and some wildcards materializing, our contingency ceased to be viable.
As a result of that, much of the team has had to temporarily turn attentions towards their own sustenance - taking up contract work and the like.
Rather than turn the lights off at the face of our recovery plan falling through, I've been living off of what scraps I can and have continued to stay focused full time on pulling things back in line with Tangiers.
This brings us to where we are now.
By the end of the weekend, we'll have hit the point we had intended to quickly reach after the last update.
In most respects, the game is fully and robustly functional, and we've got a good quantity and cross section of content to demonstrate. I've got a number of funding and publisher opportunities arranged that I will be pursuing over the next three weeks. If our work pays off, then these will give us the means to go back into full production and quickly begin to deliver concrete results.
With the game in a broadly comfortable state, at some point over the next three weeks I intend to stream some gameplay sessions. There's a pretty tight schedule ahead of me so I'm not sure when exactly, but I'll share the time and date of this in advance through an interim update.
There's also some bits of gameplay footage that I've captured but need to edit together. I was hoping to have that in time for this post but can't really afford to keep people waiting any longer. Will be distributing that at first opportunity, probably around the time of streams.
Current status
With features locked in scope since the last update, I've spent the past months working on completing and honing what we've got on the backend.
As a result, things are very positive on the tech front. Vast majority of features and architecture are in a position where they're ready for public consumption. Some fine tuning, a few bugs to find, but for the most part the backend is ready to go. Our architecture is stable, fairly well optimized and very close to completion.
I've put together an itinerary of backend progress. Green denotes areas that are good to go, yellow areas that need a little more work. Anything else is deferred until post-beta. Note that this is edited for accessibility so isn't a one for one representation of code architecture. Also note that the completion percentages aren't on a linear scale between components - some areas require a couple of days work, others an hour or two. All in all, I'm looking at 5 final weeks of focused work to get this 100% ready for release.
From our itinity, our primary area of backend focus is the interlocking pairing of AI and Animation. Finalizing this area is dependent on animation, so accordingly productive progress is effectively funding locked. In the interim, I will be blitzing through the other areas.
Then there's the backend. With regards to beta roadmap, not too much has changed. We've got one remaining mission that needs polishing off, and another that needs bringing out of prototype. After that, we've got full voice sets to finish recording, followed by a handful of remaining audio tracks.
If things don't proceed as planned
We've made plenty progress, but there's still the risk that the next three weeks will fail to bear fruit.
If we do find ourselves in such a situation, I've no intention of pulling the plug on things - I'm committed to seeing things through and delivering to our backers. We've soldiered through enough so far that I can't really consider any other alternative.
The broad contingency for making sure we can release would involve taking a month or so out to raise funds through external work and similar. This will cover remaining third party needs and enough sustenance to see us through to Steam's Early Access.
Within Early Access, we'll have low enough remaining overheads that even a tiny quantity of sales will be enough to keep the lights on and see the game through to completion. The release pattern for this would be to release the game iteratively through a total of three quasi-episodic "acts".
To get to Early Access with reduced funds we would have to reduce scope by some amount. I would focus our work, stripping things down to the most effective elements while maintaining the gist of what we wish to do with Tangiers.
If we do have to take this route, I'd make sure that we do so with as much backer-consent as possible. If that is the case, then I will make sure that the first possible chance to update contains a discussion of proposed component removals with room for backer feedback.
Ideally, that's not a road we have to go down, but if worst comes to the worst then it's a better option than dragging things out indefinitely or to cancelling things entirely. Have to keep things afloat and have to keep working with what we've got.
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