Development on Hiatus

Hi everyone, Dis here. I know I haven't sent out an update in a while, and I would rather have been able to send this out alongside another patch, but here we are.

Long story short, I simply don't think I have the time or energy to work on DDND: Judgment Day for the foreseeable future. I've recently started grad school, so that's my main focus, and I have other projects that are vying for my attention as well. Judgment Day has been almost entirely a solo project up to this point, and I have historically struggled with juggling multiple big things at a time.

Besides, I feel like the game is in a really solid state, and that it doesn't really need another minor update or balance patch. I believe that, for what it is, the gameplay is sufficiently deep and well-tuned. Let's be realistic here: DDND's online is quite shoddy, and the community is relatively small for a genre that is predicated upon playing against other people. The training mode is also pretty rudimentary due to engine limitations. Because of all that, I think that very few people will explore the game enough to get to the point where the cracks in the balance start to show.

What would make the finer points of the balance start to matter is if there's a sudden surge in interest. But to the extent that I could do anything to make that happen, it would be by promoting it on social media or creating content (neither of which really comes naturally to me). Maybe I could also generate buzz by releasing something big, like new characters or a port to a new engine that allows for better online. But that would take a lot of work, and unless I get outside assistance, it would be hard to find the time to devote to it.

I'm also just fine letting Judgment Day stay underground and unexplored. I'm not making any money off of it, so I think it's cool to allow it to be a thing that exists that people can happen to come across.

Of course, there is another path I could take: bring in more people to help with development. But that seems tricky to make work. One big issue is that 2D Fighter Maker is an obscure engine, and one that's intuitive at first, but frustrating if you're trying to implement more complex features. Also, my coding practices haven't exactly accounted for the possibility that someone other than me might work on Judgment Day. And if we were to move Judgment Day to a new engine, that would take a lot of work as well, especially because some of the game's mechanics are closely linked with 2D Fighter Maker's, uh... "quirks." It would be hard to find people able and willing to take on the development work.

Also, I'm kind of worried about being a bad boss. Communication and collaboration aren't my strongest suits, and I think I also have a very exacting vision of how Judgment Day should be. Game development takes a lot of work, and 2DFM makes that work especially tedious. I don't want a situation that feels like I'm just shouting orders from the sidelines while everyone else just does all the busy work.

Anyway, that's kind of just how I've been feeling about Judgment Day. I wanted to get something out sooner rather than later just so people know what's going down on my end. Thank you for over 10k downloads, by the way! That's, like, a pretty crazy number for something like this, isn't it?

Dong Dong hibernates, for now...