Toby’s Island Faces Changes and Challenges Due to Developer Split

The Kickstarter for Toby’s Island launched in March 2014 and gained attention thanks to its monster-raising RPG stylings. Despite including a lot of aspects that fans of the genre enjoy, the campaign squeaked by with $20,993 CAD of its $20,000 goal. Since then, the development team has posted bimonthly updates to keep everyone in the loop. This changed suddenly in July. There was no update for the first of the month. It was only on July 15 that a new, and quite serious, post cropped up.

Things had not been going well for the developers. The two main men working on the project had apparently been arguing for months about how they saw Toby’s Island progressing. Eventually, these arguments became to much and they decided the only course of action was to split up. In this process, designer Matt Beer managed to keep the source engine and other aspects, but lost all visual assets and has to create new ones. This first update also included a link to a metaphor-based blog post but the metaphor was taken the wrong way by many backers and has since been removed. No one was meant to be viewed as “bad” or “evil” for these events. It’s just the unfortunate nature of partnerships at times. Sticking together may have in fact caused further issues.

Toby’s Island is still in development but there’s no doubt this is a setback. The silver lining about this situation is that they were willing to share this with backers instead of just going into hiding and ceasing updates entirely. Here’s hoping Toby’s Island gets back on track soon as over 700 backers are waiting to play.