Another day, another Kickstarter campaign being updated after a year of silence. This time around it’s Mechagami, a 2D arcade platformer by developer Joe Rheaume. It collected $5,338 in July 2014, with an expected release date of December that year. That didn’t happen, and now nearly two years later, the developer has no concrete information despite releasing a new update.
In a new update appropriately titled “What Happened?,” the first since October 2015, Rheaume tells the story of how he was laid off from his job, then got seriously ill, but is now miraculously cured. It’s always amazing how many Kickstarter developers get laid off and then ill whenever they come back from a long hiatus, but what can you do?
After the explanation of the Kickstarter Bug, Rheaume goes on to say he’s been working on the game. “The 8×8 screen final space dungeon is just about finished, which means the core content of the game is nearing completion!” That’s the only thing he says about the game, the rest is saying how he’s learned his lesson on not giving a time frame for release.
Good is Bad
He wraps up with great news though. “There are still additional boss fights to program, secrets to add, and non-essential powerups to polish. Then there’s the whole issue of figuring out how to publish standalone executables of a game made in Flash for Win and Mac now that Flash is basically a dead platform…” Oh.
There are no screenshots nor videos in this update. It’s just the classic excuse of a developer’s life going to hell to explain the year of silence, a single sentence on the progress of the game, and a litany of new excuses and problems to be solved at some later date. Normally I always say any update no matter how scant the info is better than nothing, but this update is so lean it might as well be silence.
If Rheaume simply talked more about the development in the last year or showed a video or even some screenshots that would been okay. But after a year of silence, it’s fair to expect more than one sentence on the game’s progress.
