Yes, Your Grace Epitomizes Frustrating Kickstarter Trend

If you’ve forgotten about the unique strategy RPG Yes, Your Grace from Brave at Night, you probably aren’t alone. It’s a game that’s well and truly entrenched in a long list of games funded around two to four years ago (December 2014 in this case) that still isn’t out, and has suffered from constant delays and silent developers. You know this list of games, it’s the one that makes Mighty No. 9 look like a great success for Kickstarter in comparison.

After three months, Brave at Night have finally released their next update. This has become the new trend for the developer, who once released updates every month or every other month before the grind of developmental hell sunk in.

This new update comes baring big changes for the game. The most apparent is the radically altered art style for the over world map. Gone is the old green colored FTL map, and in comes a beautiful 16-bit-esque world overflowing with details and sharp angles. These changes carry over to the UI as well, which aside from looking nicer seems to be faster as well.

These are the big changes, but there are smaller changes as well. It’s mostly small stat changes that anyone who hasn’t been following the game will be clueless about.

Yes, Your Grace has seen some big changes as of late. Aside from those listed in this update, Brave at Night also signed with a publisher as detailed in March’s update. An alpha build was promised way back in July 2015, but since then, the team has seemingly been hit with constant delays and other problems. Perhaps that’s what convinced (or forced) them to sign with a publisher.

Regardless, there isn’t much to see here, folks. Aside from the art and UI changes, this update gives backers absolutely nothing. A “playable version” was promised for backers in that March update as well, but it wasn’t mentioned in this update.

Yes, Your Grace is one of those Kickstarter campaigns that’s becoming all too common on the site. Infrequent updates, missed deadlines, delays, all forcing the developer to sign with a publisher. These campaigns usually end up forgotten by many, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s clear that if a developer misses their release, it’s better to simply issue a short update, and head for the hills for as long as possible instead of addressing the issues.

Yes, Your Grace looks and sounds like it’ll be a damn good game. It has an interesting concept behind it and despite my disdain for 8 and 16-bit art, I have to say this one looks gorgeous. Still, Yes, Your Grace falls into the same traps that so many other small Kickstarter games fall into. Delays are to be expected, but keeping backers out of the loop with a lack of updates and a constantly changing release window is a great example of how not to run your Kickstarter.