After about 5 years or so of development, I’m announcing and committing to a (tentative) release date of Monday, May 3, 2021 for my indie game “True King,” tentatively for Windows PC.

Why announce the date now after so long? Why not release it sooner as intended? The reasons are more complicated than I expected…

… I might need to change the subtitle to my game.

Anyone who has followed this blog for… the past 5 years, basically, knows that I’ve been working on a strategy-RPG called “True King.” I intended it to be released as early as 2017. This got pushed back over and over. A year ago, I was committing myself to finish it in 2020. A few months ago, I planned to release it no later than March 2021.

My pushing back of the release date to May isn’t because of development trouble (that is still an issue, but not why I’m pushing back the date further). It’s because of the subtitle to the game, which I had set and publicly announced almost 2 years ago. It includes a word that, basically, means “rebellion,” but was a word otherwise not often used. I didn’t expect what would happen in early January in the United States. And I certainly didn’t expect high officials to call it out as… this word that meant “political rebellion.” It didn’t seem a particularly strong word to call it, in part because most people probably didn’t know what it meant, so I don’t think it had the gravitas or weight that was intended. Personally, I would have used a much stronger word, for idiots who committed a crime against a democratic government and bragged about it on Instagram as if they did something noble, all because a single man with cartoonish-hair told them to.

This isn’t a blog about politics, and I’m explicitly trying to avoid using the word in question or the event to attract the wrong attention. This is a blog about a Canadian programmer trying to make games.

… but that’s the thing with art. If there’s a story or any context, it tells a message or a moral, and in today’s society, that means it’s political. Virtually any form of text or speech can be viewed as political. I’m happy that saying “what’s the big deal, don’t be so sensitive” isn’t cutting it anymore, but in a world where everyone feels the need to say every thought they have into the void of the Internet, we have to learn that there are consequences, and to take responsibility for what we say. It’s one thing to expect that from an individual and their personality… but from art too? The thing where controversy was something to be applauded less than a decade ago? All the tv shows and games I love to watch will be effected from this era. I knew a lot of JRPG’s had controversial topics, like ultimately revealing “the Church” as the big bad guy, but saying “it’s just a story” isn’t really an excuse anymore.

I never particularly saw my game(s) as political. They aren’t based on real people or real places or real events or timelines. “True King” features a story of a child King resurrected to take back the throne from the man who stole it from his parents, set in a fictional medieval setting. It’s pure fantasy, and not a particularly lore-rich or well-researched one. But as I write out the dialogue now, despite not thinking I need to change anything I intended and not planning to change anything… in the back of my mind, I worry that I need to be a little extra cautious.

One feature I had in mind, but had not formally announced, was the ability to edit all the text in the game, primarily to allow fan-driven language translations, but also as a simple method for custom stories. Do I really want to open up that much of a game to the public, knowing they could exploit it and write a story that’s offensive, with my name still showing up in the credits? It’s one thing for a large company to allow such a thing, where no single individual could be confused as responsible, but an indie game by a company with a single developer? This might be the first game that I label as being made by “Dust Scratch Games,” and not with my actual name listed anywhere in it.

Basically, I’m saying a lot has changed in the world, especially in the last 12 months. The delay, which I decided on in January, is partly for any emotions tied to the word in the subtitle to simmer down. A lot changes each week nowadays, so hopefully by May, things will have been forgotten, and things will be back to normal. I’m not quite counting on it though, and I expect I might need a last-minute title change.

So that’s why I’m delaying, but also finally committing, to release “True King” on May 3, on May Day. But will the game actually be finished by then? Well…

I would have thought that working from home for the past several months would have been a great opportunity to get work done, especially from November to December. A few months ago, I expected a drought in work from January to March, and thought that would be a great opportunity for a sprint. By the end of December, I got about half as much done as I expected, and I haven’t touched my development computer in over 2 months now, due to a sudden wave of work to do both inside and outside by place of employment. A lot of time has been wasted, but I feel exhausted, where there is no work-life separation anymore. Most of that work is done now, and I think I’ll be more available up to May. But time has shown a lot can change within a single week.

“True King” in its current state is almost, but not quite, feature complete. That, and finishing the story and cutscenes, are my current task. Finer details, including music, haven’t really begun yet. My old desktop machine, dedicated to making games like this, is now 8 years old, and is barely able to turn on, desperate for an replacement. As I’ve said before in recent posts, I’m desperate to get this over with, to close the book on this project, refresh my workflow and work on other things. After 5 years of tackling a small RPG that was still too much for me to handle, stalled further by struggling to balance a 60-hour-a-week-work and personal life, I need to close the book on this. The project itself is kind of broken, regardless of time… part of me is even tempted to try remaking “True King” from scratch again, hoping that it would take less than 5 more years… but there are too many other things I want to make.

So it is extremely likely “True King” will not be properly finished by May, and will release unfinished. If that’s the case, I won’t charge for it, instead listing it as a free prototype somewhere like Itch.io. Reviewers have complained my older, pay-for games were “unfinished” too, but for whatever faults those had, I still believe those were ready for release when they came out, and are worth the asking price. But I know better than to charge money for something that’s barely playable. That’s a lesson more of us should learn in practice: there’s nothing wrong with making your work free. I would have been more hesitant if I was still trying to earn a living making games, be it by myself or for a company, but I know this isn’t the game that will change things for me. It was never meant to be. Better to get it over with, learn from my mistakes, and move on to the games that might yet be game-changers for my career, or at least be a fun new diversion.