It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
A lot of you have emailed in over the last year asking what’s going on with Date or Die. That’s fair - after a few convention appearances and a reasonable amount of fanfare, we more or less disappeared from the internet. The answer is a little complicated, but the key takeaway here is that yep, we’re still working on it and no, we're not finished.
To give you a little background - Date or Die is absolutely, 100% a passion project for us. We’re a tiny team with little to no outside funding. On the one hand, this affords us some flexibility - we can pick things up and put them down as other commitments arise, we don’t have angry studio heads demanding that we meet a release date, and the finished product will be exactly what we want you to see. On the other hand... it affords us the flexibility to do something like neglect to update our social media channels for over a year. We’re planning to fix that, starting with this post and continuing every few weeks from here on out. Sometimes, we’ll just be poking our heads in to say it’s been a quiet couple of weeks, but we want to keep you up to speed with our progress. Speaking of...
We’ve spent the last month or so returning to the roots of the game - figuring out the best structure, expanding character development, creating a workflow for key art assets and establishing different branching paths - so that we have a solid foundation going forward. We’re also using some higher level project management principles so we can keep ourselves in check. Development has stopped and started a few times over the last year, often for reasons out of our control, but we’re redoubling our focus for the foreseeable future.
Most of our routes are fully planned out and number of scenes (spread out across characters, but roughly adding up to the length of one full route) are first-draft complete. As you might expect, actually writing the thing is the area where we have the least to say, short of sharing excerpts (which is tricky to transpose from an interactive format to a blog post). We don’t want to overstate things here - there’s still a lot of work to be done, and it’s definitely too early to give you an idea of a release window. That said, our primary goal right now is getting every route to a state where there are words on the page, and we can expect to pick up the pace over the next few weeks.
Here’s where we can be a little more concrete - our main priority for the last couple of months has been getting to a point where all of our in-game sprites are finished, and we’re proud to say that we’re almost done! Here are a couple:
Once we finish the final polish on these, we’ll be moving onto backgrounds, starting with the character bedrooms (each of which has its own distinctive style).
Christa's been hard at work developing distinct themes for each of our characters - below you can hear a few excerpts:
Disabled for Tumblr - head to our website to listen!
And that’s about where we are right now. There’s still a long road ahead, but we have a clearer sense of purpose and we’re feeling great about our next steps.
Finally - and we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention this - we want to thank you for sticking with us. It’s easy to fear the worst when a project like this suddenly goes dark, but your dedication has been overwhelming and gotten us through some of the slower periods over the last year. So again - thank you, and keep your eyes peeled.
We're hoping to update every couple of weeks from here on out - if you want to stay in touch, the best method's our Twitter, where we'll be linking to all of these posts and providing snippets here and there. And of course, if you ever feel like reaching out, you can find details over on our Contact Us page.
