Hi dear followers and supporters of I Date Free!-dating game! It's been a while since we've updated you on how it's going with this project. Sadly, we're coming to you with this announcement on a rather negative note.
As you know, we have had our fair share of problems with the game project already. Now it seems the problems are bigger than we had anticipated.
About half of our team has either disappeared or decided to quit after hitting the first rock. This has left both Niu and Nikki in a difficult situation, as we have to work so hard on just managing the team, that we don't really have the time to do - and can't really focus on - our own jobs for the routes (art in Niu's case, writing in Nikki's).
Most routes have not finished up the first chapter yet and we are short on manpower.
We are hesitating to invite any new members into the team, as people - despite of the promises and enthusiasm - disappeared and abandoned the project without further notice.
There have also been some sicknesses, injuries or personal matters that have forced people to drop out.
What have we changed to make the job easier on everyone?
We have shortened the chapters, easing up on the writers, and we're changing the lay-out of the game drastically to reach out to our artists as well.
So what are we doing next?
Right now we're brainstorming with the remaining team to see who could do what to fill in the empty slots, on top of seeing for which jobs we need to ask people on.
We are looking into how we will be releasing the routes. It's possible we will be releasing route-by-route or that we will give you half of all routes and than release the rest route-by-route. We won't be able to give you the entire game with all routes in one go.
It's possible some of the character routes need to be abandoned completely. For now, the Nagisa and Nitori routes are at a standstill.
We might be opening up applications again, but we will let you know more about this later. What you do need to take in consideration already, is that this game is A LOT of work. Most of the people coming on didn't realise exactly how big of a project this is, even though we have said before that this will take up almost all of your free time. It's quite frustrating to have people come on and then decide that this is too much work because they can't keep up with just 2 hours on the weekend. The upside of this project though, is that the work experience can be added to your resume, as international work in the line of writing/art/game making.
Please refrain from asking about a Sosuke route. We will make an announcement on the routes soon.
Please wish us a lot of luck! We are working our hardest to make sure we don't have to drop the entire game, as there are so many of you that are cheering us on and are excitedly waiting to get to date our Free! boys.
Thank you very much for reading all of this!
