Hello everyone!

Sorry for the long wait, but this year’s preparations took a lot longer than we expected. Today, we celebrate five years since the release of Vacant Sky Act I. It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed since then. Since Act I, Project BC has:

Released several more games, including Act II, Act III, Act I+, Act II+, The Vestibule, Finding Eden, and Encarmine

Funded the development of Vacant Sky Awakening Act I through Kickstarter

Expanded to nearly every platform under the sun with the Awakening project

Incorporated as a proper business

Quadrupled (!) in staff size

Today, we celebrate not only five years of Vacant Sky, but five years of Project BC. Before we dive into today’s Contention announcements, let’s take a look at what to expect from us going forward.

New products in 2014

2014 will be the first year that we offer products other than just games. We’ll also be offering middleware for other game developers, both technical and graphical. The Metis RPG framework that underpins Vacant Sky Awakening is currently the largest middleware product we’re working on, but it will probably not be ready for market until well after VSA Act I is out. In the very near future, you should expect some art assets, both 2D and 3D, to hit the Unity Asset Store.

Status of the Complete Edition

The Day of Contention is a time of endings and beginnings. Five years ago today, we saw the cessation of Auria’s old life and the beginning of a new one. The Vacant Sky Complete Edition is an extension of her journey, in higher quality and better continuity with the rest of the series. Currently, two of the three episodes have been released.

For those looking forward to the end of the Complete Edition, I have good news and other news.

The good news is that Act III CE will be released before this time next year, and the Complete Edition will finally be finished for good.

The other news is that the form it’s going to be released in might not be what you expect. Due to technical issues with the project, we’ll be overhauling the format of Act III CE. In order to give closure to the story and to make good on our word to finish the Complete Edition, the updated story will still be intact as well as all of the choices and endings, but the battles and exploration are being removed from the final episode. It was a difficult decision to make, but due to the enormous amount of technical debt the project has accumulated over the years, it is the only way we’ll be able to finish it this year.

Hopefully, our final announcement of the day will make up for any disappointment this may cause.

Death & Rebirth

For the past few years, I’ve always been personally involved in directing two projects at a time: a main project (VS1, and now VSA) and a secondary project in preproduction. With the conclusion of the Complete Edition, I’ll be bumping up a new project into preproduction. Although I typically don’t like to announce a project so early into development, it would have to be either today or next year’s Day of Contention, and I figured the five year anniversary of Contention would be the perfect opportunity.

Since the inception of Vacant Sky, we’ve come a long way, both technically and artistically. Although originally, the plan was for Awakening to be a stepping stone into the rest of the series, it seems I was (as always) naive in thinking it would be a project that would be over quickly. Awakening is eight (or is it nine?) acts to Contention’s three, each much more in-depth than the entire Contention project combined. Vacant Sky Awakening is a series unto itself, and it would be a shame for it to put the original series on pause for years when it was originally conceived of as a way to bring in more fans to it. And, as many questions as Awakening raises, it also brings answers. Many answers. Answers a lot sooner than I intended to give them.

Having had time to reflect on this, I’ve revised my vision of Awakening’s role in the future of Project BC. Instead of delaying the original series until its completion, I intend to alternate between volumes of Awakening and of the original Vacant Sky. This way, answers in Awakening will properly coincide with the questions posed by the story of the present era.

Following the conclusion of the Complete Edition, we will be relaunching the present era series in full 3D.

I’m excited to show the new design of Auria Edith, which will be debuting in Death & Rebirth, the first installment of Vacant Sky Quickening.

Thanks so much to everyone who has stood with us over the years and helped us become the company we are today. I hope you’re as excited about the future as we are. Look forward to another awesome year with us.

-Bishop