The difficulties of game development and Early Access have hit another developer, with Sun Dogs throwing in the towel with AuroraRL. It's not all bad news though.

Writing an announcement on Steam, the developer noted how they understimated the effort required to make a game of the scale they wanted to. Not only that, they overestimated the amount of money they would make.

This isn't the end though, since the code is all up on Bitbucket under the Apache license. When I asked the developer about the assets (graphics and so on) they said "Assets can not be used in commercial projects, though if you really like and want to use them this is negotiable.".

You can see some older gameplay below:

Since the code is open, hopefully someone can keep it going if there's enough interest. Always a shame when situations like this come up but at least it can't fade away forever.