An Apology

Timo and I owe everyone following the game's development an apology. There's an ongoing debate on the forums about who's been wrong and who needs to apologize. In my mind, there is no debate: we clearly did the wrong thing being silent for the whole of 2018. If I was an early accessor for a game I cared about and it went without communication for over a year, I would be concerned or upset. There are as many different reactions to it as there are people, but there's no question everything started with the silence.



People have asked for an explanation, so here's the story. This is not intended to read as an excuse; it's just to shed light on what kind of thinking got us here. We develop Hardland by mapping out the game's shape one checkpoint at a time. When we get closer to a new checkpoint, I start being more active on the forums to prepare people for the upcoming release, and I remain active for some time until feedback from that release is sufficiently exhausted. We engage only around releases, because it helps our attention to be less divided when working on the game. This has been the blueprint for Hardland's Early Access from the very first release.



The last major checkpoint, the game's story, was a regular checkpoint in every way except that it wasn't possible to cut it into multiple releases, because it tore the whole game open on an operating table. The work was expected to take 7-10 months, and we planned for an official announcement along the way, which we posted in 11/2017. Then something happened: unexpectedly, the story started transforming the game. When thinking about the game from a writer's perspective, all the pieces started showing up in a new light. There was one piece, in particular, which more and more of the game seemed to revolve around. Wherever we looked, we saw a place for it, so we pulled things out and reworked them, over and over, following all the threads. How deep would it go? We didn't know, but the realization slowly took over: this was exactly what Hardland wanted to be.



It's somewhere during this realization that we should have been able to take a step back, and see that "we don't know how deep this idea goes" has repercussions outside the game. When we finally did wake up to not having talked to the players in an alarmingly long time, it was already the fall of 2018, and things were looking grim on the forums. We figured simply talking to people again without anything to back it up would just ignite the flames, and that we needed to come back with something really substantial to turn things around. Had we been able to alert ourselves to our negligence sooner, we could have saved many people a lot of uncertainty and anxiety over the game's destiny.



Kimmo