Most of the time we talk about game development things in these posts, but in this case it’s about the business side of things. Reina & Jericho is very close to completion, but we had one dilemma which is that since we were near the end of the development cycle, we were also low on money. We mostly use money to buy things like electricity, food, and software licenses. It’s helpful stuff. Our bank account was low enough that, despite crunching, we weren’t on pace to be able to stay afloat financially after release. There is a two- or three-month lag between when a game goes on sale and when the revenue finally reaches the publisher (in this case: us) and more than one good studio has been forced to shut down despite finishing their game, releasing, and having strong sales figures. You may think to yourself “If their game was selling well couldn’t they just find a _____ to lend them money?” and the answer is complicated. A lot of the people willing to lend money to a game studio are also the same people that are interested in buying game studios on the cheap, and there is no better time for this then after a release when financial resources are low. It’s still important to just not run out of cash in the first place. Even if a Good Samaritan money lender comes along you still want to have more leverage than “We’re broke if you don’t lend to us.” So, we went to get more money. We have pumped the breaks on development on Reina & Jericho for the last couple of weeks to do some sub-contracting with another studio. The development on Reina & Jericho is in no way endangered -- on the contrary, we have been able to make some arrangements to bring additional resources to help us finish the game, and we will be able to finish it at a higher level of quality than we originally expected. This is something that we as a studio have been trying to make happen for quite a while, and it’s exciting to have it finally fall into place. The tradeoff is that we do need to spend a few weeks diverting our resources to help close out a different game. And so, we’ve gone from crunching on Reina & Jericho to crunching on another project. The bad news is that the hours are still quite long, but the good news is that the other project has a solid deadline, we are generating revenue as a studio, and we have some strong business opportunities and professional connections that have been made that will allow us to increase the final quality on Reina & Jericho substantially. The release date is still not far away, but we regret that we’ve had to slow development for the last month and will be doing so for the next month as well. The fact of the matter is that this remains a significant step towards solving a problem that has plagued us (and our environment art) for quite some time and we are very excited to finally have access to the help we will need to bump it up a notch. But the tradeoff is that we do need to spend the time gathering resources before we can move ahead with that final step. It's difficult that we have to put it off with the game so close to completion, but one of the advantages we have is that we don't have a publisher or anyone else forcing deadlines on us. We don't need to roll out our game in an incomplete state (a practice that is becoming increasingly common across the industry). Reina & Jericho was started with the intention of creating a good game that was also a work of art. If it were a [i]product[/i] we could release it right now, but we actually have a statement we want to make with the game and a quality level we want to hit because it isn't a product to us, it's art. As art it isn't finished quite yet, and so we are making a compromise on the timeline side of things so that we can get the people we need to give it a little bit more love. And it will be worth it.