After a lot of thought and consideration, our team has decided to put A Dragon Named Coal (ADNC) on temporary hold for the time being. We’ve been actively developing the game for almost five years with a lot of success, but we’ve hit some roadblocks we can’t easily overcome. On the other hand we’re changing gears to work on a less ambitious title that should allow us to come back to ADNC when the time is right.

Is A Dragon Named Coal dead?

No, the project is still very much alive. We’re still actively revising the gameplay and tweaking story in our spare time. We just don’t have the necessary resources to complete the project as it exists now. So it’s going into hibernation as we work on a connected title. A project that should help us reimagine ADNC’s IP in a more affordable and time effective manner. As the story has never been meant to be exclusively about Coal, but a much larger world with a lot going on in it.

What happened?

At this point you’re probably wondering “What happened? I’ve been seeing progress updates and new artwork over the years.” We’ll try to explain that below. As we’ve run into a couple huge blockers preventing us from producing content in a timely manner.

Animation

One of the biggest problems our team has faced since the projects conception has been animating characters. It’s one of our highest production costs. Because of the game’s action oriented nature, animations are complex and require a lot of tuning. 2D sprite sheets require a large number of time consuming hand crafted assets. We’ve worked with multiple pixel art animators to try and fix this, but we’ve had trouble keeping consistent quality and style. 3D provides a lot of tools to make animating much easier, and we’ll probably be headed in that direction for future animating. As 3D’s skeletal rigging systems provide much more cost effective tools to animating an action oriented game.

2D tooling code became too large

Custom tile systems, combo trees, and many other libraries have had to be written for this 2D project. Over the years our code base has become too large for our team to support. 3D provides many of the tools we’ve had to hand craft. The complexity level may be higher, but the amount of code we’d have to maintain would be far smaller. Allowing our team to focus on more gameplay related coding and less tooling (which makes a big difference for a two person team).

Also the live action combat system of ADNC has become quite complex and beyond what a single programmer can handle. The system was supposed to be a 2D re-interpretation of Devil May Cry 4, but recreating something like that was much more difficult than expected. Mostly we had a chicken egg problem with going from prototyped combat to fully animated character. What we ended up with internally was a sub-par and rather buggy experience. Endless edge cases were killing us. For example there were a lot of issues with AI being able to navigate around correctly. Some games like Dust Elysian Tale have solved this issue, but we found because of some of our more complex AI systems, things just weren’t meshing like we’d hoped.

Cost of production

The plot, paper level design, crafting systems, and even an unreleased vertical slice demo have all been put together to give us an accurate idea of what completing the game would cost. Currently we have only 1 full time employee, a part time, and additional contractors working on the game. In order to finish it we’d need 6 full time employees, plus additional funds for contractors and licensing fees. We don’t have that kind of capital or access to investors at that level.

A lot of these costs come from bad decisions we made early on. Animation, gameplay style, 2D tooling, all play a big part in this. As our team has examined price points, these could all be fixed with 3D tooling and revised gameplay. Which would drastically reduce the cost of production and our turnaround times. Ultimately allowing us to tell better stories and release products quicker.

Lack of funding

Everyone who has worked on ADNC has been paid for their time and we plan to keep things that way for future projects. On the other hand the scope and pixel art production costs require a lot of money, since many of the assets aren’t easily re-usable or procedurally generatable. The game has been entirely funded out of our (the founders) pockets, making funding the project difficult.

You might ask “Why didn’t you ever launch the Kickstarter that was announced with the trailer?” Well our team decided not to push the go button on an almost ready Kickstarter Campaign since we weren’t entirely sure we could deliver the product as it stands. Our team won’t take money from investors or our fans unless we’re sure that we can deliver a product. We also don’t feel it’s right to rest the burden of funding solely on the shoulders of our fans. I’m honestly glad that we never took money, and ultimately I think think ADNC will long term be a better project because of it.

This is common in the game industry

ADNC going into hibernation is not unheard of among other small studios. A lot of indies we’ve spoken with have taken ambitious projects like ours and put them on hold for several years. Ultimately turning their prototype into a successful product. We’ve talked with other indies about our revised plan to change gears temporarily and apparently it’s more common than we thought. A lot of studios don’t expose their products early in development like we did, and instead only internally evaluate them.

What does the future look like?

The good news is that a lot of the code from ADNC is reusable since it was modularly developed. So combat systems, inventories, equippable items, dialogue managers, AI, targeting systems, and many other libraries are reusable. Our current plan is to take this code and work on a different game in the same IP that avoids costly pitfalls ADNC is suffering from. When the time is right we’ll announce this new project we’ve code named The Wanderer. When that project is complete, we’ll then reevaluate A Dragon Named Coal and how we can complete it.

Our team sincerely apologizes for this news, but ultimately it will end up making ADNC a better product long term. We want to thank our fans for all your support. Our hope is that the next project we’re working on will live up to the quality expectations we’ve set with ADNC.