In the interest of being transparent, here’s the deal—when we started working on Wellspring three years ago, we had no idea that it would take at least three years to finish. To be fair, we had no idea about practically everything we would encounter during that time (four years of game development courses, be damned), but we were determined to see it through, which ultimately meant enormous personal, financial and most importantly, mental sacrifices. Seriously, we both have about 7 brain cells left between us.

Almost four years have flown by and despite our best efforts, the game isn’t as close to being done as we’d anticipated. While it’s impossible to explain just what we’ve accomplished during that time period, all that ‘really’ matters is that we haven’t actually finished and released our intended game, which is still, at the end of the day, a product to be sold.

Our Kickstarter campaign was our last viable option, and even had it succeeded, we were still looking at another year to two years of full-time development to get Wellspring ready for prime-time. It should also be noted that Wellspring: Altar of Roots is the first part of what would ultimately be a multi-part game series—the idea was, that if Altar of Roots had been successful, we’d be able to continue development on the remainder of the series.

Given that we needed another year or so to finish the game even with KS, it’s not hard to imagine that now, with both of us having full-time jobs and other obligations, that there’s really no good estimate for how long it would take to finish it, given that we’re only able to devote a measly portion of our original time to it.

This puts us in a tough spot, to put it mildly, and it leaves us with a difficult choice, which is basically the crux of this post, to see what the community thinks. Here are our main options, ranked from shitty to not-so-shitty:

a.) Scrap the game altogether.
b.) Form demonic pact to finish the game.
c.) Put game on hiatus to work on a smaller project
d.) Continue (very) slowly working on game and release fully, but plan on it taking 3-5 years.
e.) Effectively split the game content and price in half and shoot for Early Access within a year or so.

None of this is ideal, but given our current circumstances, this is what we’re up against. I do truly believe that we’ve created something special with Wellspring (imagine that, I’m biased), but ultimately, we just shot too high and had too large a scope with too small of a team. Because.. that’s never happened in the history of projects ever.

Anyhow, we’re very strongly leaning towards going the Early Access route, but I wanted to get some opinions if anyone has any insight or ideas they’d like to share. And again and like always, a big thanks to everyone that’s supported us!