To see it go out in such a state and the reaction from the fans was easily the most hurtful thing we’ve ever experienced. Not just because we failed ourselves, but we failed our fans as well. Releasing it in the state we did was something we’ll always regret. There really wasn’t any choice-the wheels were in motion and the game had to come out. We also had game boxes shipping to retail stores all over the world, so we had nowhere left to go. With tens of thousands of pounds of debt built up, we didn’t have many options left bar insolvency. This was on top of most of the team forgoing pay completely for several months and living off their personal savings in the house that the company was paying for. We’d taken out a bank loan as well as a small loan from our business advisors. But in early 2015 we were faced with an impossible choice. , Early Access provided a much-needed injection of funds, and the project continued for a few years under a stricter budget. Why did you decide to release the game unfinished?

Because we lived where we worked, it was difficult to maintain a healthy work-life balance, which would sometimes strain our relationships. After the rush to release we had a lot of fun being able to relax together, play board games, or setup a session of Dungeons and Dragons in the evenings after work.īut it wasn’t something we could maintain long-term. The house was great too, comfortable enough for six core team members and two significant others. Productivity went through the roof, plus the camaraderie of working together allowed us to build a collective spirit that persists today. Getting the team together in one place was wonderful-there really is no substitute for being able to work directly with one another in the same room. In the lead up to release, you were all working out of a rented house in Brighton-what was that like? We had to seriously restructure the team and the amount we were paying people. We needed a major shake-up to reverse the downward trajectory. We’d built our whole plan and budget around those eight months, and we lost half of them to this huge misstep. In our Kickstarter we said we’d complete the game in eight months, which most people in the industry would rightly tell you was impossible, even for a game much less ambitious than ours. This cost us four or five months and nearly a third of our budget.

But it quickly became clear that the…tool simply wasn’t feasible. Originally, we had planned to create a middleware called Dungeoneer that would sit between the Unity Engine and the game, enabling us to build the game and allow community modding. You hit trouble after your crowdfunding campaign-what happened?

Dungeon keeper 3 war for the overworld