Poisoned Pawn?

Any word of if Poisoned Pawn is still being worked on or when it might be completed?
Not a peep since June of last year. I know they plan on trying to sell this product and make some money for a future possible game, but if you don't at least update your core support of fans at least every once in a while (even with just a sentence or two on your twitter feed) the core fans end up lost in obscurity because even the most patient person will lose patience after a long enough time passes. Let alone you want your core fans to buy when you first release to get the most bang for your buck, but if you don't at least give them little tid bits here and there they disappear and then come back a year or two later and find it's been released and buy it on GOG for pennies and you end up making little to no profit. I want this project to be a success so we can get maybe one last game out of Big Finish but am starting to lose hope that it will sell much at all due to the little to no updates.
I know it's hard to work on a game if it's being done as a labor of love with no paycheck attached. But if this game is going to end up in the dustbin of history, they should at least give the community a crack at helping out with it before that happens.

During the development of Tesla Effect, there were scores of people offering to help with it's development that never had a chance to and I'm willing to bet they would help now.

This is what I would propose if the decision was made to shelve Poisoned Pawn:

-Make a public call to action for people to help to get it to the finish line. Break down the pending work to action items can be delegated to community members that want to help out and ask them to commit to completion dates or relinquish the task to someone who can

-Move all of the code and assets to GitHub or some similar tool. I know as a game you want to keep it's secrets and plot twists so protect those parts of the assets and only give access to community devs parts that they are going to help with. Community members can sign up, list what their skills are or what they want to help with, and then the decision can be made what they will have access to

-Should the game get completed, give free copies and production credits to the community members that contributed game assets or code commits
there has been some updates and other chatter on discord app
https://discord.gg/aDH8du6
Lynne
tex murphy is back in town
Indie projects are usually tight on money. If there is any apparent delay, it's usually due to money issues. Running out of money would immediately stop a project in its tracks due to layoffs and cutbacks. In these projects, game design skills are not as important as how well they MANAGE MONEY. Tesla Effect had a ~$600k kickstarter fund, went into production in 2012, and was released 2014. Such speedy delivery may seem like the norm, but it's not, as Chaotic Fusion is finding out. It took a bunch of industry veterans and great resource management to pull that off. Otherwise, it could taken 10+ years to complete as Black Mesa did. Black Mesa is a fan-remake of Half-Life that began in 2004 and was only released fully in March 2020. At one time the developer was down to only one person working on the project due to lack of resources, i.e. money, time, manpower.
they are still working on the game but it's only worked on in the guys spare time.
Lynne
tex murphy is back in town
Working in their spare time means they are progressing at a slow rate, and they could lose money from that too as time goes on. The tech they use may become outdated, and they'll need to spend extra money upgrading their computers and game engines. What if VR is no longer a thing when the game finally releases N years from now? All their money spent on VR would be wasted.

One advantage of these freelance indie projects is that there is no pressure from investors and publishers to meet deadlines and earning goals. At first, I thought Chaotic Fusion was beholden to Big Finish Games to meet some sort of timeline or other requirements, but that doesn't seem to be the case. If you run a company, you can't have someone taking indefinite time and sucking up resources indefinitely.
the guys are not getting paid for the work they are doing.
Lynne
tex murphy is back in town
plumgas wrote:the guys are not getting paid for the work they are doing.
They have always been that way. But they actually had a realistic timeline at the beginning when they had a smaller game in mind. They started development in late 2014 and at one time expected to finish at the end of 2018. Then they decided to expand the game to a multi-part installment, and that was when I knew we wouldn't see the game in a very long time. I posted my concerns on the old forum here and their response seemed merely aspirational rather than realistic. Plenty of developers work in their spare time with no money but they should be realistic about the time they could afford to spend versus the time they would actually need. Did Chaotic Fusion really plan to spend 10+ years when they started? I don't think so. But it's looking like it. It's approaching 6 years now. I sure hope they have all the FMVs done while Chris is still young!
if you want to know more about the game visit https://discord.gg/aDH8du6
Lynne
tex murphy is back in town
plumgas wrote:if you want to know more about the game visit https://discord.gg/aDH8du6
I have already been reading those posts. Nothing indicates the game is anywhere near completion. And that is all because they gave up on simply making a remake for Overseer, which was what Tex fans had all wanted in the first place. My point is that it's nice to be aspirational and ambitious, but it's even nicer to be realistic. Their current goal could take a long long time and they better be ready for it. They've had some artistic differences with BFG. They think the BFG people are "too 90s." They want to make a "modern" game, which I don't object to. If it were me, I would just get the Overseer remake out the door first -- they get some dev experience going forward, and we get a game right away, win win for everyone. This is the classic scenario of a bird in hand is worth two in the bushes. If you want to get something, then go get it. But why give up on a good thing in the hope of getting something better?
An update:

https://twitter.com/ChaoticFusionTM/sta ... 7047340032
That was from a year ago. Their latest tweet is below, which is also from last year:

https://twitter.com/ChaoticFusionTM/sta ... 4258167808