Dear Community,
We wish to keep you informed about the progress of Farworld Studio and its private fundraising efforts to continue the development of Ascent Quest under the best possible conditions.
During the launch of our Kickstarter campaign, we mentioned that securing funds from investors or finding a publisher would follow the success of the campaign. The current advancements in development have been possible thanks to around €50k invested by the founders of Farworld Studio, but also thanks to you with the €36k from Kickstarter. Since February, this private fundraising has been one of our main objectives.
Today, Farworld Studio consists of only 2 full-time people and 4 part-time contributors. If we want to make Ascent Quest a total success, we need to expand our team. This fundraising has not yet been successful. It continues even now with a greater focus on publishers rather than capital investors. Comparing our project to similar ones on the market and successful fundraisings following Kickstarters, we hoped to find funds a bit faster than that. The geopolitical tense and economic worldwide situation, along with the recent waves of layoffs in major video game studios, are the main points of concern that seem to hinder the roughly 90 investors we have already contacted worldwide. But we still have ongoing discussions with several interested parties.
How it affects our roadmap?
The direct consequence is that our team remains very small even today and for at least the next 3 months. Additionally, a significant portion of our schedule is devoted to this fundraising effort. That is why today, we are behind on our projected schedule announced during the Kickstarter. We will not be able to launch the first alpha tests in September as initially planned. A lot of work still needs to be done to provide the great first test experience that you deserve. But then “when?”, you may ask. Rather than promise you a new precise date, we prefer to answer transparently; it is currently difficult for us to commit to a date as it directly depends on when we manage to secure funds. In any case, expect few months of delay. As soon as we have completed our search for investors/publisher, we will be able to present you a better revised roadmap. We fully understand that this news will disappoint many of you. We are working tirelessly to offer you the chance to play Ascent Quest as soon as possible.
What if we don’t find more funds?
This is a risk we have been aware of since the beginning of the project and which we already mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign (Risks & Challenges section).
We are not at this stage yet. But, if we reach it, it would be far from an ideal situation because in that case, we would remain a very small team under constant crunch. This would mean that we would have to scale down the number of features and the amount of content for the first release version. Then, if this scaled-down version performs well enough, we could strengthen the team to continue development and implement all the initially planned features later. In short, the difference is that development would be done in several longer phases, but our final goal would remains the same.
Development continues!
In parallel with our fundraising efforts, development continues of course! Recently, a special attention has been given to the monsters and the way they fight, especially the more complex bosses. We’ll show those latest developments with boss combats, in the next devlog which we’ll publish soon. In the meantime, here’s a teaser of the very first boss fight! You can count on us to keep you updated on those topics. As usual, we’ll gladly answer all your questions on Discord or social media!
Thank you,
The Farworld Studio Team
