So… It has been forever since we posted any news. You’re probably wondering to yourself: Why? It’s been quite a fight on our end as we have been working diligently and fighting what seems like a losing battle against expectations.

But before we get to our current decision we wanted to give you all the information:
In the beginning of this year we were faced with a choice regarding the development of Multiplayer. Either keep the old engine and build MP into that unstable contraption, or try something else. We looked at our options and all the C# code we had already converted for our MP server and someone brought up Unity.

We had looked at Unity a long time ago, but with what we wanted to do could not use the regular free version, we needed Pro, which cost money. But hey, we were getting ‘some’ sales with Steam, and for the most part stability had been the major issue with the game, which en large was unfortunately to blame on the development using the Torque 2D engine.

So, we bravely decided we would take all that work and put it into Unity, because all the coding we had been doing for MP was already in C#, which is what Unity scripting is working with, and we were going to have to make A LOT of changes anyway to the current code that made a switch almost the same amount of work.

We pushed onward and purchased Unity Pro. OUCH!

We wanted to get Darkout stable, with MP, extra content, and publish on other platforms.

Allgraf Games was then met with a series of internal issues commonplace for independent developers and with some heavy heart saw a member of our coding team move on to other projects. We dug in our heels, went into some design stages and contemplated how it would be possible to continue production of Darkout and were fortunate to find a temporary replacement who continued where he had left off, but only for two months. We were grateful for the support but with independent development and based on a compensation system that relied on sales more of the team were forced to move on to other work as well.

This has left Allgraf very shorthanded and has, to our dismay, forced us to reconsider the future.
Particularly, Darkout.

Unfortunately… this makes Multiplayer impossible to deliver as we had intended. Since its conception and through to our release on Steam we had a solid plan – a full team and very reasonable expectation for Darkout to move to a stable version on Unity.

Had everything been as it should have been MP would have been out and ready to go in June/July – if we had the same team as in January.

This news comes at a point where we had had some high profile companies approach us about porting to various languages and consoles.

However, the feasibility for us to continue current development with our greatly deflated team, borders on the near-impossible.