Last Year we shared our plans about Violet from a logistical front. The TL;DR of our post was we’d be shooting for a Kickstarter in February 2024. And unfortunately we have some bad news:
Our original, high level plan was to launch our Kickstarter in February 2024. I (Dan) would continue working full time until January 2025 where we’d develop the game for two full years. In 2027, we’d polish the game and release. After meeting with the advisor, it was encouraged for us to set a lower target dollar amount, as well as to spend less time post Kickstarter developing the game. With less budget and less time (the double whammy), we decided to postpone the Kickstarter. Though we know we’d have a good demo / be ready by Kickstarter in 2024, my (Dan’s) gut was telling me to wait another year (2025) for personal financial reasons.
Above everything else, I (Dan) need to make sure my family is provided for. And second, I want to make sure those involved on the project don’t have to worry about if / when they are getting paid. This is a big risk and I need to make sure everyone involved can get through two years without my full time salary. Of course this is disappointing, but I think the pros might be better in the long run (I always say slow and steady wins the race). For one, this gives us another year of development / design / art, which should help reduce time post Kickstarter developing the game. It also means we naturally wouldn’t need as much from a Kickstarter, making a lower target actually workable from a budget standpoint. And obviously, one more year will make the demo even that much better.
From a logistic standpoint, the timeline stays the same, but we are just shifting the Kickstarter out a year. The Violet team was graciously more than accepting with postponing the Kickstarter.
However, the “bad news bears” doesn’t stop there:
Shortly after we decided to push the Kickstarter out, our lawyer informed us that not only is Last Life Studios (the LLC I (Dan) am operating under) is trademarked, the game name of “Violet” is also already trademarked. Essentially what this means is the name of the game is going to have change, as well as some of the branding we have developed (e.g. the website, violetthegame.com, our logo, etc.).
March has not been a good month for Violet. It has really got me (Dan) discouraged. Tony, our artist did give me a little encouragement and said “For what it’s worth, those are all normal setbacks. If it means anything, none of those have discouraged my faith in the project.” The next couple of months will be a bit of a rebranding time, so we may go a bit silent as we try to figure out what to rename / rebrand too.
Setbacks yield pruning, and then growth. Right now the pruning phase sucks. But we believe the growth will be exponential.