Update #14: May 5, 2023

Lily is going to finish this by herself

Hi folks,

Zoë here (a.k.a. spinnylights). Lily decided today that she wanted to finish this project by herself, and didn't want me to be involved anymore, so I'm leaving it to her. I can't help but admit that I'm really sad as it's been the centerpoint of my life for years now, but at the same time I really love her and I respect her wishes. I'm sure she'll finish it in a cool way.

"small business are less exploitive than faceless corporations" haha well at least they're still friends!

For the past two years or so I've been working on a new, open source engine for the game, in order to make it easier to troubleshoot performance problems, work on the game from Linux (which is my computing home), and break the dependency on a proprietary engine (Unity).

use Godot engine

I was planning to post an update about it here once I had some sort of minimal playable demo, but now I regret having waited so long. Anyway, the repository for that is here (now with a scratch name since it's not Crypt Underworld anymore). By now it has a mature-enough graphics layer to render shaders in a platform window, so the basic graphics infrastructure is nearly done. I've spent a lot of the development time studying Vulkan, C++, calculus, and linear algebra so that I have the background I need to code a game engine from scratch, and at this point I've mostly gotten the hang of those things (I just need a little more linear algebra). Now I'm not quite sure what to do with these skills or the code I've written, but obviously they have some use beyond just this game so now I'm trying to decide what to do next.

There is no obvious use for linear algebra besides programming a piss simulation

Anyway, I guess this is probably the last you'll hear from me on this project. Sorry it's taken such an incredibly long time—when we first made this Kickstarter I don't think either of us realized how much work we were taking on or how unrealistic the schedule we originally came up with was. I was very inexperienced as a game developer back then (my only professional programming experience was in web development and IT) so I really didn't have the background I would need to make realistic predictions about how much work a feature would take to build. If nothing else, I understand much better now, so whatever I do in the future, I don't think I'll fall prey to that so severely.

Kickstarter has ruined countless idealist artist lives, or maybe helped them mature?

One thing I want to say as a side note is that we still haven't forgotten about the posters. For a few years they were stuck in a storage unit several states away with all the rest of our stuff and we couldn't afford to retrieve them, but a kind friend helped us get our belongings again so we now have the posters again. Just before we had to put all our stuff in storage, I actually put all the posters in tubes and got them ready to ship, so all they really need is labels and postage. Money's still really tight for us so I can't say we could pay to ship all of them at once, but if you want to update your address we'll try to get them out as we can. That's one long-standing thing I would really love to see taken care of as obviously it's kind of absurd how many years y'all have been patiently waiting.

Cursed late capitalist merch logistics

Also, before I go, I want to express the deepest thanks to everyone for pledging to this project originally, because it actually saved me from homelessness at the time. I had recently lost my job for medical reasons and couldn't pay my rent, and the income Lily and I got from this Kickstarter allowed us to move together to another state with a lower cost of living and where I could get health insurance, and we've been able to stay afloat there ever since. We didn't say anything about that at the time because we wanted to just focus on the game, but in truth y'all saved me in a dire circumstance, which I'll always be grateful for. See y'all around, Zoë

Give your money to unhealthy game devs