A Hero’s Call, Silence Explained, and an Update From the Developer

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It was all that anyone would talk about for the longest time. This new game a new developer was creating. Out of Sight Games, and their new kickstarter for A Hero’s Call. However Slowly news has trickled down from a constant flow to a occasional drip. Now people are starting to wonder, did we get duked? Is this game still going to come out?

A little backstory

Back at the beginning of 2017 A kickstarter was created to raise money for voice acting for the game. According to the the kick starter page It started on January 4th, 2017, and raised $10,292, backed by 278 backers. In the small audio game world we live in, this was quite a remarkable amount. People were excited and the Audiogames Forum topic Was being updated and posted on constantly. There was a general excitement for this new audio game with high production value. All of this added to by the teasing Demos posted for everyone to listen to. Everyone was talking about A Hero’s Call, anticipating the release and finally being able to play it. As time passed the talk calmed down, and everyone was waiting for the June/July release date.

so what happened?

Well as is the case with allot of “Indi” games, the release date was pushed back. The Last update on the kick starter page came in June of 2017.

Well, yeah. We’re very sorry to report that June was an overly optimistic estimate. Unfortunately, some things have taken considerably longer than expected, so the development cycle has had some slow stretches over the last few months. But we are still rolling, and are making serious headway towards getting the initial audio release out to everyone who backed the project. We aren’t ready to announce a firm release date though, because thanks to some of these delays, we can’t accurately predict when things will be finished…

So where does it currently stand?

Many people are wondering on the audiogames.net forums, What is going on with A Hero’s Call. Nothing much has been heard for awhile on the forums. The last post was on July 19th, 2017. Since then it is just pages of people wondering what is going on, and when the game will be released. Some have started to show a bit of mistrust, wondering if it was all for nothing, and if the game will ever come out. This was to be expected, taking into effect the complete lack of news and updates. There is always suspicion around any kick starter campaign, as there is nothing to ensure the money is actually being used, or that the project will be a success. Not saying that this campaign was for ripping off people or anything like that, but rather to point out the mind set allot of people have when it comes to online funding platforms.
As I said before, the developers have not gone into complete radio silence. On September 14th, 2017 there were 2 posts from the development team on twitter, one of which is below.

imbed tweet from out of sight games

No official date at present. Unfortunately we're dealing with a persistent stability issue that is hard to debug.

— Out of Sight Games (@OutOfSightGames) September 14, 2017

So, Though they have not posted on the forums, they have at least tweeted as of September 14th. The reason for no updates on the forums is anyone’s guess, it could be something as simple as not wanting to deal with the nonstop nagging and complaining that comes from that platform; though with no updates it was justified. The constant argument, or defense that it will be done when it is done is not reasonable or useful to the discussion.
I reached out to the developer for an update, and all can be assured, they did reply and they are still working on the game. A reply and explanation from the email follows.

Currently we’re solidly in the beta testing phase; at this point we’ve mostly ironed out the little bugs and breaks and are down to just persistent, hard-to-debug low level stability issues, and are working on finding and fixing those. Our sound designer continues to work on the tremendous amount of audio content and technical sound design that the game demands, but is making good progress. The soundtrack was recently completed, which was one of the big outstanding pieces we were waiting on, and is just going through some final audio fixes before it’s completely ready.

We had hoped to have an initial launch ready by now, but unfortunately sound design issues, and some of the bug fixing we’ve needed to do, took longer than anticipated. Since it’s impossible to predict how long these sort of stability fixes will take, and since our sound designer’s time is still more limited than we’d like, we’re holding off on announcing an official release date until we have gotten to a point where we’re stable enough to release and have a concrete time table for the remaining audio work. But we are getting much closer, and have actually had the most productive couple of weeks we’ve had in months, so if we keep it up at this pace, who knows?

Thanks for reaching out! We’ll try to be better about keeping the public informed…

In Conclusion

Allot of people were worrying, myself included. However after looking into the matter I have been reassured the game is still being developed, just that the developers have ran into some issues like all do. The only real issue here seemed to be the lack of information being pushed out to the community. Joseph has taken responsibility for this, and I think he understands where the worry came from.

Also though I have not personally talked to beta testers myself, I have been told they are in fact beta testing and working on the game. This was also a personal worry for myself not having heard of anyone actively beta testing. I openly admit my worries were incorrect, and the game seems to be progressing. The only problem was a breakdown in communication to us, the community who have been waiting for the game. I say this as someone who didn’t personally donate, for those who did put in money, their frustrations must have been worse. Now everyone can relax however, the game is still being developed, and though we don’t have a solid release date, it seems as though we will have one in the medium future.