In a surprising twist of events, the developers of Glyde the Dragon have cancelled their Kickstarter and largely disbanded, despite reaching their base funding goal with plenty of time to spare. The latest Kickstarter announcement post goes into more details of what exactly has happened and what this means for the Glyde project as a whole.
From what I gather, it sounds like there was some disagreement within the Valefor Games development team in regards to the scope of the project, timelines, and a path forward after the release of the expansive demo. As such, they’ve decided to amicably part ways. Valefor/Martin, the remaining developer and overall creative lead of the project, will continue working on the full game at a much smaller scale, using new and existing freelance work to supplement development where needed.
The demo that was released alongside the Kickstarter campaign will be moved to its own Steam page and offered as a standalone prologue to the eventual full game. This will remain a free download, though part of me wishes they would go ahead and offer this at a small price so that the disbanded team could receive some payment for their work, and maybe finance some of the full game’s development as well, though I can see how the optics doing so might not be well received.
As a part of this effort, the demo will be rebuilt “from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5,” which sounds like a much more daunting phrase than intended. From discussions in the game’s Discord sever, trying to port the game to UE5 directly apparently has caused some errors due to some likely amateur and unoptimized code. The game is basically going to be manually ported over to the updated engine, so while still a large task, it appears to be less of a “starting from scratch” effort than what it immediately seemed.
Valefor has reassured members of the Discord server that everyone involved is happy with the decision. While I am sad to see the project fail in its current state, I would much rather the team disband now if they feel that is what is best for them, instead of dragging out development on an ambitious project they are less than enthused about. It sounds like overall, the team/remaining developer have taken feedback akin to comments I made on my original article here regarding their Kickstarter and development plan to heart and are adjusting scope accordingly. Hopefully we will still one day see Glyde the Dragon’s final form, though I suspect it will look much different than what was presented so far. Best of luck to Valefor as they figure out the next steps in this project!