Mooncrest Development on “Indefinite Hiatus”

The folks at KnightMayor have published an update on their official website to explain why the development of Mooncrest – their action-RPG inspired in equal measures by the combat of Dark Souls and the story and setting of a trilogy of mods for Neverwinter Nights – is on “indefinite hiatus” and most likely canceled. In short, the developers are running out of funds and wouldn’t be able to last until the time is right for a new Kickstarter campaign:

Well, this isn’t the follow up update to the combat system unveiling we were planning on. Since the closing of our Kickstarter over 2 months ago development on Mooncrest has not progressed in a manner that we are happy with. When we brought the project to Kickstarter we didn’t have any plans in place or talk about what steps we would take if the campaign had failed. As we discussed elsewhere, there were problems with the way we chose to present the game and everything didn’t come together the way we envisioned.

Afterward, we decided a playable version of Mooncrest would be the best way to convey our vision of the game. The past 8 weeks we have been working toward a second Kickstarter with a modest goal of $40,000 where we planned to deliver a vertical slice to our backers. A vertical slice, for those not familiar with the term, is a playable proof of concept. It’s not the same as a prototype or pre-alpha as it looks and plays like the final product. With a playable version of the game and a better project video it would have addressed all of the concerns of our previous campaign. Also, it would have made it easier to be greenlit on Steam.

While we feel we were finally going in the right direction, the harsh reality is economically we can’t continue the development of Mooncrest at this time. The project has been self funded from the beginning and we are at the point we are beginning to scramble to make ends meet. We had a short window to get the second Kickstarter up and running due to the fast approaching holiday season (when Kickstarters don’t have a high success rate) and we found ourselves making decisions to make the deadline that would have again lead us to another subpar campaign. That was something we decided wasn’t fair to us, our families, our friends, and most of all, to you, all of our amazing supporters out there. After some soul searching we decided our best course of action was to put the project on indefinite hiatus.