CENTRATION

State of Development

25th Oct 2021
Noms

Preface

First and foremost let me preface this by apologizing for the total lack of communication and updates from us over the last couple of years. We've been completely silent both on our website and our Discord about any development or any form of progress, and it's honestly been unacceptable on our part. All we can do is apologize for this.

Centration's Development State

I'm not going to beat about the bush here, and I'm sure most of you are at this point preparing to scroll down for a tl;dr of this post so I'll come right out and say it at the start:

Centration development has halted, and will be shelved with no timeline for continuation.

The project hasn't been cancelled, it's not dead. There will come a time when I and some of the team come back to this project with fresh minds, more experience, and more importantly, the finances and free time to support a project like Centration.

Why? How?

The simple fact of the matter is, at the beginning of Centration's life, we bit off more than we can chew. We were inexperienced and had a vision and we weren't willing to compromise. This came back to bite us in the ass later when we realized our lack of experience and budget meant that our original vision for Centration wasn't achievable. We ran a couple of failed and partially successful campaigns to raise money for development, but they were unsuccessful.

We then tried to release early builds of the game on Steam Early access in an attempt to allow supporters to support us as development went on. This, also, was a huge mistake on our part. The game wasn't remotely in a playable state and a combination of bad reviews and internal direction changes meant we took the game off of the Steam Store, and we decided to focus on a smaller, more achievable game.

We bounced around some ideas before coming back and deciding to compromise on our original design for Centration. A redesign was started and we decided to focus on developing a small section of our core gameplay loop and iterating from there. This was a good idea, and had we started with this process from the beginning, it would have been met with success - however this occurred late in our development process and a lot of our developers - myself included - were suffering from burnout and demotivation.

What followed this was a series of events in most of our developers personal lives that took a lot of our free time away - some of us developed families, or started new jobs that demanded more of our time, some of us moved to different countries and some decided to move on from the project.

This combination of events has resulted in the stagnation of development over the last two years; and while we all still dearly want to make Centration a reality, the simple truth is that none of us have the ability to do so in our current circumstances.

The Road Ahead

As mentioned above, this doesn't mean that the project has been cancelled. We want to make Centration a reality but we lack the vital tools to do so: Time and Money.

That's why our team will be stepping away from the project indefinitely until we feel comfortable, have the free time and the financial situation to restart development and create something resembling our vision. That doesn't mean we're going to go completely silent however. Centration isn't feasible with our current circumstances, but other, smaller projects are possible and we will pursue them with the goal of gaining experience and funding to continue.

Your support over the years

Those of you who have supported us and believed in us over the years deserve more than this. We've let you down and in some ways betrayed your trust. All we can do is apologize and ask for your forgiveness.

We hope there will come a time to see you all again in the future.

  • The Centration Development Team