Game over man, game over news

Hello guys.
So, recently (within the last 2 years) there has been no activity on our side.
Rather a lot of trouble getting things straight, keeping a team together, time management issues ...
the full programme.

We decided to stop trying to beat a dead horse and, for better or worse, I felt the need to stand up and to tell you guys about it, since there has been no official word about it.

Well, here it is.

We are deeply sorry to let you guys down and we're very very thankful for all your support, comments and feedback during the process. I can not say how much we're actually thankful for all the support we got from all of you.

Prison Island has been cancelled. But let me explain to you our reasoning.

The project has been an amazing adventure to us.
It went through several iterations of changes (of which the first was a simple combine-prison breakout scenario). However, there never really was a solid base to work on.
No one had a solid vision of how things should be. Suggestions were taken into account,
ideas and principles were thrown away and got replaced by others.
One day we would go left, the other we would go right.

So essentially we (or I if you will) failed to establish a basic concept, a basic game design everyone could understand and work with. That caused the whole project to bloat and feature creep was a thing that occured on an almost daily basis.
By the end of the day, there was this immensely huge mess of design documents virtually saying nothing.

We had a lot to work on, we were this large team of people, and yet we didn't know what to do or where to start. Large parts of the game logic were missing as there was no one with enough time on his or her hands to write all the game logic the concept required. The project went stale.

To compensate for the fact that we had practically nothing game logic wise (but admittedly a lot of other funky features such as sunbeams and headbobbing ...) we tried to at least dump the basic level structures and do the logic work later on. The results of that can be seen here on moddb.

So all in all, the whole concept was too much and there was not enough planning and bad organisation. The project derailed in scale badly and there was no going back anymore.

We could not keep going like this.
Personally, I was trying to get things straight, scrape off features, put the concept into a state where it can be worked with ... but to no avail. It would make more sense to start from scratch.

The Real-Life got us all and no one has the time or motivation anymore to bring this monster of game concept back to life.
So for now, this is the sad end of our adventure.

Lastly, I would like to make it very clear that I do not blame the (former) team for this, just in case you might got this impression. Each and everyone who worked on this is an exceptionally talented person and it was mostly me, who wasted their talent.
For that I am sorry.

It was fun while it lasted.

Thank you all again, for all of your support and patience.
It was a pleasure doing this together with you.

We will see each other again, somewhere else. I am sure of that.

Cheers,
df