This One's A: KeeperRL Greenlit, Development Extended

It used to be standard procedure to celebrate the milestones of development for games you were looking forward to: announcement, going gold, getting released. Now I find myself celebrating the indefinite delay of those milestones. KeeperRL is an "open-source dungeon simulator inspired by Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress" which has been in-development for some time and was due to be finished before the end of the year.

But after the game improved this past year and was Greenlit last month, its developer has announced instead that he's going to continue working on it for at least another year - and probably much longer.

Here's what designer Michal Brzozowski wrote on the game's website:

I was also pessimistic while setting the release date, as I didn't expect huge success from the project. My plan was to finish it as a minimal complete game, release and be done with it. I'm a beginner game developer, so I anticipated that my first project would be very far from perfect. It made more sense to finish it quickly, then use that experience to work on something new and better.

Recently though, I changed my mind. The game has improved a ton since April, even though it still has lots of problems. I'm starting to like it so much that I just want to continue working on it. I think it will keep getting better with age, like good wine. I feel that finishing now would waste a lot of its potential.

Getting to the point, I'm going to work on KeeperRL for at least one more year, and most likely for longer than that. This will let me do everything that I have in my mind without any unnecessary time pressure.

And isn't that just lovely? The plan now is to work towards making the game as stable and bug-free as possible ahead of an Early Access release at the start of 2015. The game has previously been available to backers of an IndieGogo campaign or to those who bought the alpha via itch.io.