While the Age of Indie has generally been a fruitful one so far, there are always some that have to call it a night, and in this case it’s the developers of Air Dash Online, the Super Smash Bros-inspired indie fighter. The game’s developers say the project is on “indefinite hold,” despite its promising characters.
 
The news comes a long while after the game halted its Kickstarter campaign and then went dark—despite an unoptimized proof-of-concept demo they had online (the site is now closed) and a promising pitch. In a response on Facebook to one of many “Alive or dead?” posts, Christopher Emerson, who worked on the game as its graphics programmer, responded with the below quote:
I’d say indefinite hold. One team member may come back with something similar, but as for myself, I work for Sony at Bend Studio now.
So, not entirely dead, but not exactly alive either. Sony’s Bend Studio is the development studio behind Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the Vita as well as some of the Syphon Filter series.
Emerson also went on to add that the platform fighter genre “is an easy genre to second guess your efforts in”, adding that while there is “potential”, getting that across to investors and the paying/playing audience isn’t quite that easy. One reason, he added, was due to “lots of conflicting presumptions” on the secret sauce necessary to turn such a game into gold. This “makes it very difficult to narrow down an approach and keep development on track,” Emerson said.
Air Dash Online was to have graced the PC as an online brawler game.
