Cipher Prime, the developer behind games like Auditorium, Fractal, and Splice, have canceled Auditorium Duet. The sequel to Auditorium, the company sought funding for the project on Kickstarter back on February 27, 2012. 2,037 people raised $71,061 for the game, which originally had October 2012 delivery windows listed on the main page. However, after a November 6, 2015 update, in which Cipher Prime apologized for missing an October 22, 2015 deadline, a backer only update and tweet have confirmed the game has been canceled.
Here is part of the apology and explanation from the backer-only update released by Cipher Prime founders William Stallwood and Dain Saint. It discusses some of what went wrong with the project.
“Splice had been in development for quite some time and launched slightly after we finished shipping out the [Auditorium Duet] rewards. On the plus side, the game was honored in a host of award shows and platform-specific features. Unfortunately, the work needed to support Splice pushed back Duet development again.
So we split our team in half, with one team working on supporting Splice, and the other half working on Duet. Finally, the ball was rolling!
During this time, we messed up communicating to all of you countless times. We’re sorry. There’s no excuse for it. Keeping you in the dark is almost as bad (or worse) than not shipping the game itself.
Once Duet got to a playable state, we were ready to start having people play it. We thought it best to not send out builds to you, because they still felt rough and one can only make a first impression once. In hindsight, we should have shown you these incomplete builds earlier.”
Stallwood and Saint’s message also noted that some of the time invested early in the process went toward getting backer rewards out, rather than developing Auditorium Duet. They also said that creating smaller games and taking additional jobs to keep making money was an unfortunate necessity along the way. While Cipher Prime attempted to funnel money earned from previous games into the project and find publishers and investors, they were unable to secure the money needed to complete the game.
Auditorium Duet was going to be released on Windows and Mac. Incomplete builds of the game are now available to Kickstarter backers in an archive Cipher Prime shared in the backer update.
