Midora, the indie action-adventure game inspired by the 2D Zeldas, is being put on hold. Mhyre, the game’s director and president of studio Epic Minds, explains why in a blog post. If you want the basic gist, here’s the primary reason, straight from Mhyre’s blog post:
So why have we not enough money? Developers. By developers, I mean programmers and artists. We simply need more. We hired another amazing artist, Ian Schlaepfer, in September and thought we could achieve everything we aimed to do. We were unfortunately wrong. While most of the assets for Early Access have been roughly finished for some time now, we still do not have a satisfying demo.
Midora was being funded through a Kickstarter campaign that amassed close to $75,000 from 3,359 backers. Unfortunately, it appears these funds were still not enough for Epic Minds to continue with development. Further down in the same post, Mhyre elaborates on the studio’s financial issues further. He writes:
Yes, Midora on Steam Early Access was our plan to get a better budget, to hire more people to work on the game. We are not bankrupt, but we know for sure we do not have enough to complete this game. We also do not have what it takes to release Midora on Steam Early Access in a satisfying state. We were in the same situation a few months ago already, but we still had hope to stabilize with Early Access and then just keep going. Continuing our work today on Midora means putting everything at risk (the team and the project) with a result impossible to predict. We feared something like that would happen, which is why we’ve been searching for solutions early to solve that problem.
While acquiring financial help from a publisher is one of the options available to Epic Minds, Mhyre states that this is not something the studio is interested in. Private investors were another option, he says, and were explored, but no deals have come through yet. As a result, development is being put on hold.
