As I've noted many times in my Kickstarter articles, the crowd-funding of games doesn't always go smoothly. Some games even fail to reach target even with well known names attached, and one such game was the spiritual successor to Giants: Citizen Kabuto - First Wonder. Now the developers having exhausted other funding options have decided to shelf the project for the time.
An e-mail sent to backers of the failed Kickstarter has been posted to Reddit and in it the developer details the journey since the failure of their campaign.
"After the kickstarter failed we looked for other opportunities and partnerships to keep the development going. While your donations helped we were still self-funding 95% of the project directly out of pocket. The amount of investment needed to get the game to the next stage was too large for us to handle by ourselves. We had some interesting conversations but regardless of how excited some were for the project it came down to numbers and risk. For publishers, the kickstarter showed we just didn’t have or couldn’t find the audience."
So for now the developer Rogue Rocket is going dormant while the team seek out work and focus on "other projects and jobs". On the subject of donations towards the game the devs say it's important that they sort out that, either through refunds or in the form of keys for the First Wonder demo or Gunpowder which was their previous release - if you've made a donation you can choose which option you'd prefer.
"I'm still very passionate about making games like these" the email concludes. "I always will be. They are unique and therefore rather hard to sell but once we get a foot hold I think they’ll be here to stay. I remain undeterred but it’s clearly been too many years since Giants and MDK and If I want to build games like First Wonder then I have to start off much smaller, simpler and grow a new audience. I have such a game in mind."
So, it seems that despite setback First Wonder might even one day become a thing. It's nice to see small developers not giving up on something they love.