I suppose you could quibble here about whether it counts as unreleased, or - as a visual novel - whether it's a game to begin with, but my favorite (and ongoing!) Kickstarter Clusterfuck is the "official" English version of Sharin no Kuni: The Girl Among the Sunflowers, which first went live on Kickstarter in late 2016.
Sharin no Kuni was not a new game; it's a fairly well-respected classic, first released in 2005 by AKABEiSOFT2. It's not an untranslatable game; there's been a full (albeit unofficial) English translation available since 2010. Neither the original developers nor the would-be overseas publisher were new to the English market; by the time the Kickstarter project started, AKABEiSOFT2's G-Senjou no Maou/The Devil on G-String had been available on Steam for a year, and Frontwing had published two of their popular Grisaia games as well as some side-stories. The engine, while known to be finicky, was not impossible to work with; the aforementioned G-senjou no Maou and multiple other visual novels from other publishers used the same Kirikiri engine. In short, this seemed like a complete slam-dunk of a project, with the Kickstarter's 'Risks' notes going so far as to say "Unless some catastrophic, unforeseen or natural disaster occurs, we guarantee delivery of the final product."
The Kickstarter wrapped up at the end of 2016, with planned ship dates for digital and physical goods set for August and October of 2017, respectively. And yet - in March of 2023! - none of that has been delivered. Not just the physical goods, and certainly not the planned Vita release; even the basic digital PC release has yet to materialize.
So what went wrong? Well, a lot of things. To start with, even though the project mentioned using the fan translation with permission, it turned out they still planned on having a new translation done anyways - one that wasn't completed until October of 2017, past the planned ship date. And if you expected engine work to be done concurrently - say, working on an early build with the old script to make sure it functions as intended in English, on modern operating systems, at the planned resolutions, etc., and working on inserting the new script as it became finalized - you'd be wrong! Despite other publishers putting out Kirikiri-based games with few or no issues in English, and despite AKABEiSOFT2 doing their own 2018 re-release of the game for modern systems (albeit without English support and at the original 800x600 resolution), engine issues and unforeseen bugs needing at least 1-3 months to work out plagued the project pretty much continuously, except for the part where the PC build was backseated entirely in a desperate rush to get the Vita build put together and published before Sony cut off publishing for the Vita altogether (spoiler: it didn't get published). This trend continued until sometime in 2021, when Frontwing insisted the game was done for real this time, and DVDs had been pressed... only, oops, there's more bugs that somehow we missed, we're delaying the game while we investigate, we'll have to reprint the DVDs, and no, you can't see what the near-final build looks like. The final official update in December 2021 - five years after backers were charged - really went above and beyond, claiming that they were scrapping the current build and moving to a new toolset, if not an entirely new engine, a process that they estimated would take six months. Despite promising an update 'after the new year', no official update has been made in the 15 months since; Frontwing has claimed twice in the comments that they're preparing an update and need a little more time, although no such update has materialized.
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Bump!
Some interesting reading here. I knew about a couple, but learned about a quite a few here. Always sad to see such promising projects vanish into thin air.
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I think I just found what I'm gonna do with the rest of my day, thanks for that link.
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So... Didn't the team behind The Mandate essentially scam their investors by running off? 🤨
Veteran team of developers [ex-EA, ex-2K Games, ex-Ubisoft, ex-Funcom]
Quite the names 😬
"It took $8,000 from me. A job offer from Telltale, an offer from Hi-Rez, it cost me my relationship, it took 4 years from my career. (...) They suffered no repercussions. Matus and Matsuko are still in business and they got away Scott-free without a single fuck for the people they took advantage of or the fact that they damaged the lives of so manv devs."
Quote from an artist working on the project 🫣
"The Mandate raised (took!) $700K and just vanished."
From one of the comments.
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Oh, I wasn't aware of that account - thanks for linking it. It's a good reminder of the human cost which can be involved in these situations.
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Bump for interesting games. Really sad for Divinity, Original sin games are one of my favorite ones, really good and fun coop! They taught me that turn based games are great!
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Real shame about the new Tex. I have really enjoyed Tesla Effect, which was an introduction to the series for me too. ;)
After that I have bought the older games from the series, so I should play them at least. :)
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What a fun way to get to a train! unless you really hated school
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I loved the Tex Murphy games played through them several times. I also knew about them long before the Tesla Effect came out. Didn't know about a potential knew game, now I'm sad :(
One of the cancelled projects I was most hyped about was StarCraft: Ghost.
Another one which technically wasn't cancelled but has been in development hell for more than 10 years SpaceVenture with a lot of problems. Apparently they released a buggy mess as a finished version a few months back. From the makers of the Space Quest series.
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Damn, Odd Gods looks like something I'd like a lot.
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Welcome to my third train (seems it's been quite a few years since one and two).
The theme for this one is interesting games which were never released. I try to keep track of games which attract my attention in previews, and these are some which sadly never eventuated.
The train will run for 14 days and is protected by a quiz, with answers coming from the summaries below (the links are just for citations/further info if you're curious). To save you wasting time (but feel free to read nonetheless!), the train contains the following games:
Paradise Lost (excludes RU/BY)
Just Die Already
Immortal Redneck
Black the Fall
Tempest: Pirate Action RPG
Guns of Icarus Online
Snake Pass
Aaero
Paradigm
And now, the games...
The Mandate
Kickstarted with over $700,000 in 2013, The Mandate was to be a sci-fi RPG where you act as a ship captain, managing your crew, exploring space and resolving disputes between factions. It's the Star Trek sim I always wanted!
Unfortunately, the release date in Q1 2016 slipped by, and updates ceased in 2017. The company - and presumably Kickstarter money - are now long gone.
Northen Shadow
A first-person sandbox RPG with city-building, Northen Shadow was greenlit on Steam in 2014. The solo dev abandoned the project in 2016, indicating that it had changed far beyond the original vision.
Runemaster
This procedurally generated RPG based on Norse mythology was announced by Paradox in January 2014, only to be paused - apparently permanently - in December of that same year.
Divinity: Fallen Heroes
Probably the biggest name of the games here, this was meant to be a sequel to Original Sin 2, but more focused on tactical combat. It was originally to be released in late 2019, but was put on hold and does not seem to have progressed since.
Tex Murphy: The Poisoned Pawn
I came to the Tex Murphy series late, via Tesla Effect, but enjoyed it enough to be interested in the news that another game was on the way, with trailers released in 2017. Unfortunately, creative differences led to it falling through in 2021 - while it was ultimately released, it was as a novel rather than a game.
Odd Gods
An Australian-made low-fantasy CRPG with time travel, featuring an alignment system based on music genres (!), Odd Gods received attention back in 2017. Developmet dragged on for years before news on its official page finally dried up in mid-2021.
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