Update #76 - "Development News and the Team at Work"

Ah  yes, Linux, a major gaming platform.

How are the odds, if Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, sells so well it can get a re-release but on more platforms? Vita excluded.

Anyone know the details on this, what is plausible if the budget is there post launch?

For anyone else interested, I did some more zooming in on the pics of those map layouts on the desks and noticed that 2 of the maps don't match up. They don't seem to be inverted versions of each other either. Two different castles maybe? If not, they could just be alternate versions of the same castle.

Cross-posting my comment from the KS here.

I doubt this will change anyone's mind, but I think all of this is important to know for those concerned, just some history for perspective on what's gone on with the game from its start and what I think led to this, with me holding back no unfortunate detail. Mike touched on/hinted at some of this earlier.

Mighty no. 9 promised Mac/Linux. It was delivered, too, eventually. They're also still "promising" 3DS and Vita, from 2013. This was a promise made by Deep Silver and Inti Creates, two companies who were one proven and one heavily speculated to an almost certainty to have been involved in Bloodstained. They may have been tied at the hip. That may be why Inti had to be removed, because Deep Silver is terrible. I'm sure most of you have seen the "masterclass" trailer, but besides that and perhaps more importantly, we saw how bad Mn9's different ports were. I consider PS4 a lead platform, and it isn't even one of the more infamous versions of Mn9, but it remains the only PS4 game to ever hard lock my system. A guy I know personally had the same thing happen to him, but multiple times. I only allowed it once - if a game forces me to cut the actual power to my system, that's a little extreme.

I believe what happened is - Inti Creates/Deep Silver were cut from the project, but the team that was left (just ArtPlay at this point, as this was before they found Dico, 505, now WF, etc) resolved to SOMEHOW keep all of these promises that turned out to almost kinda-sorta be accomplished by Mn9 (and this includes exclusive rewards/their (non)delivery). At the time of Bloodstained's conception, it was early-mid 2015 and likely planned a good bit before that, so it wasn't quite yet obvious to Bloodstained's planning phase that things were going to fail spectacularly on the Mn9 front. In its early-mid days in development, it was considered actually a pretty successful and then kinda a moderately successful thing, and then just got worse as time went on and the assets came out and poor or non-delivery of things occurred. Anyway, I digress - Iga wanted to continue to promise the world.

And I think they certainly tried, until either reality or devs or publishers or all of the above caused them to hit a wall with plausibility of some/all of these things. Some of the promises/platforms would cause one way or another a prohibitive release timing or feature problem, possibly meaning they'd need to push much later in 2019 or even past 2019 - something that their budget probably can't allow. Every passing week that Bloodstained isn't out in the world, that's more and more money to all parties involved, and more time before some can be paid at all. The value of our 5.5 million is a bit overstated and exaggerated, I imagine they went through that easily in the first two years with all the salaries/contracting involved. As we all should know from the pitch trailer, a publisher was to (and did) kick in the large majority of the budget. We were around for proof it was viable.

It didn't all turn out to be a bad deal, though. We got the best of the Mn9-y situation and almost none of its bad or bad decisions, as yet, at least to me. The best of, meaning - Inti Creates just does what they do best - make a 2D style retro game that rocks. Publishing a game on their own (i.e. the platform problems and backer codes), problems working in Unreal, being tied to Deep Silver - none of that worked out so great, but the end result is/was a great thing in CotM. The other bit that we got out of the deal of immeasurable value is Fangamer. They're nothing short of amazing and I'd argue that to the death.

So I think this is about the full story. It doesn't have to and may not help anyone, but you can bet Koji Igarashi is trying his best to keep things on track the best he can. For a while there, it was on him almost exclusively.

I'm not seeing anything about Dico in these last two updates. The images from this update are Artplay's studio.

Are Dico still working on the game?

I'm a Linux user. 200+ games in my account on Steam. Many AAA.

That being said, I'm no stranger to buying games. My Steam accounts cost alone can buy a pretty high end gaming PC.

Many Linux gamers today are like me. We only commit money to mostly native ports. The occasional proton supported port is fine.

However, going back on promises citing BS reasons is not gonna work. Somehow the middleware magically works on the BSD kernel based Nintendo Switch where the userspace environment is way more limited than Linux? I think not.

This is just them bailing out of it. Thank God I didn't back this game.

The very least they should do is offer Mac/Linux users a refund.

Putting dual booting aside which is what bootcamp is essentially, Mac users don't even have proton (regular wine does not ship FAudio) and obscure old versions of OpenGL. And Mac does not ship Vulkan openly like Linux distributions do.

It's going to be an even bigger PITA to run on Mac than to eventually get going on Linux.

Linux isn't for gaming? I can seriously frag gamers in CS:GO and TF2 just fine. Wanna bet what the guys that get fragged are running? Get off your high horses people. This isn't about what is better for running what.

This is about promises being broken to kickstarter backers. This should concern EVERYONE. Not just the Mac/Linux users. This is fast becoming a trend on kickstarter. So much so that it has begun to take a heavy toll on crowdfunding.

ovenkitty Blame Sony, they do not want VITA to represent what it stands for anymore. PS Vita should change to PS Morte. (Pun not intended for Bloodstained).

Yeah.. I know.. Perhaps in the future a fan-made port will be made. Who knows. Can't be that hard.. Just takes time and effort, something fans really have on their hands when it comes to projects they love.

ovenkitty Some things get like, super active after some years. Its strange. But yeah... I try to focus getting the game on GOG. And have it on my laptop when I have to sleep at work