We will be pausing further development on Let’Em Run Free, at least for the time being.

We had a lot of plans for where we wanted to go with this game. Unfortunately, a lot of the ideas have not turned into fun gameplay. We wanted to add variety with the various fence types, but as we added them, they were all too similar. We had a hard time making them feel different enough to justify having many. To really distinguish them we had to make changes that felt unreasonable. Yes, this is a game and we can take some liberties with reality, but there is a point where it goes too far and just feels wrong. We had also planned to have different fence posts, but they felt like adding complexity, without adding any fun. We do have some ideas of how to improve the gameplay, but it is feeling like the finished game is not going to be as good as we had hoped.

In addition to the gameplay, we’ve run into plenty of technical issues. Godot’s navigation systems are not that great. We’ve spent many days working on navigation related systems and bugs. We still have an error showing up that does not block gameplay, but occurs often. Godot’s next release is making some significant changes to the 2D navigation, which will hopefully offer improvements we can use, and is likely to be the start of further changes in the next few versions. It seems like waiting for a few new releases of Godot may help us to work through our current issues, and get a better result with much less frustration.

Finally, we have not seen much interest in this game. There are occasional views and rare plays, but overall, it does not seem there is an audience for it. We have also been getting tired of it... of course we’ve replayed the same bits so many times dealing with bugs that it wears on you. If you are interested in eventually seeing a full release of this, leave a comment. We may come back and take a fresh look at it in the future, but for now we are moving on. Our latest game jam submission, Hungry For Loot, is a project we are enjoying working on far more, and which has far less technical issues to get in the way.