This time around, we’re not ready to start working on the next episode right away. We feel that you guys deserve a detailed explanation of why we took this decision. So here we go:

For starters, as you may know, our team recently lost one of the main programmers, this mean we are no longer able to create new chapters as fast as we used to. At least, not until we expend some time optimizing our creative process to be more efficient. So we have made that our new ‘top priority’: we need time to analyze all the processes involved in the creation of a chapter, and find valid optimizations that finally enable us to achieve the ‘two month’ per episode development cycle we’ve looking after all this time.

Secondly, we’ve been running late on delivery some the things we’ve promised you guys in the past, so we time to focus on these (and try to solve what caused the delay in the first time, so that won’t happen again). In talking mostly about the ‘Hall of Fame’ which we’ll be finally updating in the upcoming weeks to reflect the contributors from the two past campaigns.

Finally, after four episodes published and a bit more than a year working in ‘The Last Door’ it feel like the right moment to make a brief pause to take reflexive decisions in terms of story, and game design and features. Going into production of a new episode right after the previous one, leaves you with only so much room for improvement. We tried our best to include new features and little design improvements with each new episode, but this time around it feels like we can achieve a so much more if only we could have some pre-production time before going deep into production of episode 5.

In summary, we’ve decided to wait until all the funds for the next chapter are collected, just like in a regular crowdfunding campaign. We estimate that, at the current donation rate, we’ll have around two months to focus on these open fronts, and we’ll be ready to start working in chapter 5 by the end of April, therefore aiming for a grand return during summer. We will be disclosing exact dates as we approach these milestones. As usually, we will be reporting every step in the way there, through the forums.

We’ll do our best to make the wait worth it, so the first episode of Season Two feel really fresh and meet all your expectations.

A note on the conclusion of the funding campaign of ‘Ancient Shadows’

You guys are amazing! We’re sincerely humbled by the amount of support we’ve been getting through this tough times! As you probably know, the funding campaign of ‘Ancient Shadows’ has been the most successful one so far, we collected the amazing sum of 13305.8 € (at the time of writing this article) which feels like a world record for us. Thank you!!

Also, we’ve been a lot of fun the last couple of weeks with the Stretch Goals. You guys managed to unlock a few of them:

– Pilot Chapter OST free for everybody: which is already available in the soundtrack section of the website.
– Download & play offline for Premiums: Episodes One and Two already there. Episode Three will be up in a couple of days.
– Server upgrade: We didn’t have the time yet to do it, but we will soon.

Unfortunately we didn’t achieved the last of stretch goals: ‘Open source the game engine and assets’ so we will save that for the next campaign, in the meantime we will figure out the best way to do it.

‘Ancient Shadows’ finally available!

Despite all the issues we endured while creating the fourth chapter, we’re proud to announce the immediate availability of the fourth chapter, ‘Ancient Shadows’. We apologize for running a little behind schedule with this last episode, but as we explained we wanted this episode to be as good, or even better, than all of its predecessors. One more time, thank to our helpful legion of beta players who flooded us with their awesome feedback and suggestions, we believed we managed to outdone ourselves once again.

Hope you guys like the result, we are really proud of how it turned out. What are you waiting for, ‘Ancient Shadows’ is now waiting for you to play!

NOTE: Soundtrack of ‘Ancient Shadows’, as well as the Spanish translation, will be available early next week.

‘The Four Witnesses’ now free to play

As in all previous occasions, with the release of the new chapter, the previous one becomes free for everybody. If you haven’t yet, you can play it now.

Also, we’ll be pushing this episode to kongregate, armorgames and all other major free flash game sites in the upcoming week.

About the mobile version of ‘The Last Door’

Some time ago, we launched episode 1 and 2 of ‘The Last Door’ in the App Store. It was an experiment: we invest just the right amount of effort to port the game to the iPad and launched it, to determine if it would work in this platform as well as the browser version does.

The experiment was not a huge success, to say the least. On one side, we hit a few technical issues that revealed that the way the game is made for the browser, is not immediately compatible with the mobile platforms, and thou further R&D would be required to decently port the game and deliver an experience as good as the one’s present in the browser version.

Despite all that, we were able to achieve some really impressing good reviews in the App Store: mostly plain 5 out of 5 stars in almost all countries, for both episodes. Woah! Definitely players using the iPad loved the game as much as the browser version. But, in the other hand, the attention the game was getting but way lower!

The browser version of Episode 1 for instance has found more than one million plays (combining the ones from thelastdoor.com, kongregate, armorgames, and other sites). The iPad version fall nowhere near this numbers, despite being a free app. Episode 2, as a paid app sold very modestly. In summary, it proved for us that the same business model we we’re using for the browser version doesn’t work for the mobile version.

We know, because many of you told us, that you guys want to play The Last Door in your mobile devices, and believe me when I say that we want you to. It just didn’t make sense, from a business perspective, to continue to do so on our own. So, to that end, we decided that we need to team up with a publisher in order to bring The Last Door to the App Store and Google Play the way you guys deserve.

For the time being, for pulled the iOS version of episode 1 and 2 out of the App Store, and we’re focusing on solving the technical issues we know of. Let’s hope we have exciting news to share with you soon, regarding the mobile version.