During the last two weeks, we have been working hard on reorganizing the team and taking on new projects.

About Animal Liberation and Mr. Nugget

As part of the reorganization, unfortunately, we had to temporarily suspend the development of Mr. Nugget and Animal Liberation. This does not mean that the projects are canceled, only that we cannot tackle them at this time.

The main reason is that we are a very small team, with two very good 2D artists and no 3D artist. Therefore, taking on projects with 3D art at this time is not the best idea. We want to make games and release them, for which we need to reduce the friction of creating those games and focusing on our strengths is the best strategy.

For that same reason, we decided not only to stop doing 3D for the moment but also to set aside Unreal Engine because the added value we saw in it was in the 3D renderer and networking. But removing those two components from our next games, it didn't make much sense to continue using it since the development experience has quite a bit of friction.

Instead, we are doubling down on our bet with Rust, a language and ecosystem that we enjoy using: cuentitos (the narrative engine we are developing) is made in Rust, and so is 2dcl. Both projects were a pleasure to develop, thanks to Rust and Bevy.

So, what now?

We are in the process of designing a new game. This time it will be directed by Dani. We will make a more formal announcement soon, but I can reveal that it will be a game with a good narrative leg and a very interesting audiovisual proposal based on an idea that Dani worked on in the past about the Qom tales of the Black Tree.

Pablo and I have been working on some crucial modifications for cuentitos and have started implementing a basic visual novel system using Bevy and Rust. The game will not be a traditional visual novel, but we started with that because we thought it was a good starting point to later share something with the community (cuentitos + visual novel = <3).

Patreon

Hidden People Club is trying to do something different, and the path of working with publishers is becoming increasingly difficult for us. Partly because of the type of games we want to make and partly because we are not finding it easy to find a publisher who aligns with our philosophies.

We want to spend our time making games, not perfecting convincing speeches for a publisher to finance us. So, after talking to Juanma, we defined that nothing makes more sense for us than to turn to the community and ask for help to continue to exist.

If you are interested in:

• Keeping us independent and being able to make games with different visions without worrying about the economic side.
• Allowing us to not participate in practices that are harmful for your health (social media, ads, etc.)
• Seeing behind the scenes of the development of our games
• Actively participating in everything we are trying to change

Please consider becoming a member of Hidden People Club on Patreon. We will be eternally grateful!

Objectives

In the previous update post that was released on the blog, we listed a set of objectives to achieve within the next 6 weeks. These were our promises:

• We are going to release 2dcl: In the next two weeks, we will be reviewing what is missing to launch 2dcl and speaking with the Decentraland community to evaluate the future of the project.
• We are going to launch our blog: Done.
• We are going to announce a new game that aligns with our current team: We have been discussing this a bit, but we hope to be able to announce the game properly before the end of the month.
• We are going to announce an open-source project that we have been working on and that will be part of our next game: This project is cuentitos. It is not yet ready for an official announcement as we need to finish organizing some things and writing documentation, but it is already available for the daring!
• We are going to stop posting on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. (More on this soon) and focus our communication on Mastodon and our mailing list: Done. We left farewell posts on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. We created our Mastodon account and our mailing list is available.
• We are going to launch a Patreon so you can help us stay independent: Done!
• We are going to start streaming once a week parts of the development of our games and trying out cool things that other people make: We are still planning this, but the idea is to do some testing in the next few weeks. If you're interested in joining, we will announce it on Discord, our mailing list, Mastodon, and Patreon. You can choose :D