I speak for myself and my company when I say that there isn’t much that is more difficult than
coming back on a promise. A promise, to us, is like an oath that we will not easily make unless we are very sure that we can live up to it and not disappoint those we have made the promise to.

You may recognize in your own life and ambitions that there are moments that you feel the need to
push yourself to achieve, even though the goal is really difficult to pull off. In order to push ourselves,
we have set and communicated an unrealistic goal that we will need to revisit and set right.

This goal has been setting a release date for Fragments of Him. In hindsight, the release date that we had set for ourselves (Winter 2014/2015) was rather optimistic considering the amount of unknowns we were dealing with at the time. We laughed in the face of reason and are now embarrassed for not living up to the expectation of meeting this release date.

The biggest question on your mind is probably, why is it taking so long?

There are several reasons causing this to take longer than expected and I will try to shed light on this
as best as I can.

Scope

At the time of estimating a release date for Fragments of Him, the script for the experience had
undefined elements in some of the core narrative arcs and that made it difficult, if not impossible, to
get a clear indication of when we can get Fragments of Him finished. We now know that the core of
the story that we want to tell feels whole and rigid. With that, we know the number of characters,
environments, scenes, and narrative branches we need in order to tell this story.

Fragments of Him Garage

Content

One of the biggest time sinks, by far, is that we are creating an experience with a lot of unique
elements in it that require artistic authoring to get it the way we want. An example of this is the 3D
models we need to shape the environments and characters and interactions that come with it. There
are a host of environments in the game for various scenes, throughout a range of times, with
changing seasons, portrayed by a number of characters that occasionally wear different outfits,
which are driven by a lot of motion capture data. We are undertaking this challenge with a
reasonably small team and we’re paying its price.

Technology

We are using new tools and techniques to make Fragments of Him look and behave as an experience that is unlikely to come from a small team such as ours. We can also tell you that over the past year we managed to become registered ID@Xbox and Sony developers with help from our fellow friends and developers. What this exactly means for the future we can’t say just yet, but it may give you an idea. 😉

A realistic release date

With all this uncertainty about when this project is finally ready to show to the world we have
adjusted our estimates and expectations. Our burndown chart is now telling us that we are 387,5
working days removed from finishing what we have started by following our current course.

According to the almighty interweb, there are 251 working days in 2015. Luckily, this project isn’t being made by a single person and we can distribute this labor of love over the people that help us realize our vision. That leads us to assume that we should be able to bring you the title that you may have been eagerly waiting for somewhere in 2015. We have realized that we are not that good in setting a release date based on feelings, hunches and wishful thinking. We really want to bring you that which we have promised and are hard at work to realize this.

On behalf of the team and myself I sincerely and humbly apologize for not being able to live up to our promise and we hope you still choose to support us in realizing Fragments of Him.

Yours truly,