Novidades de Marsmare: Alienation

Não costumamos deixar comunicados do Kickstarter, mas pelo carinho que temos por este jogo, e também porque o seu autor é completamente transparente e honesto sobre o seu desenvolvimento, vamos deixá-lo na íntegra.

Deixamos a nota que já tivemos oportunidade de experimentar a versão para o Next, mesmo sendo alpha, e parece-nos bastante fiel à versão para o 48K. Esperemos que Drunk Fly tenha energia para vir a completar a versão final para o Next, mas também a versão 128K, no fundo a que mais nos interessa. A versão para Steam já tinha sido entregue em 2024 (ver aqui).

Segue-se o comunicado.

The future of Marsmare 

Dear people of Earth,

These have been difficult times for our team. And, to be completely honest, there isn't really a team anymore — just one slightly dysfunctional member left trying to sort all this shit out.

But let's start with some good news.

The good news

Although the project has been in a mostly half-dead state for quite some time, some work has still been happening behind the scenes. The hope was to have a Marsmare build ready around the arrival of the KS3 machines and, perhaps, revive this otherwise dead zombie once again.

Since the project has been reported and Kickstarter has forcefully requested an update, you will shortly receive access to an EARLY ALPHA build of the ZX Spectrum Next edition of the game.

Please keep in mind that this is very much an ALPHA release. The build is not finished yet, and under normal circumstances I would not recommend trying it in its current state. It is still missing some features from the 128K version and contains known BUGS, GLITCHES, AND CRASHES.

That said, the game is generally playable (at least in CSpect), and I assume some of you would rather have the opportunity to try the current build now than wait for something more polished.

Once I manage to fix the remaining issues and get my hands on an actual KS3 machine to properly test the game on the new hardware, I also intend to release the complete source code of the game. The source code is, frankly, quite a mess. But I still believe the community may find it useful, interesting, educational — or perhaps even turn it into something new.

 And now for the bad news

I think it is fairly obvious by now that this project is unlikely to reach the destination we originally imagined for it.

The world is not the same place it was when we started this project in 2021. For a long time we hoped that circumstances would improve and that eventually we would be able to continue more or less according to the original plan.

At this point, it is difficult to pretend that this is likely to happen.

Most of the team has moved on with their lives, and with no clear end to the war in sight, while sanctions and logistical restrictions continue to make cross-border production and shipping increasingly difficult, I currently see no realistic way to complete the physical release as originally planned in the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, we were also a little too efficient at exactly the wrong moment: the physical boxes and figures had already been produced in Russia before the war began in 2022.

They still exist. They are still there. They are sitting at a friend's place.

Getting them from there to everyone who backed the project is a rather different problem.

I am still looking for possible solutions, but I do not want to create false expectations. At the moment, there are very few realistic options available.

For backers living in countries where receiving parcels with cardboard and plastic from Russia is still realistically possible, we may be able to arrange preparation and shipping of the box and figure individually. If this applies to you and you are interested, please contact me separately.

Thank you again to everyone who has stayed with this project for all these years.

I wish you all the very best. Stay safe.

P.S. About reporting the project

I also want to address one thing directly.

Reporting the project to Kickstarter is unlikely to make development move any faster.

At this point, work on Marsmare is driven almost entirely by the personal motivation of the one remaining person still working on it. There is no functioning team and no commercial incentive behind continuing the project.

Kickstarter can, of course, take action against the campaign, including potentially marking or terminating it. But that would not create additional resources, restore the original team, solve the logistics problem, or somehow make the physical rewards appear.

In practice, it could simply bring the project to a definitive end.

If that is genuinely what the community wants, then naturally that is something I have to accept. But if the goal is still to see Marsmare completed in whatever form remains possible, pressure from Kickstarter itself does not solve the problems the project is currently facing.

What would genuinely help is practical assistance.

If anyone has relevant experience, contacts, logistical options, or a realistic way to help complete the physical release under the current circumstances, I would be extremely grateful to hear from you.

This project has no financial upside left. It has long since become a loss. Sanctions, inflation, production costs, and logistics mean that finishing it now requires putting substantially more money into the project than was ever originally budgeted.

The only reason Marsmare has continued to move forward at all — however slowly — is that I personally still want to finish it somehow.