As you may know, we had many delays and we were struggling to find a solution to this problem. Titan was preoccupied with personal matters for months. During that time I tried to keep my chin up and work on the game. Until I kind of cracked... I couldn't work alone while waiting for something to happen.
Titan kept promising me stuff but everything kept failing so I decided to take things in my own hands. We agreed that we should have a new programmer, at least for the level design. Titan's friend never made any levels and another guy we tried to hire was a fraud and stole some money from us, without delivering anything (he has scammed others too, his account was deleted shortly after).
I spent January looking around for other promising programmers. I found 4 and we decided to try one of them. The new programmer delivered a good looking level by the next day. Still though, it was 90% complete and it would need Titan to check it and place it into the game. It looked promising and I would love to hire even more programmers to finish the game sooner. Unfortunately, Titan was busy for almost 2 weeks and the programmer, waiting on Titan, wished to move on to other things. To me that meant that no matter how many programmers we have, Titan will always be the middle man which would mean further delays.
That brings us to last week. Titan convinced the programmer to work on our game some more. And he promised me that he can finish the Beta by Monday, which was yesterday (which is something I heard over 8 times since September). Right now I have no patience left and obviously this cannot go on like this for any longer. With the walls closing around me, I made a bold proposition to Titan: in my search for programmers, I found a company who is willing to take on the entire game. I can run things my self but Titan won't be able to program the game anymore. He will of course be around as a helping hand, whenever he can and we will use the Patreon money to pay them. Titan didn't like it of course, but he realizes that we don't have any other viable options. Sacrifices need to be made for the greater good.
So me and Titan made a bet. If by the end of February he doesn't deliver the new Beta and if he doesn't change somehow his life in order to be able to work on this game in a punctual manner, then we will give the programming aspect of the game to a company. So this is up to Titan now and the clock is ticking.
Either way, these are good news for the game itself. We found a company who can finish the game and we have the Patreon money to pay them. And it's a chain reaction: if the game is good and the Beta releases are often, then hopefully, more people will support us on Patreon. Then more content it will be made and the game will keep getting better!
