Ortus delayed

Oof. So, I just did a bit of checking up on Ortus (the wRPG I covered last July, in development by Elvidian Entertainment), and while the news isn’t horrible, it’s not great either. It seems that Elvidian underestimated the amount of work they’d given themselves with the project, and their Kickstarter funding has run out.

I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised to learn that $21,740 is an insufficient amount of money to keep a team of 4-5 working full-time on a wRPG for more than a year. Assuming only four team members and no outside expenses whatsoever, that means each team member had $5,435 to survive on for the year 2012. (When they say they lost a writer during this period, I can only assume that that is because he literally starved to death.)

While this may all sound rather dire, I’m happy to report that Elvidian has not, in fact, gone all Manse Macabre on us. They’re going to diversify their development a bit, completing smaller projects as they proceed to keep from going broke, and working on Ortus in between. They even posted a 2-hour livestream of them working on Ortus on the Ortus Facebook page on March 7, so it seems that the game is still coming along.