Apologies to all our players

Update July 3rd, 2009: The full, sponsored version of the game is now both up on gamesgames.com and this very site. Go! Play! Enjoy!

Strange things have been afoot with The Pretender. We didn’t actually expect to become a finalist in the 2BeeGames Indie Game competition but somehow we did. Not realising that the finalists were now open to The Whole Internet, we went ahead and updated the game on the contest site to the latest version.

Now, when you’re looking for sponsorship for a Flash game, it’s very important that you’re able to offer your sponsor a period of exclusivity. That means not getting the game plastered all over the internet beforehand, right?

Well, we didn’t count on getting a really rather good review from jayisgames.com, arguably the biggest Flash and casual games review site on the net. That, er, increased our exposure level quite a lot. Not a good thing in the eyes of our potential sponsors, and indeed, one of our ‘potentials’ pulled out immediately. (But don’t get me wrong: a great review on JayIsGames? That’s got to be one of the highlights of my developer life!)

References to the game then started to appear on other sites as well. I tell you, it’s a strange position to be put in: our game is receiving (mostly) glowing reviews, but we really needed to put the genie back in the bottle! Which is very-difficult-to-impossible, of course.

We want to keep the momentum of the game going, but we also want our sponsor to feel like they’re getting some sort of value for their money (in the form of an exclusivity period). So, we’ve made a very tough decision. The version of the game on the competition site is now a demo version, with the Medium and Hard levels temporarily removed.

I want to take this opportunity to again apologise to players who are halfway through the game and have suddenly lost access to the more challenging levels. We’re very, very sorry to disappoint, believe me. But I want to stress that it’s only temporary! All levels will be reinstated once we’ve finalised our sponsorship deal.

And we do have to make sure our sponsorship deal survives. Creating The Pretender didn’t come for free: we have a bunch of costs to cover, and further development to fund. Tristan and I would love to go full-time in this game development business (we love it!) but there’s no way that’s going to happen unless we’re able to at least recoup our expenses incurred in creating our games.

Thank you for your understanding, and know that the full version of The Pretender will be reinstated just as soon as we can (we’re hoping for within a week, or two at the outside).

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