There were a few fans that have been following Home Free that thought this game went into development hell and stayed there, but it appears that this pup is still alive and kickin’.
For those of you that don’t know, last year developer Kevin “potatojin” Cancienne posted his dog survival simulator called Home Free onto Steam Greenlight, and dog lovers from around the world flocked to support the game as he went on to have a successful Kickstarter campaign with more than 4,000 backers that pledged close to $100,000 USD to bring the game to life.
The game follows a lost dog in a large randomly generated open world city, after his owner abandons him and leaves the poor pup on the street. It is your job to take control of the dog to survive at all costs. The coolest part was that the developer also says that the game is an action RPG, so your little dog will grow and develop over time as you steal food and fight off rival dogs.
Everything was going well, there were constant updates, a few new screenshots, news about development… and then everything just kind of slowed down and came to a crawl.
I was following the project closely, but regular news wasn’t flowing like it used to and this made fans and backers concerned because they paid money for a game and the developer slowly vanished. This especially worried backers for the fact that the release date was originally scheduled for a 4th quarter 2016 launch, and we still only have the original game Trailer from September 30th 2015, which is now literally a year old.
https://youtu.be/YTRhbVa4tXQ
Although there hasn’t been any new gameplay or teaser trailers, he has come back to Kickstarter to update players on the status of the game. On September 30th, one of his backers asked if he had any status updates, and the developer replied on October 8th that he would be posting something new in the next few days.
“@ Elizabeth: Soon! Lots of crazy personal stuff lately, but I hope to update you all in a couple of days.”
And that he did. On his Vine account (which he also shared on Twitter) Mr. Cancienne shared two videos showing a few glitches he’s been trying to squash before release.
https://twitter.com/potatojin/status/788889940490915840
https://twitter.com/potatojin/status/785706581648375808
I’m really digging the Jet Set Radio style graphics the game has. However, this begs the question if the game is still scheduled for a 4th quarter 2016 release?
He has posted a few updates on Kickstarter, but since I’m not a backer I can’t read the comments or see what the actual contents of the updates say. One of the latest updates does have 17 comments and 69 likes, so I’m going to assume it was something positive and the game is still being worked on. A few of the backers have made some comments, so it gives us a pretty good idea about what is going on behind the scenes.
So it sounds like the game had a few bugs and kinks, and instead of releasing a broken game the developer wants to take his time to deliver what he promised. Since he says he’ll be sharing more updates soon I’ll keep an eye out for any new screenshots or trailers that might be released within the next few months, as well as any news about the official release date.
Fans speculate a November 2016 release date based on the information on the Kickstarter page, but he might delay it to a Spring or Summer 2017 release date to give him more time to iron out the bugs.
If you would like to learn more you can check out the Steam Greenlight page for more information and to follow the project.
