Dear supporters,
the good news first - he’s back. Starting Friday Desdraw will return full-time to the project and make it his official “job”. This means we are no longer required to look for another animator (a process that proved to be rather difficult) and we can continue with our established team.
Now with the current release having taken forever and probably containing one too many bugs for our liking Des wanted to give you full transparency on what happened - to make your own judgement and also hoping that you continue to stick with us.
When we started Des lived in a country* that didn’t really offer you much opportunities building your life let alone make a living easily, political situation was also far from good. The Lara project actually provided him the opportunity and the means to finally emigrate to a different country. So your support of our project really lead to a profound change in his life and enabled him to have more control over his own future.
Settling into a complete new environment and country is far from easy as you can imagine - dealing with new laws, taxes (having to show “steady income”), staying permits, making new friends and acquaintances, finding a place of living, setting everything up again… so early this year he had to take on a job to be able support his life in a new country and secure his immigration status.
This, as you unfortunately also experienced, had a severe impact on available time but also to our team as Des became scarcely available for some time (=us wondering if he had been abducted by aliens) and his schedule was suddenly packed with a multitude of other things. So we tried to work around this, move forward in spite of the difficulties, had some honest discussions and all that - it was overall a stressful time for all of us regarding our Lara project.
Fast forward a couple of months - now Des has managed to get everything settled, structured and the immigration office surprisingly didn’t really care about the job (bureaucracy at its finest) but just extended his permit by two years after the latest review. Hence he is now in the situation that he can return full time to the project so we can follow our initial vision without making any compromises that shaking up the team might have brought to the table.
We know we have much make up for but we will try make good on our promises by delivering quality and content in reasonable time again.
Thank you all from the entire PixDES team.
(*Note: Country names left out on purpose for privacy reasons)