What does the future hold?
5/10/2016
No point in dancing around the issue, I am out of money and trying to figure out what the next step is. Whatever happens, I am continuing to work on VQ, as that does not cost me anything but time. But I might need to allocate much of that time to a paying job, unless I can figure something else out.
The one thing that I have decided, for certain, is that I am returning everyone's money: Kickstarter backers, investors, patrons, and preorders (and anything else). Everyone will keep their rewards regardless. I made this decision before I even launched my Kickstarter campaign, although I've only talked about it with a few people. I am taking this step regardless of success or failure.
If I have to work another job, I will probably begin this return process as soon as possible (and it will take time to accumulate everything). Otherwise I will begin returning money when profitable. I am still planning to release something in the short term, as well as the source code.
I can understand if anybody is disappointed or angry, but I assure you no one has a heavier heart than I do. I invested over $100k of my own money, debt, and equity into this, in addition to about $500k of work (accounting for overtime and opportunity cost). I spent about a decade working in this area without any sort of return (other than it being "fun"), and over the past 3 years I put in well over 10,000 hours. I dragged my family through all of this as well. Nonetheless, if there is anything more I can do, please let me know.
This is not the end, but it is still a depressing position to be in. Still, I can't help but be grateful to have been given an opportunity to work full time on something like this.
As I have mentioned in the past, writing a game engine is a feasible (if unwise) thing to do, if you pick your battles carefully. I simply had too many battles, and too many directions I tried to tackle at once. My todo list never once shrank faster than it grew. Only at the tail end of this did I decide (for better or worse) to burn my entire set of goals and focus on one "simple" goal (although I must stress that nothing is simple).
If I sound like I have a bleak outlook, I don't. I still believe in this and I have something that I am proud of. This is the first time in my life I have worked on something of this magnitude, spanning 50k to 100k lines of code, and not wanted to scrap the entire thing. I've tackled a lot of new ground so I suppose the road is destined to be bumpy, but I continue to learn from my mistakes.
If anyone has any ideas of what I should do next, I am all ears. At the very least, I feel obligated to be transparent about my current situation. There is no outcome that I fear, I mostly just want to do what is best for everyone, even if that simply means getting a job and paying everyone back. I will probably investigate past offers I have gotten for funding, but I don't know if that will necessarily bear fruit.
One last thing I would like to make clear is that nobody owes me sympathy, and I am not even asking for it. My situation is a result of my own choices, and the only thing that I can make better is the future. All things considered, I think this journey has been great so far, and I am curious to see what the future holds.