How to sprint through difficult terrain
Dear friends and backers of YARPS!
For me, the beauty of tabletop roleplaying games is that every decision can in fact form and influence the world. As players we can choose from an infinite number of paths through our adventures and every single one can lead to a different outcome. Often our characters are faced with more opportunities than responsibilities – that’s what makes us feel like mighty heroes and courageous adventures. Of course we tend to skip the boring everyday parts of our characters’ lives. Why do I care what my character does while there is no necromancer to stop, no bomb to diffuse and no cursed artifact to purify? Just give me the good part, the exciting scenes. We decide to not roleplay the parts where hunters sell animal hides, bards entertain peasants and healers cure sick people – not as part of a noble quest, but as a way to earn money. While some groups may summarize these events or let the dice decide how they turn out, I bet nobody plays every dreadfully mundane detail of his characters life. And why would they? Roleplaying is about having fun within vivid worlds and exciting stories.
Real life adventure groups, like the YARPS development team, can not choose this skip option. Or at least we can’t yet. There might – finally – be a way around this! While we can’t share too many details at this point, we wanted to tell you about the potential of this opportunity, because we are very excited about it.
Where do we stand?
If you are on a journey and you are unable to skip the tedious parts (because it’s not a roleplaying session) it can feel like an odyssey. It doesn’t even need a new crisis to slow down your travels. There are times where we can’t proceed with our YARPS adventure because we need to work on a client project. We’ve been calling this our “core business” in previous announcements – unfortunately this is not a matter of prioritizing. We need to juggle these projects on the side (and sometimes with all our focus), in order to feed our group of adventurers. Like the Witcher needs someone to toss him a coin so he can eat before slaying some more monsters. Or put more worldly: these client projects pay the bills of running our software company, that is the foundation for the YARPS development. The more ways to support YARPS directly we find the less client projects are necessary. The federal funding from the IGP program, for example, enabled us to make big steps with our data structure, the UI/UX redesign and the new screens we presented in the last announcement. But there’s still a lot to do, that we need to finance with client projects once again. This core business can be a challenging and time consuming task, which isn’t exactly made easier by the continuous world crisis mode over the last years.
If we could, we’d always skip this to work on our passion project – but at this point it is a necessity. One that makes it impossible for us to commit on a release date or a fixed roadmap. We dislike this as much as you do. That’s why we’ve always pushed for a possibility to change this dynamic; why we talked to all kinds of potential partners from publishing houses at the Frankfurter Buchmesse over content creators to game studios.
What could change?
One of these conversations developed into the big chance that is presenting itself to us right now. At the moment we’re in negotiations with a potential partner who’d enable us to shift our focus, prioritize YARPS and make it our core business. This would mean no more juggling on the marketplace for a few coins, no more performing songs in the tavern to earn a place to sleep for the night. Instead we could afford to do what we always wished was possible: develop YARPS full time. Working on our passion project without having to worry about a side business – a side business that actually needs to be the size of a main business but takes much less time to make this whole plan work properly.
We can’t reveal details of the ongoing negotiations or about our potential partner itself, because there are NDAs involved. Nevertheless we wanted to share the potential with you. The cooperation wouldn’t change our strategic plans. YARPS wouldn’t have to lose any of the features or the focus we anticipated in the past. The main difference is that we’d be able to finally invest all of our time in the project, so that we could finally speed up the development of the project without losing the potential that lies within it’s complexity… building something agnostic always sounds way less complicated than it turns out. This is something that has been cooking for a while now. And we are very excited for this opportunity, but we were hoping to announce this once it’s a done deal. While waiting for the chance to deliver groundbreaking news to you, we underestimated the time these kind of negotiations can take. This – together with some unskippable core business stuff – is why you haven’t heard from us for too long.
We hope this announcement could deliver you some insights why we aren’t ready to drop more essential news yet. If the negotiations go well – fingers crossed! – we’ll let you know about the cooperation and what it means for YARPS. Until then we won’t be able to commit on a release date or a fixed road map. Because we still need to rely on juggling projects that enable us to continue this adventure, as mundane and tedious as it may sound.
All the best,
on behalf of the YARPS team,
Chris