November 21

Notorious Games is proud to announce the launch of a Kickstarter fund raiser to bring Xsyon out of the Prelude and into the future with a full featured release of Xsyon: Apocalypse!

Please visit our Kickstarter Project Page for full details.

When Xsyon's development began, nearly five years ago, I knew it would be a monumental endeavor. With a small team and a very limited budget everything needed to fall into place perfectly to launch the Prelude to Xsyon, our current installment, with a full set of planned features but in a limited, simplified state.

The Prelude was intended as a simplified pre release version of the game which would evolve with its community as we add features and improve the game based on player feedback.

Xsyon's development began in 2008. In 2010, Xsyon was opened to the public as a pre-release. In March 2011 The Prelude was launched. Since then we've added many features and improvements, but have not yet launched the full 'gold' release of Xsyon. While reaching our current stage in less than 5 years is no small feat for a tiny development team often with just 1 or 2 full time programmers including myself, our goals are ambitious and development has been slower than desired.

A multitude of unanticipated obstacles came our way - programmers moving on to other jobs at inopportune times, losing funds due to the stock market crash, team members experiencing disabling health problems, server instability and dealing with hackers and contentious players. The biggest issue has been a lack of funding to deal with setbacks efficiently.

We found out early that players desired existing features to be fleshed out more than they longed for new features. Some Prelude game features, such as terraforming, architecture and tribal systems were developed much further than originally planned at this stage. Unplanned features such as carts, permissions system, creature migration and undead haunting were added. Other features, such as pets and mounts, had to be put aside for the future.

Development took on a different and slower path.

We are now taking Xsyon in a new direction.

Today we launched a Kickstarter crowd sourcing project to raise funds so that we can develop Xsyon at a much faster pace and without distractions. We are planning on a year of further development to take Xsyon out of the Prelude phase and launch the first full feature release Xsyon: Apocalypse.

So join us on Kickstarter! Together we can make it happen!