We reported earlier this week on concerns amongst backers of dinosaur survival game The Stomping Land, who hadn’t heard from creator Alex Fundora for over a month, despite the developer promising weekly updates.
Some possible good news here - Fundora has been in contact with Kotaku, and claims the reason for the lack of communication is that he’s been busy porting the game over to the Unreal Engine 4.
Here’s Fundora’s full response:
“It has been quiet in The Stomping Land community but that is certainly not the case behind the scenes! The game is being moved to Unreal Engine 4 to take advantage of technical and creative opportunities, and while the game was so early in development, I didn’t want to keep working for years with a game engine (UDK) that had officially lost support by Epic.”
”The move has put a bit of more work on my plate, but the already discovered opportunities using UE4 are exciting, and I’m confident fans will be satisfied with the long-run decision.”
Which is… okay, but if you’re going to go off the radar this long then you should really let your fans now what’s going on. Especially as many of them have already given you their money to run this project. I want to give Fundora the benefit of the doubt here, because he’s clearly got some big, ambitious plans for The Stomping Land, but he urgently needs to get back amongst the community and start reassuring people.
If that’s not something he’s comfortable with, he could definitely do with a new PR guy (the previous contractor, Lee Fisk, left last month) to keep up those lines of communication with his backers open.
We’ll keep an eye out for any further developments.