Jason Ely is a very busy fellow. By day, he’s a lead engineer on Star Citizen — which recently crossed the half-billion threshold in its ongoing crowdfunding efforts — and by night he tries to find time to work on Elderlands, a retro MMORPG that has been his pet project for many years now.

Unfortunately, as Jason explained in an update posted to the Elderlands Discord server back in July, Elderlands is in need of some scaling back in order to remain a viable project for him, given how all-consuming work on Star Citizen evidently is:

So you all deserve an update.

The progress on the game has been very slow. Many times, I’m unable to work on the game for days. This is primarily due to the fact that my day job is very taxing.

With my day job, I’m a lead engineer on Star Citizen. For those who know about the game, it is very large and ambitious game. I’m very busy during the week and as of late, I’m pretty burned out by the end of the day. When we have a release pending, my team and are normally on call over the weekends, which can eat into my EL development time.

I try to fit EL into my schedule as best as I can. I do have days where I’m very productive on EL and some days where I don’t have the motivation to even look at the code.

I have made many attempts to give you all an accurate schedule, but I have failed to keep up with that. We have turned the game in a direction that would greatly reduce the amount of work required to get a fun and functional game ready for you all to play. We took the game to an open world model rather than a typical theme-park game. Even with that said, the progress of the game is still slow.

We have one designer, two artists, several GMs, and a few other helpers. The bulk of the work required for the game is technology and tools. And I’m the only programmer. It has been difficult managing and organizing the social media sites, discord and patreon account. All our GMs/Mods are volunteers.

I do not think it is fair for me to continue to make delivery timeline promises. I also feel I’ve not been fair to the patrons. You deserve more. I am also considering pausing or ending the patron campaign. I’ve not been living up to my end of the agreement.

Going forward I’m not going to make a promise, or list dates unless all the work for the release is ready to be deployed.

The game is not going away. Though this will be the last MMO I make for a very long time, if ever. There are other projects I want to work on. Projects that will have a much shorter development time.

The Elderlands website was recently pared back to a very basic splash page, with a registration/download link. Previously, there had been a news section there, and its removal tracks with Jason’s description of the state of things above.

Still, it’s heartening that Elderlands is still being worked on, and that there are still plans to move it forward. But one can definitely understand the way an intense day job can cut into one’s energy and time for personal projects.