The dev made a post on steam
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Hi there,
As many of you know, Sylphine has been in a frozen state for
quite
some time. Not to go into too much detail, but this game was basically a passion project that I wanted to make into a career. Unfortunately, due to bad decisions from me (like remaking the game many times for various non-compelling reasons that looking back on I can't quite understand) and a few life events, that dream didn't quite pan out. This is the TL;DR, I'll expand on this at the bottom
This in mind, I've decided to pause any future sales/visibility for the game as I'm now at a point where I'm not sure if I can continue with development of any kind in any meaningful capacity. The game will still be available to download and play in it's current state, but it will be unlisted from the store. This should take effect soon.
I'm still hoping to continue development as a hobby and do have many assets created, scripts written, and even a prototype of the games remade intro that I had finished. If I do get to a point where I can develop these into an update, they will be released freely to all current players. An announcement will be made in advance here.
Thanks for giving it a shot. I am glad to hear that the game did bring some enjoyment to some people. And I apologize again for my naivety and personal issues that caused this game to not reach its potential.
The Opposite of the TL;DR
: No excuses, just want to explain.
When I first started journey or adventure or whatever synonym, I didnt realize fully understand how much went into turning making a game into a living. I had never even programmed anything beyond Hello World when I started. I had just played similar games and was like 'Wow, this doesn't seem so hard'. Things were good at first, I was living with my in-laws at the time so it's not like I had a lot of bills. This made it okay that I spent my time on this. But once life started and I moved out on my own, things got rough. I finally realized how much things actually cost, and how hard it would be to actually 'live' off of making a game.
It didn't help that my anxiety/insecurity I've always had ended up having me remake the game like 3 times, constantly redo events, redo renders, rewrite stories, many other things. And despite many of the players telling me (rightly) to listen to my first gut instinct and stop remaking things, I didn't listen.
So development stagnated, and people were rightfully upset with me. Around this time I started realizing that I also wasn't ever really making enough to make ends meet, since before this time I was being supported by my in-laws. So I got a full time job, and development slowed further. Time passed, I had to keep working to pay bills, some medical things happened that ended up making way more bills, and now I'm just a normal person I guess, working a full-time job and trying to make a comfortable living.