Reading through the 2001-era blog posts, it looks like they ran out of time. Not necessarily money or arbitrary publisher deadlines, but the viability of the Game Boy Color as a platform with the freshly-released Game Boy Advance.
Major props to whatever lawyer or artist or whoever had to sign off to get this ROM dump to happen; it's nice to see art like this not get lost to the ether.
Time, but we were also told that RPGs don't sell very well either, nor do non-franchise games. Our mistake was not thinking to secure a publisher prior to development, though that may have affected the game direction (one publisher told us to replace the hero with a Disney character...).
Can I assume these issues meant a GBA port wasn't feasible?
(Also, as someone who spends a lot of time with fan works often considered second-fiddle to original creations, I find the idea of you being explicitly told to use an established character... frustrating.)
We considered a port, but it would have been a ton of work (half the game is written in assembly language, plus we'd need to redo assets, rework it for different screen resolution, etc) and we'd still need a publisher. We were pretty burned out by the end of it.
Very understandable. I just wanted to say that the screenshots and the gameplay videos of this game struck a chord with me. That's some beautiful sprite work. I particularly like the overworld.
Thanks, we tried to make it look as good as it could on the GBC hardware. In fact, until videos of the game were posted, some people even thought we faked the screenshots.
And now you don't just have to look at it. Go play. :)
Looking at the source code, it's actually licensed under the GPLv3 as well, so the software seems to be free, just the resources and game content aren't.
It's a shame though, since the GBA is backwards compatible with Gameboy Color. And eventually we saw PS3 owners continuing to buy new PS2 releases. Too bad nobody took a chance on releasing this.
Lots of great games didn't sell because they were non-franchise titles released at the end of their platform's life. Shantae, Drill Dozer... It sucks, but it was probably the right business decision.
Major props to whatever lawyer or artist or whoever had to sign off to get this ROM dump to happen; it's nice to see art like this not get lost to the ether.