My friend, we must part now but I will be with you…

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A couple of things kicked in at the end of last year that made me take the following course of action… The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge are no longer available to purchase. What this means is that the mobile versions are no longer available and the Desktop versions are available for free but unsupported.

The main driver for this is my inability to support the games. I have spoken at length about the issues caused when Marmalade pulled out of the SDK market, and my ongoing battle with bringing the games to a new platform. iOS was the first to cause me problems. LoM hasn’t worked correctly since iPhone8, however Apple don’t allow you to set which devices your games work on, so I had to add a piece of text to store description to say that it didn’t work. Up until late 2019 I would get the odd support email from people who had bought it or upgraded their phone and the game didn’t work. To the new purchasers I could easily point them at a refund, and the upgraders all I could do was offer my apologies. However iPhone8 is two years old and pretty much the base phone – which means that more and more people are upgrading and new purchases are most likely to be an incompatible phone. This situation became too much and so late last year I removed the iOS versions from sale.

Google are making more and more demands of the apps on their store. I have had to make a number of listing changes but as of yet not had any requirement to change the actual game, but it’s only a matter of time.

GoG had to remove the Mac versions from their store last year because of the 64bit support requirement of Catalina. At the same time I removed the Mac Desktop versions from the Apple App store.

My work on the replacement version has been very sporadic. I made great strides early last year while I was working away from home in Bristol, and even uploaded test versions for preview, however since taking a contract closer to home, I have had no time to do any work. I made a decision back in July that had I not released the replacement version by the Solstice, then I would stop all work on it. The reality is, that outside of my day to day work, I just don’t spend time developing any more. And the fact that the game sits their uncompleted essentially stops me from doing anything else.

The second driver is that I am making some changes to my working situation. There is no need for details here other than to say that I will be making my company ‘Chilli Hugger Software’ officially dormant for the next six to twelve months. The main issue from this is that I cannot have any income coming in to the company bank account, otherwise it’s not dormant. Therefore the games would at least need to be free.

With the combination of the two things it was just easier to remove the games from sale completely, which I did across the board late last year. Once all the games were removed from sale, I intended to put the latest versions of the Desktop games on the site for unsupported download. However when removing the games from sale through GoG.com, they requested that they be able to keep the game on their service as an unsupported free download – I didn’t have any issue with this as their site listing is really nice!

I hope that this is not an end game rather just an acceptance on my behalf that it was time for the game and me to take a break. I started working on Lords of Midnight DOS in 90/91 and I released the Windows version in ’99 the remake has been available since 2012. I am hopeful that I will come back to Midnight development in the foreseeable future – I just don’t know how or when. I thought it important to make it clear that for the foreseeable future, there isn’t going to be a updated version of the game.

The code remains on GitHub should anyone wish to get involved. The current version works on Windows and OSX desktop, but only in a window. Technically it works on iOS and Android, but the resolution support isn’t there. As always I would be happy to work in conjunction with others, as sometimes, just being a team can make the difference – and I still want to see The Citadel produced.

I must take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported me and the game over the years. It really is appreciated.

22 thoughts on “My friend, we must part now but I will be with you…”

  3. Many thanks for all the hard work and dedication over the years, totally understandable, time for a break.
    Citadel will wait and we will be here. All the Best.

  4. This is sad news, but quite understandable Chris. Best Wishes for your future endeavours! (‘toadbrain’ from the old forums, owner of your LOM and DDR versions for both PC/GOG and Android)

  5. Well Chris, I have been enjoying your work ever since I found your Doomdark’s Revenge download for Windows many years ago – you’ve brought many hours of enjoyment to me through your work, so thank-you!

  6. Thanks for your hard work Chris. It was great to see these games brought back to life and the great memories brought back. Good luck.

    Gav

  7. Pingback: Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge now free | Scent of a Gamer

  10. You have done a great job to date. I’m sure Mike would be very impressed by your efforts as all of us fans are. Thanks again Chris and we hope for a speedy return to your custodianship.

    Barry

  11. Thanks Chris for all the time you invested in supporting our memories of the best games ever.

  13. Your work has given me hundreds of hours of fun (my family don’t understand). I am sorry LoM will not be playable for a while, but understand it has been an enormous effort on your part. Thank you so much for what you’ve done.

  14. Chris,
    Thank you very much for all your hard work….I understand the route you now take….all the best for the future!!!

  16. Yes, we all (I think I can say it from behalf of everyone here) want to see the Citadel produced too, and yes, we all will be waiting patiently for this (hypothetical but very much desired) thing to come. And definitely yes, we all thank you a million times for your passion and your dedication and your honesty.

    Mike could be proud of you. Thanks again, and NOT goodbye!

  17. A very generous parting. Too many classics disappear with time. Thanks to you Lords of Midnight will not be one of them. I hope you are able to return when the time is right. Thank you.

  19. I don’t know if it’s a personal question or appropiate but, if it isn’t, I’d like to ask you, Chris, how many copies of The Lords of Midgnight and Doomdark’s Revenge did you sell overall?

    I am only asking because I’d like to have an idea of how many Spectrum nostalgic are still out there, and the number of sales would be a great way to gauge that. I follow other websites (frozenempire.net comes to mind) and the average number of visits for that site makes me thing we are rather anecdotical. Hope I am wrong!

    If you think that’s too private, you can always give us a more generic estimate (in the hundreds/thousands/better than expected/no one bought it) etc, Any informatio would be appreciated,

  21. No problem. I have always been open with my sales figures on my twitter feed.

    Anyway, roughly…
    I have rounded these figures a little to take into account the out of date nature of them. I have not done a full sales unit check since end of 2018, but I have sales value as of end of 2019.

    Total units sold over the last 7 years, at various prices points, across all platforms and both games is ~50,000. That has generated sales of ~ £100,000. This is about 60:40 split between LoM and DDR.

    Of that £100k – £50k is lost to Sales Commission (Apple/Google/etc..) and VAT.

    The remaining £50k was split 40% to me, 30% to Jure, 30% to Mike’s family.

    So over the 7 years it equates to about £230 a month which is still subject to Corporation Tax etc. If I had taken the money directly out of the company to put in my own pocket, and not considered any costs, you’d be looking at income of about £150 a month.

    For the records sales split along the lines of : Apple 46%, Android 23%, Windows 30%, Other 1%

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