I will likely be a day 1 buyer on GOG, as I loved Sanitarium (and give any reasonable adventure game a try), but there isn't enough information to pay in advance. Unfortunately for new devs, I can't justify the money when they don't have massive amounts of the game already completed to help sell their product. Even for seasoned devs... we have examples of how things get out of their hands without a publisher to keep them in check. Its a very quick read and easy decision to pass on when its just a few screenshots and over a year before the expected release date.

Best of luck to devs and backers!

I don't think Kickstarter momentum is the issue. Torment raised $4m+ on April, Camelot Unchained $2m+ in May, HEX $2m+ in June, WARMACHINE: Tactics $1.5m+ just a few days ago, and many others. I don't think there's any real drop in pledges (feel free to correct me if you have real figures). Just a few more: Project Pheonix raised $440k so far in around 3 days, 7 Days to Die is ending soon and is close to $500k, Chroma Squad raised $77K so far, CANDLE $48k -- not a lot of money these last ones, but still more than Shades of Sanity is getting.

Whether a game does well depends on how attractive it is. This project just doesn't seem exciting, and I'm not sure who the target audience for it is.

We've decided to go completely DRM-FREE, in all avenues. No more wishy-washy "based on distribution method."

this werewolf game sounds pretty interesting... was it going to be the new bloodlines?

I remember looking forward to that game, reading about it in magazine previews.

http://www.unseen64.net/2008/06/30/werewolf-the-apocalypse-bad-luck-with-games/
According to this site it was finished but never released? Sure it'd look dated by now, but I would so buy this game if it were to be made available.

i backed for now, but i'll want to hear about how this game is something unique. there's plenty of survival horror first person puzzlers out there and you're gonna need to talk up the selling points to make this the next pathologic/amnesia

The werewolf game was based on the White Wolf series. It was using the Unreal engine when it first came out, and it was the first project right after Sanitarium. At the time Dreamforge didn't have a 3d trained staff, at least not for real time 3D.

I don't have a current build, the one I still have is only partially finished so some levels are nothing more than a couple of rooms. We were about 3 months from ship, but in all fairness I think the game really needed more work. There was a learning curve for the Unreal engine at the time, and it was its first generation so there were always problems. Especially since the artists went from 3D studio max where poly count was not an issue, to trying to make something look good under 300 polys.

And at the end the team was pretty beat. Last year one of the best level designers got caught robbing a bank. :(

Thanks for the support, we'll do our best with our updates. Today I refined the page to explain the story a bit better.

To follow up on an earlier question, I don't think the writings Max was looking at in the temple had any real significance other than "hey look at the ruins!" Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Oh, and to respond to making the Sanitarium Engine opened sourced:

I don't have the legal rights to do so. My old boss specifically told me not to share the code, and I have to respect that, not just because I want to keep my promise but he's also still very active in the industry. It's also the work of a bunch of other programmers, since the engine was built over the Chronomaster game engine.

It's unfortunate that Sanitarium's drivers didn't age well. Direct X works SO much differently now than is did 15 years ago. Direct draw doesn't even exist anymore, current drivers emulate it in 3D, and that's what Sanitarium tries to do now when you run it.

Someone was working on porting the game to the old SCUMM engine, but I think they stopped around 2009.

The main problem with Sanitarium running on more recent hardware is that it does not tolerate multicore processors very well. Lock it into just one core and the game plays much more reliably.

And yeah, it's unfortunate, but it's better to live up to the agreement than to get sued out of existence. Open source is better in some ways, but not if it means getting nothing at all.

Hi Rob, thanks for considering open sourcing the Sanitarium engine. Maybe at least long time preservation of the source code is possible by giving it to the Library of congress (they won't open it LoC blog/ just archiving). On the other hand, there are also examples available where source code was given to fan-communities only for archiving or patching under NDA agreements without leaking ;) e.g. Wing Commander or the Gothic 3 community patch project.

About a new build to patch/fix some of the remaining issues (e.g. hedwards mentioned multi-core issues or the several level lock bugs) in Sanitarium, maybe a DirectX9 build against a newer SDK can be considered. DirectX9 was pretty downward compatible (Sanitarium was DX5?) and is still some kind of standard (in contrast to DX10 or later which is pretty different). The directx9 SDK is still available in the web.

Nevertheless, you could decide to make the new engine open source, would not limit commercialization of the resulting game and would be strong sign to the community and a good push for your kickstarter campaign. :)

Advantages which could be advertised in the campaign: community made ports to other platforms (linux, mac, android etc) are possible and perfect "modding"/localization/translation support... ;)

That would be effectively impossible. He's presumably already seen the source code, so he couldn't be involved in creating a new engine that was compatible. Plus, doing so would be prohibitively expensive to be done in this fashion to be completed in any reasonable time period.

I can try talking to the old owners next time I see them. It would be a few since one lives in Seattle, which is the one I'd need to speak to the most. I've also heard quite a bit of rumors about the state of things with the old catalog, so it'd be worth it just to get some things straightened out.

We added another video update. This shows a "supernatural logic" puzzle.

Also did a shout out to gog.com

That was quite an intriguing setup.

Sounds good, I'm curious about the outcome. And, I'm ready to spread good news over the web. :)
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I meant in this case not a Sanitarium compatible engine, but the new "Shades of Sanity" engine (maybe i'm mistaken but I interprete the project description as "own engine"). And my point was that offering a open-source game would bring several advantages (while already being founded per kickstarter!) 1.) some extra buzz 2.) additional technical support for free by the community... porting (linux etc), fixes and translations ... as automatic modding support. :)