TIME FOR THE TRUTH

We will be bluntly honest.

There was a sale planned in the Fall of this year for the SHMUP Fest, however due to recent turn of events regarding Evil Epic Games, that will not be happening anymore as the game is now free to play – that and we honestly had no more faith that players were willing to buy the game. The purchase of this game is no longer as important as our primary objective to provide an intuitive reason that will convince you to care enough to give this game a chance by playing it and inspiring others to play it with you. All we truly want is to see servers with many players playing the game (preferably in the hundreds).

• if we can at least 50 concurrent players, then we can consider this game a minimal success.
• 100 players is a minor success.
• 500 players is a moderate success.
• 1K players is a major success.
• 2K+ players is a phenomenal accomplishment and a dream come true.

While we still intend on releasing mod tools for the game, the only thing we can focus on without your support is the just level editor, before discontinuing post-support for the game, writing it off as a colossal failure, and moving on to other projects. In order for us to go further with more tools such as:

• Ability to create new monsters, items, or weapons, import music.
• Customize the game’s UI theme – color schemes, new fonts, change BGM.
• Upload/download UGC (user-generated content) via Mod IO.

We truly need YOUR support to ensure that happens. We need to see that enough players truly care for this game and our vision. Far as we are concerned, there are practically crickets playing our game – practically, as in just 1 or 2 players (that may likely have been our playtesters) chime in on their own volition to play the game once in a blue moon. We know Qorena is not the best game in the world, nothing compared to the likes of BattleBit Remastered, Teardown, Door Kickers, or even the top-down Battle Royale IO games, but we do try our best to make this top-down bullet-hell game fun, enjoyable, and worthwhile. Since the original launch in 2018 as Maze Qore Arena, much has changed tremendously under the new title Qorena.

For starters, we introduced upgrades and powerful weapon levels, making the weapons like the assault rifle and machine gun turn from standard-fare to powerful gatling blasters; rocket launcher turns into a missile barrage cannon; sniper rifle can penetrate through walls, and the flamethrower is augmented with minerals harvested from the Warp, to become the Voidthrower.

Enemies now have dialog and music plays in an event-based fashion. Each survival level has their own unique preset of enemies that spawn. For instance, prison arena levels feature special enemies from Maze Qore prison (save for the Yellow Sector spawning exclusively hornets, and Red Sector spawning predominantly Psykers and their possessed victims), whereas outdoor levels feature enemies working for the Imperium – an evil tyrannical government set on imperializing and conquering the entire planet of Asterisk.

What more can we honestly do with this game without transforming it too far beyond its original design and goals (again)? Call it an identity crisis if you wish, however it is a problem we have been trying to resolve for roughly 5 years – seemingly to no avail, and still are trying. We hired playtesters to play our game, find bugs and glitches, and help us improve the game to be fun and more available for anyone willing to play it for at least an hour, not 9 minutes at best. We tried to seek funding and marketing support for this game as well – to no avail.

We have honestly ran out of ideas, so Version 0.9.X will very likely be our final update milestone for the game. We no longer have any motivation to complete the game enough to leave the Beta stage by reaching Version 1.0. Until a miracle is made, there is no point wasting anymore of our time if our audience simply does not exist outside of ‘personal associates’. In fact, we’re probably talking to ghosts here at this point.

To anyone that did read this far into this post, thank you for paying attention I guess…