Hey everybody!

I had to wait until things were official, but I can finally share some great news!

As many of you know, for most of its lifetime Jellyfish Games has been entirely self-funded through contract work. Since programming contracts are usually the easiest to find and most lucrative, I’ve taken on the lion’s share of that to keep the lights on.

While I enjoyed working with different teams on a bunch of fun projects, this kept pulling me away from Astrobase Command. Art and design were coming along nicely, but programming work was piling up.

Lucky for us, we had Daniel and Max on our team and they convinced us (some would say kicking and screaming) to launch a Kickstarter campaign last year. The community answered the call in a big way, handing us the development time we needed to get the game to a playable alpha. This would allow us to gather hands-on feedback from the community and start selling the game to sci-fi nerds everywhere.

We hit our alpha date as promised and started selling the game soon after. While we’ve seen steady sales since then, it isn’t at a rate that could sustain development on its own until launch, for reasons that have nothing to do with the game.

Funds started to get tight towards the end of last year and I couldn’t shake up any work from my usual contacts. So, after a few months of looking for a solution, I found one: I got a day job! I curse my alarm in the morning and curse other people in traffic in the evening, just like everyone else! Luckily, I have the soothing power of podcasts to keep me sane.

But seriously, the thought was that I could relieve financial pressure from my new family (have I show you pictures of my son yet?) and from Jellyfish during the day and still code my little heart out on evenings and weekends on Astrobase Command. Free coding hours!

If you’ve noticed a slowdown on meatier weekly builds, that’s because I set aside the scary tasks in favor of small things that have been piling up for a long time and just needed a bit of work to get out the door.

Obviously, we couldn’t work like this indefinitely, which brings me to the aforementioned great news!

The guys worked their magic once again and found us an amazing programmer to join the team right up until launch! He was jazzed to work on the game, and was open to a deal that everyone was happy with. I can’t say more about him just yet for reasons, but I’ve already seen him in action and *chef’s kiss*! Given everything we’ve done with just four people, imagine what adding a fifth will do!

We’ll share more with you over the weeks and months to come. I really look forward to upcoming versions of the game and hopefully you do too!

See you on the space lanes!

-Adam