Some of you wondered why there was no Blanksword Newsletter last week - well! There was something else announced that caused a little bit of a stir in the indie world.

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What was that again?

Silksong is an indie video game made by Team Cherry. It is the successor to the incredibly popular metroidvania Hollow Knight. Silksong has been in development for the last half-decade, to great anticipation from its fanbase, and it suddenly announced its release date for September 4th of this year. So, next week.

If you're familiar with Indie Games and Hollow Knight, you know how big of a deal this is. If you're not, let me paint you a picture: you're a small-time indie film-maker working on your first big project. It's years in the work, and your movie's performance in theaters will determine your entire career from that point onwards. It's scheduled to release next month. One morning, you wake up to the news that Christopher Nolan just announced Batman 4 with Christian Bale reprising his extremely popular role, and it's airing in a couple weeks.
Comparisons are hard to make between two industries so different as games and movies, but you get the idea: Silksong's release date announcement was a tremendous shockwave that sent all of us Indie developers (and many larger industry studios too) flat on our asses, in no small part because of how *close* the release date is.

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And what now?

Well - the release date was not THAT close. Team Cherry isn't heartless, and they've been in the Indie world for many years - they had the courtesy to announce Silksong with enough leeway that all of us could, if we wanted to, reschedule our plans. And many, many devs did just that. You might've heard of the likes of Demonschool getting set back, for example.

For Blanksword, this lead into a tricky dilemma: we had big plans for September. Big plans. In fact, this Newsletter normally was about everything we were going to do next month, it was going to be wonderful and exciting and you'd all have the concrete info about our Kickstarter that we've been dangling over your heads for a while now.

We thought about it feverishly in the days following the announcement. Silksong is the biggest event in Indie Games this year (arguably over even Deltarune - yes, it's that big a deal!) - can we really afford to put our Kickstarter in competition with them? Should we move things back to another month? Maybe even wait until next year? But then, there's budget considerations that we have to take in mind: every month spent in development is a month where work has to be paid for.

Eventually, we decided that we're going to soldier on. We'll move our schedule one week and that's it, to give Silksong enough breathing room. As an aside, I'd like to stress that I don't have any sour feelings towards Silksong. I think it's wonderful that Team Cherry's devs can take their time to make the game of their dreams and aren't constrained into a cold, calculated schedule engineered to maximize profit over passion. Personally, I'm still really excited to play it as a long-time fan of the first installment!

All of this means that the next newsletter will be the big one: the one where we tell you all about our Kickstarter Plans and make some other very significant announcements about Blanksword's future and perhaps, even, your future in Blanksword :]

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Stay tuned and don't forget to hydrate,

Leaf

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