It's been about a year and a half since we put out our big 2023 status report video, and I'm sorry to say that not much has changed for TLT. Aside from giving everyone a candid update on how things were (or weren't) going with the project, we also thought the status report would be a good way to measure community interest. Across YouTube, the Dev Blog, Xwitter, and the MMLS Forums, only 16 people responded. As much as we appreciated those comments, it wasn't exactly an encouraging turnout. Numbers aside, we floated some pretty drastic ideas in that video (changing our lead character, reverting to 2D, or trading the whole concept in to instead make Mega Man Legends 3), yet only a handful of comments had anything to say about those drastic possibilities, indicating to us that what little audience TLT does still have, is not particularly passionate about the project wherever it may go.

Regardless of our discouraging findings, Blyka and I did have some deep discussions about the project after that, but before any of our brainstorming could solidify into a plan, the literal foundations of the project--the Unity software used to make TLT--crumbled beneath us. In a nutshell, for those who didn't hear about it at the time, the creators of Unity tried to push some seriously underhanded terms of service changes upon its users. They have since relented, but broken trust of that magnitude is not easily restored.



The commercial project Blyka and I had been working on (much of which we'd hope to reuse in TLT) was stopped dead in its tracks. Like many other devs, we looked immediately into other game engine options. Nothing seemed quite the right fit for our needs, but more importantly, having to abandon 11 years of Unity experience and start fresh on something new was a hurdle we weren't ready to jump. And as life would have it, circumstances outside of game development have done a remarkable job ever since of throwing one thing after another at us, keeping us too occupied to even consider rebooting our dev efforts even if we decide we want to... If in the end we choose not to continue making commercial games, then that's naturally going to have quite a negative impact on TLT.

It's been suggested that we put the project on GitHub, or allow others to take the assets and reboot the project themselves. Maybe this is inevitably where TLT is heading, but with so much about our lives currently up in the air, it doesn't feel like the time to make that call. Sorry if that seems wishy-washy after so long, but that's where things stand.