Hi everyone,
It’s been a few months since we last connected, and the free updates for Sanctree have been on pause for a while. But since some of you have been asking about the team’s status, I thought I’d drop in and chat—just like old friends catching up.
'Guardians of the Sanctree' is my first true indie game, and now, it’s also the source of the $70,000 debt weighing on my shoulders (wry smile).
During development, I gathered a team of nine trusted friends (some of them are from my college club). Someone said a 10-person team was too risky for an indie project, but I believed that if I was going to fully realize my vision, I needed the right people—to polish every system, tweak every asset until it felt just right, no matter the time or cost.
Back then, we crammed into a tiny rented office (sharing the space with another company), takeout boxes piled in the corners, working under the glow of monitors at 2 or 3 AM, all of us convinced that if we made something great, players would notice.
On launch day, I barely slept, scrambling to fix bugs. Reality didn’t give us much breathing room, and in the end, sales were modest.
I’ll admit—the launch version fell short for many of you, especially with issues like optimization. I still feel guilty about that. The months of free updates afterward were a struggle, but I couldn’t just walk away. Not when the game still needed to be better.
After paying the team their final salaries, I had to say, “It’s time to go our separate ways.”
I know stories like this— 'game underperforms, team disbands, creator left in debt' — aren’t uncommon in the indie world. But here’s the thing: this isn’t the end for Sanctree.
These days, I’m working a day job unrelated to game dev, but after clocking out, I still dive back into the code—fixing bugs, tweaking numbers, even if my typing’s a little slower now. Sometimes, a message pops up on WeChat from our former lead programmer: “Got some free time, want me to take another look at that level logic?” or “Should we try to address that issue players mentioned in the reviews?”
For the Sanctree dev team, it’s gone from 10 to 1—but I’m lucky to still have companions on this journey.
Some might say, “You’ve got debt. Focus on paying it off. Why burn the candle at both ends?” Honestly, I don’t have a perfect answer.
Maybe it’s because Sanctree is my “first”—the first game I built entirely from my own vision, the first time a player’s comment (“This was the best demo I played during the Steam festival”) kept me awake all night, too moved to sleep.
Money matters, of course. But those little moments of 'initial intention'—that’s what keeps me going. Sanctree is like my first child. Even if it didn’t ace the test, I still want to help it stand tall, to make it something worth being proud of.
The debt will get paid. The day job won’t last forever. As long as Sanctree sits on someone’s hard drive, as long as I can still type code, there’ll be another free update someday.
If you ever spot an overworked old bird in the game, that might just be me. Its story—and mine—is only just beginning.
Thank you, truly, for being part of it.
—The Producer of Sanctree
