Atooi explains Hatch Tales’ lengthy delay and visual overhaul
Atooi launched the Kickstarter for Chicken Wiggle Workshop back in 2018, and $35k funding was secured to bring the game over to Switch. Fast-forward to 2023 and the game is yet to arrive, but we now know that the end is in sight.
Just a few days back, Atooi made an update to the renamed Hatch Tales Kickstarter to confirmed a release date for the title, March 28th, 2024. While there’s quite a bit of time between now and launch, this is the first solid release date we’ve heard for the game in years. We’ll keep fingers and toes crossed, but it does seem like Atooi is going to stick the landing this time around.
A lot has happened to Chicken Wiggle Workshop in the last 6+ years; much more than just the new Hatch Tales name. Through Kickstarter updates, it’s been revealed that the game’s visual style and character art have gotten revamped, moving things away from the cutesy designs to something with slightly more edge. Still, 6+ years is a considerable amount of time, and fans have wanted to know why the name change and art overhaul have led to such a lengthy wait.
Thanks to an interview with Nintendo Life, we now have a considerable amount of insight into what happened behind the scenes with Hatch Tales. You can see the full comments from Atooi’s Jools Watsham below.
The long and short of it is that I made many mistakes in how I handled the communication with the Kickstarter community while we were having our own internal crisis with the identity of the game. These types of development issues are common, but how to handle them when you have over 1,500 backers wanting to know what’s going on was a new and challenging experience for me.
We hit two major snags along the way. One was the emphasis of the level editor and the other was the kiddy nature of the personality of the game and the main characters. This, in turn, created a third issue with the schedule and budget, which snowballed into the need to make more games to bring in money to fund the continued development of Hatch Tales. It was a very difficult situation, and I am very happy to say we’re passed it now (phew!). We managed to solve the game’s identity crisis and get back on track to complete a game we’re very proud of.
[Atooi’s Jools Watsham]
