Allison Road is now being published by Far From Home, a publishing label Kesler co-founded with his wife.
Revealed in the wake of publisher Konami’s high-profile cancellation of the Hideo Kojima-directed Silent Hills, Allison Road features first-person survival horror gameplay in which players must grapple with their inner demons throughout. The game elicited positive word-of-mouth buzz within the gaming community, and a Kickstarter campaign was well on its way to reaching its initial funding goal before Worms series creator Team17 stepped in with a publishing deal.
Shortly afterward, developer Lilith abruptly ended its partnership with Team17 and Allison Road was suddenly canceled. Little is known regarding the circumstances of the split beyond Lilith’s statement that it had reached “a mutual agreement to end our collaboration.”
“It did take a bit of soul searching to find the drive again to work on Allison Road and to simply make a call on what to do next,” Kesler told IGN this week. “After the setback, I took a bit of a break from working on it and re-evaluated all the work that had been done so far – the whole journey, so to speak. I started making a few (in my opinion) necessary changes to the story and the flow, little bits and pieces here and there, and before I knew it, it sort of naturally came back to life.”
Kesler plans to approach Allison Road as a solo project in order to better shape its backing narrative, though he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of hiring on extra help to finish up development.
“For our gameplay trailer, I did all the modeling, texturing, shaders, lighting, etc., and thankfully a lot of the mechanics are already implemented from the previous development phase, so I can comfortably take the game forward by myself,” Kesler said in a statement sent to IGN. “If and when it comes to a point where new features and mechanics are required, or old ones need changing, I’ll go look for support.”
