A Short Hike dev halts work on unfinished RPG, saying, “I might never finish this, so I’m releasing the demo!”

The developer behind A Short Hike has shelved development on an RPG but is releasing it as a demo, allowing players to enjoy it nonetheless.

Adam “adamgryu” Robinson-Yu started Untitled Paper RPG back in 2016, saying, “I was nostalgic for the old style of Paper Mario and thought – well, I make games, why not try making the game I want to see? I started cooking something up in Unity and… it looked cool! I thought, maybe I really could make this game.”

Now, almost 10 years later, Robinson-Yu said they felt “overwhelmed”, adding “the scope felt too big, I didn’t have a story”, doubts crept in about the turn-based combat, and “in general, started to lose the joy that I felt working on it”.

“After releasing A Short Hike and working on the subsequent updates and ports… I didn’t really want to go back to this game?” Robinson-Yu admitted. “The development for the RPG had become difficult, which was why I took a break from it in the first place. I might return to this project someday, but I’ve been working on other things and don’t see myself making time for this RPG in near future.”

Consequently, if you pop on over to the official website, you can download a demo with one to two hours of content for both PC and Mac.

“Some people still ask about this game! I figured maybe sharing the demo is better than nothing,” Robinson-Yu added, explaining why it’s been released as a demo. “There is 1-2 hours of gameplay in the current build, after all. There’s some stuff in there that I’m proud of, even if there’s also some stuff that I find embarrassing! Hope you enjoy taking a peek behind the curtain at a game partway through an aimless development.”

“Just finished a few minutes ago,” said one player in the comments. “This was a wonderful demo. I had a gut feeling you wouldn’t go back to this, but I never expected you’d actually drop a demo of what you have put together. It already has so much of the personality, humour, attention to detail and innate Nintendo-esque playfulness that defined your work on A Short Hike – and this was first!

“Thank you for taking the big leap of putting this out there!”

As for what else Robinson-Yu has planned? That includes an action aventure game, a “micro-RPG with a claymation asethetic”, and an online platforming roguelike.