Last month we wrote about how the developers of Homesick, one of the first games we ever backed on Kickstarter, were sadly caught up in a copyright dispute over the use of music in their promotional videos. But now Lucky Pause have contacted us with some good news.
Backers of the Kickstarter project for Homesick received an update from Lucky Pause in October advising that Joy Autumn, the composer of the original music for their trailer videos, was disputing its use. The full story of what has happened can be found on the campaign page, but Creative Director Barren Meeker and Communications Director Morgan Wyenn said: “With the exception of trying to work with Joy, making this game has a been such an amazing experience. It’s sad that someone who we considered our friend would end up abandoning us, and now come back with these false claims. We love our trailer, we want it back. We had a lot of free music options available to us, but we chose our friend Joy, and now all we feel is grief.”
Fortunately we received an email from Wyenn recently and it seems as if the project is now back on track. She told us: “Thank you so much for your support during our ugly copyright dispute situation… I just wanted to let you know the good news that we prevailed in the copyright dispute, and our videos are coming back up. The Kickstarter video is already back up, and the Youtube videos should be up soon.”
If you want to see how amazing the game is shaping up to be, just take a look at the new video above. This was released last week and contains footage from the first section of the alpha. It’s obvious that a lot of effort had been put into capturing the abandoned, lonely feeling just right and the new music by Heather Schmidt suits the atmosphere perfectly; the voices you can hear during the night-time scenes sound like the ghosts of the long-forgotten building you’re exploring. There are themes of juxtaposition at work – dark versus light, peace versus fear – and we’re looking forward to seeing where these opposites take the title.
Homesick will always be a special game for me personally as it was the first Kickstarter project I ever backed. I’m therefore really pleased to see that Lucky Pause have managed to come through this copyright dispute and know that one day I’ll be able to get my hands on this fantastic title. There’s no release date just yet but it will be available first on PC and then subsequently on Mac, with Oculus Rift and controller support.
