Hey everyone! 

How have you been these last few months? My life's been going through a whole bunch of changes ever since I came back to Spain from Japan. Chief among them are that I've accidentally become a film producer; I'm attending evening classes to learn how to install solar panels; and of course… Sire Red and I worked tirelessly over these past 6 months to finish the French and Spanish translations respectively!

I would truly say that The Hayseed Knight is over at last for the time being… unless something catches fire or there's a bad enough typo that I need to come back and update it. That's why I wanted to take a moment to truly look back on it.

I wrote the first few versions of what would become The Hayseed Knight in Spanish, and only switched to English because I was so excited to show my online friends back in 2016 what I was writing. After that, I wrote exclusively in English, and had to figure out how to translate back into my own language. 

Benjamin aka Sire Red came to offer his help right as I released the very first demo ever for chapter 1, halfway through 2017. He'd been following along since I started posting on twitter, he liked the game, and he wanted to be involved, volunteering to translate the game into French.

Neither of us knew how crazy the story was going to get. Long story short, it's been 9 years, we're both much busier people, and this feels like saying bye to a life project even if I already supposedly fully released the game back in 2024! 

I'm afraid that one part of the game will remain unfinished by necessity, however: the Japanese translation will sadly remain a translation of chapters 1 and 2 as a proof of concept. I don't have the money required to continue it with a new translator and editor (somewhere about 160k words remain, and the price tag would not be any lower than 10-14k EUR at the cheapest). 

My friend Shion Kanda[shionkandava.carrd.co], who started volunteering to translate into Japanese sometime in 2019, now works as a professional translator — I look back and I can't stop thinking "wow… we were all just in our early 20s back then. We've all grown so much". When Shion first started translating, I could barely read a word in kanji. I'm now fluent in Japanese, and with that fluency comes the doubtless knowledge that I could not make justice to my game if I attempted to translate a word, haha.

Maybe one day we'll get to see the Japanese translation finished! But for now, I can only simply thank everyone who's supported the game along the way and apologize to anyone who was hoping to see the game in their own language. As always, if you ever find this post and think "translating this story is something I would love deeply" you can reach me here or on Bluesky[bsky.app].

Games have been my job for almost a whole decade now, all thanks to starting this visual novel when I first hurt my wrist after an intense career in comics. I've had great joy, I've been burned a lot, and I've had to contend with the reality that despite being enough for me since I made everything mostly on my own, at just 4500 sales worldwide currently over 6 years on steam, THK was a commercial failure. It doesn't make a difference to me in the end because it's something I made to prove to myself that I could make it, but my life isn't as simple as it once was when I had a stable job and less health issues, and money matters more than I'd like it to. 

I've tried and I've tried to go back to making games, but every time it feels like I'm forcing myself to do something that just feels draining. Rather than hurt myself making for the sake of making, I've decided to move on and work on other things until the need to make games comes back. While I spent a very long time thinking up a sequel and writing for it, I can't currently imagine the day where I'll go back to working on it… but I know in my heart where all of these characters are going, and perhaps one day I'll know exactly what I want to say again through them.

I do have other projects in store once that day comes, both set in the universe of THK and completely new! And I've also been posting lots of art and stories on Patreon [www.patreon.com]if you want to keep enjoying the characters a little more. I hope you'll look forward to my next projects as much as I do. 

Thank you always for your support. I've been Maxi, you've been wonderful.