The recently opened kickstarter for open world pixel art RPG Hero’s Song was shut down yesterday after John Smedley, the founder and CEO of Pixelmage Games, decided it would not meet its funding goal. Instead, Smedley and his crew have opted to use funds from private investors. The latest post in its update blog explains it further:

After looking at our funding levels and the reality that we aren’t going to reach our funding goals, we’ve decided that the best thing to do is to end the Kickstarter. We sincerely appreciate all of the support we got from the backers and the Kickstarter community. This was our first Kickstarter and we made mistakes along the way. I want to acknowledge that right up front. We put a lot of time and effort into the Kickstarter, but it’s obvious missing things like physical goods hampered our efforts. It’s also fair to say because we’re early that we didn’t have enough gameplay to show the game off enough to get people over the hump.

So where do we go from here? Well the good news is that our Investors are backing us all the way and we’re going to get Hero’s Song done exactly when we said we would. I’m also happy to say that we’ve been able to do this without having to take money from publishers, something that was of key importance to us so that we could remain in creative control.

We’ll be updating you all along the way.. holding development streams (on Cohhcarnage’s stream on Twitch) and being completely transparent with our development process. You’ll be hearing from us all the time and we’ll be updating our website and all of you on a constant basis as we have cool stuff to show.

Smedley, the former head of Sony Online Entertainment, left the company last year in order to start his new group, Pixelmage Games. Hero’s Song, which boasts a story penned by best-selling author Patrick Rothfuss, combines open world RPG questing with a pixel art visual style.

Those looking forward to the game shouldn’t worry, however, since Smedley has mentioned through his twitter that Hero’s Song is only a few months away from being able to post a significant amount of gameplay.