Japanese auteur Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro says leaked assets and other issues may have led to the failure of his Fig crowdfunding campaign for The Good Life.

The Deadly Premonition and D4 creator was attempting to raise $1.5 million to finance the creation of his 'debt repayment life simulation RPG'. 

After 30 days, however, the Fig campaign had only pulled in $682,000, and now Swery has taken to Twitter to explain why he believes the project failed to gather momentum. 

Writing on the social media platform, he reasons that the leak of early assets lead people to believe the title was going to be a "compact game with 2D graphics."

"After spending a lot of time trying to hide the info that was leaked, we failed to provide you all with accurate data about the game in the early stages or the campaign, and so people became very unclear as to just what kind of a game The Good Life really is," he wrote. 

"A lot of people probably lost interest in the game at this stage, and I deeply regret that. I also think the concept trailer that I put together only made everyone more confused. 

"Most of the responses to the trailer were positive, but I think that people who actually watched the trailer started imagining all sorts of different things so we needed up only getting further and further away from The Good Life's actual content."

Whether or not you agree with Swery's analysis, it's interesting to see a developer give such an honest breakdown of their crowdfunding campaign - particularly one that failed to make the grade. 

According to Swery, the asset leak was just the tip of the iceberg, and he claims a number of other mistakes also stifled the project. 

For instance, he regrets not announcing the involvement of familiar names like Yukio Futatsugi, Noboru Horita, and Machi Koro at an earlier stage, and explains that "not PRing this powerful tag team" was a huge mistake. 

He also feels the number of bundles and extras confused potential supporters, who would've needed "a lot of courage" to drop cash on the title without fully understanding how the game worked.

So, is this the end of The Good Life? Not by a long shot. Swery intends to learn from his mistakes and relaunch the game on Kickstarter later this year.

"What we plan to do, is to relaunch the campaign as a Kickstarter, and launch before the end of the year. We will use all of the information we learned for this campaign and make the Kickstarter one that we believe can succeed," he continued.

"This will include a more clear trailer and information on both versions from the start, a lower goal (due to some great partners that will be joining production, that we're excited to announce), physical editions of the game with our pals at Limited Run, and a big, proper PR push at launch."

"Please look forward to it, and wait just a little bit longer […] and once again, thank you all so much."