Hello friends. This is Tanya and Emily from Best Laid Plans Productions, Inc. We wish we didn’t have to talk about this, but we've been experiencing an increasingly threatening harassment campaign for the last few months regarding our upcoming game, Save the Villainess. 

We planned to ignore this campaign in hopes that the commenters would stop sending us abusive and aggressive comments after no response from us. Unfortunately, after several months, the harassment has gone from private means (emails and comments in our beta-demo survey in January as well as anonymous sends to our Tumblr account) to increasingly personal, racist, and ableist public comments on our Itch.io game page that attacked our trustworthiness as developers and suggested that our Kickstarter campaign not be funded. 

You can take a look at all the Itch.io comments through this link.

The harassment has included leaving a string of 1-star reviews, as well as downvoting any positive reviews left on our Itch.io page. 

We have also reached out to Itch.io and said that we were concerned that the personal attacks were going to escalate to doxxing or other threats to our safety.

Finally, we have received an anonymous abusive message that mentioned the original writer had personal knowledge about one of us. We are now deeply worried about our personal safety. 

Thus, we have decided to shut down comments on our Itch.io game page and moderate comments on our other platforms. Under the current circumstances, we will no longer accept comments that go beyond normal criticisms and aim to hurt our personal reputations or threaten to dox us.

Ultimately, we want to close this chapter and focus on our game. Instead of dwelling on this harassment campaign, we will focus on developing Save the Villainess while taking all possible steps to ensure our safety.

While we have experienced considerable stress through this period, we will not give up on creating Save the Villainess. We thank all the people who have supported the game and us. 

Thank you for your support and understanding as we navigate this difficult situation.

Sincerely, Tanya & Emily, Best Laid Plans Productions, Inc.