Building Up

Okay! I have some good news and bad news. The bad news is Steam has removed early access for NSFW creators and SubscribeStar started random purges, meaning things are getting worse instead of better on the censorship front. There are a lot of irons in the fire and I’m pretty sure this will reverse but that is a significant stumbling block that yet again randomly dumps on my development plans.

Early access is important but it does have issues as discussed previously on this page and elsewhere on the net. The more advanced a game is, the better its reception tends to be. Many devs suggest around 65-70% completion for EA and that its main function isn’t to fund but to perfect and advertise. This makes the project a lot more likely to get to 100% since it already got that far without any sales.

The good news is I’ve now had a full month of working with all the tools at my disposal and I have put in some serious structured hours and the results are very encouraging! All the annoying R&D is paying off rapidly with production efficiency. At this rate there will be a large release this month and I suspect the game will rapidly fill out in October and November.

I’ve discussed previously about the plan to make what is called a minimally viable product, a strategy where you build out a functional product and worry about cosmetics and non essentials later.

So to get that point my plan has long been to get to parity with the html game ASAP. I already did the code and basic scripting to reach parity over the last two years. So the game is already at parity in gated text; it just has a bunch of placeholders.

I am about half done with the html parity process, not counting animations or voice work. I’m producing at high rates and I’ve dialed the perfectionism back enough to move things down the line and get final or near-final art at a rapid rate. I feel strongly that if I don’t like the game’s art or feel, then there is no way I can expect the audience to. That’s why I really appreciate the trial and error process I was able to go through, as well as the people that have supported me financially and with feedback. I’m really super stoked for this game! I can see all the pieces coming together and getting assembled and I’m certain that the vast majority of you will be pleased with the results. You should start to see what I see over the next couple of months.

To better quantify progress and what I’ve completed and needs to be done I will now summarize some of the roadmap info going forward.

To review: 

Transfigure html is approximately ~70% complete, it has the better part of a million words and 38/100 endings. It is missing a few large plot explanations and a lot of new content, some new characters and many scenes. Plus it is obviously missing most of the endings. It has a bit under 2,000 pieces of media.

So to catch up and make the minimally viable version of the game, I have to make rough equivalents of these 2,000 pieces plus some extras where appropriate. 

The current demo has about 500 assets and 4 endings. I have now completed about 500 quality assets and about 500 OK quality assets. This means I am about half done relative to the assets in the original game.

I estimate I will be done with the image stage of parity around the end of the month, give or take. At that point there is nothing left to but to fill in the last third of the game and lay all the cards on the table. Then infill with polish, animations, and voice work after the critical art is done.

I’ve also completed some of the last remaining AI porting work converting character models from 3D. I now have almost the whole Transfigure’s cast as AI character data and combining it with all the previous art and the new tools and everything I’ve learned is making something I think is cool.

The game is advancing on all fronts. I’ve composed new music. There is loads of new art. I’ve written scenes, updated code, redid more graphics, plus some animation.

Oh yeah, I also have one of the trailers updated with swanky new art. And since I got some good feedback I did another day or so of work on G-Con and the next demo of that is going to be sweet. (More content, art, balance, lots of new levels, some spicy scenes, more to explore, side quests, free roam etc)