The Future of Novus' Stuff

So, I've been putting off this post for over a week. Almost two weeks, actually. After the last patreon billing cycle produced the absolute worst results from the very beginning of this game/page, I was pretty damn depressed and took the better part of a week to seriously think about just what the hell I've been doing. 

Now, BEFORE YOU PANIC, please understand that I'm continuing work on the next update (As evidenced by the image heading this post). I've actually got the locations all nice and worked out and a little over a dozen renders done. Indeed, if it weren't for an epic struggle with the lighting, combined with long render times caused by the complexity of the main theater scenes, I'd probably have double that number. Aside from those few days off to think, I'm working right about at my normal amount of hours-put-in. So please don't fear that I'm going to pull a vanishing act mid-update or something, that's not how I work.

Having said that, however, now comes the bad news. Tempered, hopefully, with a bit of less-bad news. The bad news...I'm going to be blunt here. Unless something drastically changes (as in I see a lot more support from the community in some form - not necessarily money, but at least interest)  within the next few months, Eros Academy is only getting a grand total of two more updates. The current update is obviously one, and the second update will not be up for voting as it usually is. Instead, I'll be using the update after next to finish out Naomi's (as she's the most popular character) story/date/quest line thing. Essentially, I will be doing this so that at least ONE of the dateable characters is fully finished(ish) when I cease updating the game.

I did not come to this decision lightly.

In fact, I hate this decision. However, once I forced myself to look at things objectively, the writing has been on the wall for months. Eros Academy has simply never been popular. I can only guess at the reasons why. The game has far more content than games with 100x the fan base, and I don't think either the graphics or writing are terrible. Yet, even aside from lacking monetary support, I haven't even been able to interest people in talking about the game. Virtually no comments, no community posts, and the forum posts I used to run mostly stayed dead as a zombie doornail.

The best I can figure, I simply tried to make too large a game, with too broad an audience, and no one set of people found it appealing. Add that to the fact that, frankly, I'm an anti-social person who apparently sucks at drawing attention to the things I work on, and it was a recipe for disaster. I've lost money and probably nearly a thousand hours of my personal time on the project, while it got steadily more and more depressing for me to work on it.

Now for the hopefully slightly less horrible bits.

Just because I'm dropping Eros Academy doesn't necessarily mean I'm bowing out of adult games. I have had several smaller ideas pop into my head over the time I've work on Eros, and I'm currently trying to sort of which of them might be best to work on after I finish the two updates for Eros. There are currently some issues I'm trying to work out. 

For example, I do not want to use Daz3d for graphics again. 99% of every Eros academy update was devoted to graphics. Removing the time consuming graphical portion, I wrote, coded, tested and released each update of Eros Academy in less than 4 days. That's right, the entire rest of the process took me no more than 4 days each time and usually it was only 2-3.

For obvious reasons, I'm looking into other options. The trouble is...I'm having a hard time figuring out where to even start looking. I could make a text-only game, sure, but those are a bit of a dying art even for adult games. I could make a text+real images game like many RAGS adult games tend to be. That's a bit better, but I have no idea how hard RAGS is to program for...and I don't really like RAGS from the player side myself. So I need to look into that. Partnering with an artist...would be an ideal solution, but I don't know any and have had a lot of bad experiences working with strangers who flake out 10% into a project. I'm not a good (or even decent) artist myself, either. So you can see, I'm currently still trying to sort things out. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em!

Hopefully, by the time I finish out the two updates for Eros Academy, I will have it sorted out and I can launch into a creating a new game without delay. It remains possible, however, that it will not go that smoothly and I may shut the patreon page down for a short period while I work up to a new game. As for the new games themselves, I'm still sketching out rough outlines for them. As I will not be providing a poll next update for the final update's content, I'm thinking that I will instead write up those outlines and let people vote on which game interests them to most. In this way, I can hopefully choose something that will appeal to a wider audience than Eros Academy ever managed to gather.

- Novus