2/2 Status Update

First up a small update on At the Mountains of Friendship 1.3. 

The art for Sk8er is going well. That's it, that's the update. I haven't actually done any work on new content or mechanics yet.

What I did work on this week was Netoria Tactics. There's both the Steam release, and the Female Carwyn update. Both are getting close to done at this point. I'm planning on releasing the Female Carwyn update first along with the Steam store page, and then releasing the Steam version a few weeks later. This was people who aren't following me on Patreon or my Discord will have the chance to find out about and wishlist the game before it actually comes out. That's pretty important for selling copies of the game. What makes a game perform well on Steam is pretty complex and has a lot more elements than just making a good game. But I'm mostly using this version as a tip jar and not as a big revenue source so it's not a big deal. I'll need to sell about 500 copies to cover the extra art costs of bonus content so hopefully it sells at least that. 

This is the main piece of marketing art that will be used in the Steam version, so the store page can't launch until this is done. It's getting there, but as you can tell there's still a lot of work to be done. This was about a third of the total art expense, I really went all out on this painting. It'll look super cool when it's done. 

In further Nertoia news, Netoria 2 is happening. It's in full fledged pre-production now. I've sent base character descriptions over to the main character artist already. This is going to be less a sequel to the story of Netoria Tactics and more to its structure and gameplay concepts. It will still be a Fire Emblem-esque tactics game with NTR elements baked into the gameplay. I'm taking what I felt worked and didn't work from the first game and improving them. Better pacing, better art, better mechanics, etc. 

I considered moving to a new engine, but that would make the project take much longer. I've pretty much beaten SRPG Studio into a workable shape at this point. All the plug-ins and such I had to find/make will still be there for this new version. I understand how to do X by navigating to obscure menu Y and pressing button Z that's translated weirdly but actually means W. Clumsy or not, SRPG Studio lets me make these kind of games fast. And it's a sequel, if you could stand the interface for the first game, you'll be fine with it for the second.  There's been more SRPG Studio games coming out lately. Maybe inspired by me, maybe not, who knows. But that also means the NSFW games audience will get more used to the interface in general. Or maybe they'll start avoiding them on sight, who knows. 

So how long will Netoria 2 take? Based solely on the art pipeline, I'd say about eight months until everything I need for what I plan to be the first release would be done. That doesn't account for the work I need to do though, and lately art has been getting done faster than I can finish the work associated with it. And my dev time is split between this and AtMoF and additional Netoria 1 routes so...

Wait a minute, I feel like I'm forgetting something. Isn't there something else that I... oh yeah, Naked Ambition. Look Apollo-heads, the development of Naked Ambition is going really badly. Getting art made, the writing, it's just all not going well. It's not like I haven't done anything, but what I have done ha taken a lot of time and isn't great. I kind of have to get it done, but my heart isn't in it. I started actually making Naked Ambition in 2019 and started planning it before that. It's been over four years now. How long this has taken is my fault of course, but it's just not what I want to be making right now.  I still have tons of creative energy for Netoria, enough that I'm making a sequal, and AtMoF is fun to make too aside from how much bug hunting I need to do. But Naked Ambition... 

I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, ostensibly I mostly do this for fun. People pay me money for my stuff, but the base content is free and I don't actually make any money, my artists make money. But a lot of people have devoted their time to playing Naked Ambition and that's a commitment that isn't fair for me to ignore. I pride myself on actually finishing what I started. My hope was that after the hiatus I'd be more eager to work on naked Ambition and that was true, for like one week. Maybe taking it off hiatus at all was a mistake.

I dunno. So far my solution has to just work on what I want and hope that what I want will be Naked Ambition at some point. It hasn't yet, but maybe it will, who knows. If you're subscribed just for Naked Ambition, maybe you shouldn't be. But the year long hiatus probably drove that point home already, sorry.

That's all for this week. As always, thank your for your continued support.