Happy Anniversary (to me)!!!

I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's been a year of making this game for me.  For this reason, I thought I'd take a few minute and reflect back on the last year and give sort of a State of the Union Address for you guys.  Sorry for rambling, but you should know me by now ;-)

One year ago today, on October 8th, 2017 I started this Patreon Page, posted a small demo of My Sister, My Roommate onto reddit, and went to bed.  When I woke up, someone had created a thread for my game on F95.  The demo consisted of 53 images and ended when Taylor's mom's friend drunkenly comes into his room and has sex with him.  If you're reading this, you know the scene.

Given the size of the release, I didn't think it was worthy of being called V.1, so I cut that number in half and called it V.05.  Which would lead to a good bit of confusion, because it was not the 5th release and I don't think anyone understood my logic (it got even more confusing when I called the next release V.10).  Whoops.  But that little detail shows just how much I didn't know about making a game like this when I started.

Prior to creating this, the only experience I had coding was QBasic in High School, when I made a Christmas Tree blink different colors and play monotone Christmas Carols.  And I had never rendered anything.  Hell, I was very new the world of adult gaming.  I accidentally stumbled upon a game called Big Brother on a site I frequent to download videos and loved it.  Prior to that, I didn't know a market for games like this existed.  I found F95zone when I was looking for a walkthrough for the game and that opened up a whole new world for me.  After playing through seemingly every game available, I had some favorites, became a patron of a couple developers, and of course, there were other games I didn't care for.  Then something clicked in my head that said I could make a game.  How hard could it be?

I learned how other people made games, downloaded Daz and bought a few different assets and started to render, without knowing how things worked.  Same thing with Renpy.  I watched a stupid renpy tutorial countless times, trying to figure out how to do the most basic of tasks.  I used the tutorial's code and also copied other games' codes.  Everything I learned was more or less trial and error, and seeing how other people had done it.  A year later, that's still how I learn new things, although now if I get too confused, bossapplesauce is usually there to help me (thanks bud).

Somehow, on the first day of my demo release, three people trusted me enough to contribute a few bucks to the game - gamersglory, Gon, and Epicuren.  I still can't believe that.  A couple weeks later, I released V.10 and all hell broke loose in the forums.  In the game, wanted to demonstrate to people just how much of a slut Nikki was and it seemed like everyone hated it.  Looking back now, it was a very vocal few, but at the time, I was really disappointed.  Since I was so new to the game dev world, I had no idea what a reaction that would cause.  It seemed like so many people were just commenting to shit on my game.  People that had pledged to me, deleted their pledges, the person that started my games' thread apologized for sharing the game with everyone, and people on the forums said they were putting my game on their ignore list (sometimes I still wonder how many ignore lists I'm still on because of that).  In the end, I had 7 Patrons that month - which is still more than I thought I would get in month 1.  I'll forever be thankful to those first pledges I got and to the people that were defending my game in the forums - PenfoldMole and BigBabs69 in particular were coming to my defense time and time again (thanks guys, if you're reading this).  Without those people, there's a pretty good chance I would have just stopped making the game.

But luckily, I decided to focus on the positives and kept plugging along and making the type of game that I wanted to play.  I learned a lot, got better at rendering, and got better at coding, kept my sense of humor, and dare I say that the animation loops are at least on par with other games?  Slowly the number of my patrons continues to rise up and I'm currently at 99 of you guys!  That's crazy to me!  I can't thank my supporters enough.

Some aspects of the game have changed from the original outline I wrote a year ago, but for the most part, I've stayed true to the original story I wanted to tell.  And it seems like people are liking it.  I love the positive messages that you guys send me on here, and discord, and F95 - seriously, they make my day when I get them.  If I could go back in time, there are certainly things I would do differently, but I'm really happy with where I ended up, and more importantly, where I'm going.

So, everyone wants to know -- where is the game going?  I'm not going to tell you.  That would ruin the surprise!  But I will let you know that right now, I plan on having 6 more updates and I absolutely love what I have planned.  That will bring us to V.15.  That may slightly change as we get closer to the end, but we'll see if I'm able to tell the story within that amount of time.  As usual, I'll keep in guys in the loop with what's going on every week and if I need to pause working on the game, I'll also pause taking pledge money.  When I first started doing this, I said my goal was to learn a new hobby, create something cool, and that I would not disappoint you guys.  I believe I've been successful with all three of those.

Thanks again guys.  This game wouldn't exist without the people like you that support me.

Here's to another year!
Sumodeine