Incoming changes! (part 1)

Hey everyone!

Things are about to change! We mentioned earlier that we have a lot of new plans and ideas for this year, and well, even though we hoped to first be done with some more things before making all the announcements, it so happens that now might be the perfect time for two of them!

NEW IDEA #1

TL;DR:
We're changing this Patreon's page charge setting from a per-month basis to a per-new-big-update basis. In short, instead of always being charged at the end of each month, a charge will only happen when a specific type of post (Paid Post) is made by us. The charge will only take place when we post a big update for a game, roughly the size of a story chapter.

In other words, no more charges without new content! All charges will be paused for a while too, don't worry!

Also, don't worry for a second about being charged more often or at an inconvenient time. All charges will be at least 30 days apart, and every single one will be announced with one week of antecedence and they will always be made at the beginning of the month (but not every month, that's what's different). And if you want some hard guarantees, it's possible to put some hard limits on your own Patreon profile regarding Paid Posts and whatnot!

This means that nobody here will run the risk of being charged more than what they signed up for. In fact, it's very likely that this decision will end up slashing the monthly sum we get by half, which sounds bad but it's something we really believe it's for the best.

(There's another TL;DR down below)

Why? A couple of reasons. The most important one is that some deep changes to the game are needed urgently and there's no way to make them quickly. We've spent the last two weeks trying to make the Engorgement Spell 2.0 work with a smooth framerate, then we downgraded our expectations to a at-least-not-completely-insufferable framerate, and both efforts crashed and burn.

What's worse is that there appears to be no way of salvaging what's already been made unless the game is rebuilt from the ground up outside of a browser. The Engorgement Spell 1.0 (as it was shown in A Day with Paige) was a nice experiment that was forgiven for its wonkiness (not by most, we must admit) due to it being tied to a bare-bones teaser. We didn't know until now that the "wonkiness" was at the brink of what an HTML5 canvas could pull off, but that's the case.

Migrating to the Desktop and building a serious game is a must. We knew that, you knew that, but in the end, we kept postponing that decision because there was NO WAY that it could be done within a month. Maybe not even within a semester. The task itself was never the most demanding part, specially when compared to the everything else going on in our lives, but waiting for a game to be rebuild in another system from scratch is asking too much of most people's patience. In our heads, it seemed unfathomable that after stopping the train, building a new engine and having it running again, that there would still be any passengers left. However, you guys have showed nothing short of true grit in staying with us through all the busted deadlines and fading promises that we honestly can't even say where that impression came from in the first place.

So, yes... This is going where you think this is going. We... We can't really say anymore when the last update for Blair's game is going to get a DONE stamp. We're really considering releasing the game with just the dialog + the scenes at the end, which is not really the shiniest packaging we could give that part of the story but it might just be what's necessary. Blair's a strong lady and there's a couple of extra things we could throw in to spice up the tale without requiring runic forging or harmonically balancing growing penises.

And then, theres Paige's holiday (hah!) special.

We planned the holiday special around this new Transmutation Spell, a more elaborate version of the Engorgement Spell. The whole game revolved around you teaming up with Paige to transmute a holiday-themed dinner in time for the guests. A genius idea, we thought at the time, because the transmutation mini-game would be running along the dialog, so that you could chat, banter, joke, w/e with the characters while still trying to turn a pumpkin into a turkey without it blowing up. That way, the mini-game would not be too hard, since there would be a group of "people" working on the same thing, and it'd not be too easy either because finding a way to coordinate everybody's efforts would get tricky fast.

We even designed these disease-like enemies that would show up as things progressed, so some characters would want to do the "fighting" while others would want to do the "transmuting", and you, the player, would have to choose between doing what you liked best or what's needed the most.

Alright, but are we binning Paige's promised new chapter for good? No, there are way too many assets already done for that. We want nothing more than to say good riddance to web browsers, but Paige's new little chapter is still coming as soon as possible, as a web-game without any mini-games, most likely focused more on Paige herself (she's gonna be the birthday girl, after all). More about this on the next post!

However, with the spells ruled as non-viable due to technical reasons, we're afraid that we really have to rethink the holiday game so as to not include the spells at all. Rethink the whole thing. As much as we want to, we can't really blame it on the browser devs, who think that the right way to optimize a browser for today's world is to restrain it as tightly as possible. At the beginning, the very beginning when we were still prototyping A Day with Paige, we thought that WebGL would take much more time to become "a thing" and that the HTML5 canvas would only get better and better with time. It turned out that nowadays everybody wants to murder the canvas since it's simultaneously the best tool to dodge user-tracking and the best tool to track users. We bet on the wrong horse. 

So, to wrap this bit up: Tech is hard when one doesn't know what to do and after figuring it out, still act all stubborn about it. Nonetheless, we managed to pull it this far simply because you all stuck with us. We can't be thankful enough for all the support, but we can make it lighter for you folks from now on when we end up wasting time on the wrong path. We're not saying it's necessarily a final decision, but it's something we'd like to try out. The support you guys send our way is the best thing we have going for us at the moment and it's not tied to its monetary value.

But, of course, we've been running this thing for a while now... Thanks to the best fans we could hope for, some that have been with us for a really long time, some even from the very beginning, there's a respectable amount that we managed to save up. Which means...

NEW IDEA #2

TL;DR:
We're making this project our FULL TIME occupation this year! Woohoo! We're strapping some rockets to this thing!

That's right! This year is either gonna make it or break it for us, and we really believe in the making it part! And yeah, we can see the skeptical look on some faces... We get it, if we run this thing the very same way we've been doing, it's not looking good for those "make it" odds.

That's the second most important reason of why forgoing the monthly deadlines is such a big deal for us. From now on, we'll no longer release incremental updates that rely on shortcuts, missing assets, contrived navigation and all the little hacks that took a piece of our heart each time we added them in. We're going to give that whole "It's Ready When It's Ready" a fair shot, which is something that we felt like we never could due to the whole "keep posting or die" mentality we started with. 

We want all the games that we publish from now on to be self-contained stories that can be enjoyed on their own. No mini-games, just games. Stories that build off each other instead of requiring one another. No more premature announcements (this one doesn't count)! And if it takes us this whole year to develop nothing more than a 2-hour long game, then you can bet it's gonna be some damn worthy two hours.

But enough talk, time to make some amendments. First, there's gonna be a lot more communication! A lot of weekly posting! So far on our schedule we have: a new gimmick that might sweep away some of the cobwebs on the Discord chat, some thoughts about light novels we're going to write, a potential new way to tell our world's story, a whole new revamp of the art style to enable animation, incoming changes to the pledge tiers, a partnership with a new adult game dev, and, who knows, maybe a lot more things that are going to come up from hearing what you have to say!

Well, that should be enough for now! See y'all on the next post!