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SUPER ALEX - Personal message
47 minutes ago
Hello friends. This is me, Super Alex, writing to you. It's been a long time since I've made a personal post, but the time has come.
I have been thinking about this text for several days. But to finish it and make a post today I was prompted by an appeal from one of my most loyal subscribers, who supported me since 2017 and decided to cancel the subscription. From now on, I don't want you to stay in the dark, I want you to understand the whole picture of what's going on, and that's why I'm going to tell you about everything that should have been said a long time ago, but these are not the things that everybody would say and certainly not to everyone.
Anyway, jokes aside. For the first time in the history of my work in game creation - the current game development is in a crisis state and on the verge of closure. But let's go over everything in order.
I started the first drafts of Amnesia back in the distant 2019, back then I was working alone. I did everything by myself. I started actively working on the game at the beginning of 2020. It took me about two years to make 4-5 hours of gameplay, 2500 pictures and 200 animations, the numbers are approximate, but somewhere around that. During those two years (2020 and 2021) I had time to work with a couple of Spanish writers and had already stopped writing dialog texts myself. But I still had the job of coming up with the scene design and plot, as well as all the other work. In January 2022, I released the game on STEAM, and got an influx of new money. Some of it I put aside into a security fund, some I spent immediately, and the rest I decided to invest in the project to hire new people and speed up the release of updates. And from about that point on (first half of 2022) my work was divided into 2 parts - working on creating scenes myself and finding new people and delegating the work to them. By the end of 2022, I had a programmer, a writer, and a couple of artists. However, the results were not satisfactory for me, the number of subscribers on PATREON remained around 500 people, as it was at the beginning of that year, but the expenses increased, because now I was no longer alone. Also, at the end of 2022 in Russia there was a very unpleasant political situation with military actions, because of which I decided to move to another country. And here comes the beginning of 2023 and I meet my first creative crisis. I'm in another country, I have new employees helping me create the game, but the number of subscribers is not growing, expenses are increasing, and STEAM revenues are falling. We were living off short but animation-filled scenes (like Alexandra coming to the MC in the morning). But I was already having a hard time creating them.
And then in April 2023, I got lucky. Because an old friend of mine who had just finished her MBA in business management showed up and motivated me with big goals and future accomplishments. All I had to do was build a system, organize a team, build a plan and take action. And I will say that some of those ideas were realized. I got fired up with new goals, she and I started developing the project with renewed vigor and thanks to these actions we had growth between April 2023 and November 2023. In November 2023 we broke the 1000 PATRONS for the first time. Which made me very happy. We already had 10 people on staff. That's 2 writers, 5 artists, a programmer, myself and an assistant helping with all sorts of different tasks. The staff has grown, subscribers have grown, we even had two months when we were able to make an update within 4 weeks. But as income increased, so did expenses. The net profit did not increase. I received exactly the same amount of money as I did a year ago.
Don't get me wrong, I do what I do because of a genuine love for what I do. I'm on fire developing hot games, I love it. Yes, I need a break sometimes, but then I get back into it. And money for me is a measure, an indicator, an indicator of the success of my labor. I believe that if my game doesn't bring in enough money, it means I'm not making a good enough quality game. BUT I WANT TO MAKE A QUALITY GAME, otherwise what's the point?!
The end of 2023. This is where all the fun starts. Based on everything I've described above, I'm making perhaps the most wrong strategic decision of all. The decision was made to improve the game's graphics and make the story more coherent and interesting, and the only way I could do that for me at the time was to remaster the game. Yes, remake all the scenes, rewrite all the text. Change the gameplay itself and introduce all those features that I wanted to see in the game but never got around to. And all of this I wanted to do at once and with the whole game.
It's April 2024. Updates that were released from the end of 2023 to April 2024 were made with a remaster system in mind and these scenes will be included in it. At the same time we were working on remaking old scenes and the remaster was planned for May 2024, but in April I realized that the date of completion of all work on the remaster was not even on the horizon. In the process, we found ourselves overestimating what we could do. Since the game was already quite large in content, and the efficiency of the team was getting lower and lower, the hired artists, highly motivated at the beginning of their work, were losing their former fervor, productivity was falling and I didn't have the tools to fix it, or rather I thought I didn't have the tools. But there was no turning back, what had been done could not be changed, because all these months we were making renders with new locations and updated story in mind.
In the same month we decided to focus all our energies on creating only the remaster. Which meant that no new updates were expected for a long time. We would not be able to cope with such a financial burden and in order to have as much time as possible to work on the remaster in full and without layoffs, we decided to release 3 more updates using the scenes written and made for the Free Roams of the pre-remaster version of the game, which will not be included in the remaster. That's why the last three updates had scenes with no story progress or hot animated stuff in them except for the main character mostly jerking off, since that's what they were created for originally in the pre-remaster version (Free Roam events).
Also in April 2024 I decided to leave the project to reduce the financial burden and not to take money out of the project, so by this time we have already started to spend the very reserve that I had set aside from the money from STEAM. I was focusing my energy on short-term earnings. Now it doesn't matter what I did, what matters is that I wasn't involved in the project from May 2024 to August 2024, and all my functions were delegated.
As of September, I'm back on the project, but I'm not back as I was before. After a year or so since I made the decision to expand the team, I finally realized that being on the front lines creating images and managing people are completely different functions requiring completely different skills, which I naturally didn't possess. And I can't say that right now I know everything I need to know, but I can definitely say that every day I'm getting more experienced in this sense. Since August 2024 I've been actively pursuing my studies in management, just like I did with Unity and C#. If before all my attention was focused on how to make a render or animation better and more beautiful (which I am quite good at doing), now my attention is focused on improving the efficiency of the whole team and since I am very capable in learning, I am sure that I will be able to do it well.
Let me summarize briefly.
When the team started to expand rapidly (now our team consists of 10 people together with me) I was looking for solutions that can make the game even better, since the updates did not bring the desired result in terms of subscriber growth. And I found nothing but to try to improve the visuals even more and fix the problems in the story. But I didn't realize the root of the problem at the time and tried to improve the visuals instead of focusing on increasing the volume and releasing regular updates - exactly what you really want. It was a strategic mistake to start doing a remaster and now we got what we got.
I don't have a "load" button to roll back all the work as if nothing happened all this time. But I do have the ability to tell it like it is. And also what I'm going to do now, so that you have a real idea of what state the game is in.
My current tasks are to actualize all the processes and work done, to bring all the scenes and renders prepared for the remaster into a single structure. Distribute the remaining work and finish the missing scenes as quickly as possible. Release the first build of the remaster as soon as possible. Basically, putting out fires I would say.
My strategic tasks are to continue active training in business process management. Systematize the work of the team. Establish effective communication. Build a solid operational structure. Reduce costs and increase efficiency. Accelerate the release of updates to regular monthly updates.
It's important to say that all those problems that have been going on for so long are not a problem of my attitude to the game - it's a problem of work organization. Managing my own processes is one thing, but managing other people is quite another. But I can't afford to work alone, because I have a lot of ideas that I would like to show to the world, show to you and for that I need a strong team. And the skills to manage it.
Thank you to everyone who has been with me all this time. Now we are going through a big organizational change in our team, which will affect the future results of our work. It will probably change the composition of our subscribers as well. However, I intend to see this game through to the end, and I have an action plan on how to do that.
I'll be sharing more detailed steps in future posts, and I'll also start showing you the work I've already done. Because now you know everything you should and more.
With my biggest thanks to you. Super Alex.
almost 5 years and not mutch to show oh and those animations well maybe if dev didnt make 50 animations for every little voyeur scene then progress might have ben faster lol 
