- Oct 7, 2019
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1) You realize that we started with literally no more than maybe 200 lines of code (this is being generous, when the game was first shown to me there was an unanimated Eve skating around brown circles with green and blue blobs around her, it was also done in ActionScript if I recall and Wilson, our first progammer demanded we switch to Unity, and since he was all we had that's what we did), 1 animation, and a outline map of cloverton plus some sketches of monsters and NPCs done in about 5 minutes a piece at the time that H-Bomb was informed of the test page of the patreon by someone and blew his stack? We had 2 weeks to put together SOMETHING and had promised a literal 'to the minute' deadline for uploading. I had to personally dragoon a friend IRL who was a photographer at Houston (or was it Dallas) A-Con to help and we stayed up the first night before the con and into the get the thing even a LITTLE playable for our first build. I stayed up and got him whatever he needed, he plugged out a few thousand lines of final code and debugging and then I uploaded it before he got a 2 hour nap in and went on to do stuff.
Most games, when they go to patreon, have a considerable amount more done, are doing it with prefabricated pieces (RPGmaker), or simpler mechanics (RenPy). They are not starting from literal scratch because you were busy carefully -not- doing anything more until the break was final (I had been brought onto the project about 1 week before and while S-Purple had already been given the ultimatum by the rest of the BS team that they were going and done and he was trying to figure out what to do next, and H-Bomb was still AWOL at this point in time, literally impossible to contact, as he had always been for the first 3 weeks of any month for the last 11 months, Spurple had made some minor stuff, and I told him to knock it off even if he had done it in his non-billed, personal hours, because optics). We had zilch. Our original plan had been to start serious work after the whole thing had been announced for both ethical and optics concerns, and then blitz something out for christmas. We expected to lose a lot more people, but have a considerably better game out of the gate. More time to plan and test. That didn't happen. Then we lost wilson, our first programmer, and more or less got some kid out of college, who was good but wasn't very good at future proofing.
2) We pay our people an actual living wage. I took $15.00/hr to a cap of $2500 a month, USD of course, every month, but everyone else was paid $3000.00 USD a month at $18.00/hr. To be clear, that's 166 2/3rds hours per month, total, just a smidge over 40 hours a week. Most groups don't do that, they split things evenly between the team members, where as we went out of our way to avoid hiring anybody until we had the budget for it. That was why until our income stabilized over 18k USD a month, we had the first two mile stones set at $3000 for a programmer, and $6000 to hire an animator too. We were lucky to reach those in the first month because it meant spurple wasn't drawing too heavily on his savings from what he'd been paid from Breeding Season.
That's why.
Yes, it's a lot more money than other projects get, we don't underpay our people. We also started from way the hell lower down on the totem pole in terms of resources than most games do when they push to Patreon. Most games are like 'hey, let's have a real prototype and have done at least 6 months of figuring out what we want, and some grey boxing, and shit' which we didn't get to do.
Full break down for fulltime contractors comes to a little over 20k right now, that's 2 programmers, 3 animators, me, and spurple. Ontop of that we have to pay for comissions of splash pages, writing by the word at standard rates, SFX, composer work, licensing fees for various programs because we're doing this all above the board, and I can go on if you like?
3) Finally. It has to be said that we know we're only going to get one real shot at actually releasing this game and it'll set the tone for what everyone else expects of us, first game as a team or not. A moderate amount of fucking up is to be expected from us, and will likely be tolerated. If we don't unfuck the grindy, unfun aspects of the game, which means implementing various systems we hadn't even considered when we first got into this, or redoing systems programmed in spaghetti code during the first 6 months of brutal 'please, it wasn't us that are the bastards in this story' crunch time, then we're never going to ever recover from it.
We got one shot to make it right, we're planning on this being our last year of development, but if it takes longer than that and people will still support us in making it better, we're only really answerable to our patrons, the people paying us money and allowing us to feed ourselves. No one else. So if we feel like we're not delivering something at the final quality our patrons expect? Then we have to fix it.
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4) Standard development time for any game that is multiple hours of content runs at about 4-6 years give or take. We're shooting for releasing in our fourth year. Yes, we promised to release in 2 years. We were naive and fuckups. All I can say is that whatever our project after cloud meadow and the 2 DLC story chapters we got planned is, the next game is going to have a lot more preproduction put into it.
No, but we've basically been avoiding this place ever since we first read the thread back when it first happened and there was literally nothing but vitriol and unconstructive criticism. It's gotten marginally better.
I've said nothing on this thread that hasn't been explained at length on our discord or on other forum communities at one time or another.
As I said before, it took blatant, outright, impossibly false misinformation to get me to finally cave and come to a thread where 4 in 5 posts are actively hostile to our team.
Also fuck you my mom is a saint.
And we have to be really careful about that because there are plenty of people on this thread alone who have effaced a desire to see us taken down, banned, etc. Given that fact, I hope it's obvious why it is so important to us that there is literally no possible excuse for this. That's why there's no rape, beastiality (Defined as sex between a sapient and nonsapient individual by the talks we had with patreon's staff when they passed the rules changes), incest, necrophilia/guro, or pedophilia depicted in our product, and will never be depicted in any of our products. Too many people got an axe to grind with S-Purple, and regardless of their intents we'd be idiots to not cover our asses and toe the line.
Also the reasons are really obvious to anyone with half a brain. Mastercard and Visa told them "You will ban this type of content or so help us god we're going to cancel any transactions with your bank accounts through our service because fuck you. You think you're going to drag us into a fucking RICO action waiting to happen? What? Porn isn't made by organized crime anymore? Fuck you and fuck your fairy stories."
Tbf, it is a legitimate concern. I know a few erodevs who have been asked to act as money launderers. "Yeah I'll put 1000 bucks into your patreon and you give me 900 in cash back man."
It was the threat of RICO charges when it turned out that there were human traffickers running some of the cam girl patreons that caused Patreon to blanket ban cam girls after that whole deal with the FBI probe. That's also what lead to them tightening the rules because the money handling companies like Visa and Mastercard and Paypal got spooked hard core. Patreon might not be the best thing, but they have gone out of their way to avoid notcing any minor issues, as long as people keep it off their public posts and front pages, thus insuring the credit card companies won't find out on a casual search.
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