- Thread starter satoshi bae
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This game's state was a promising alpha in 0.0.1 & 0.0.2, and every update since has taken ages and added very little. I'm honestly just impressed that it's still being worked on.
so its basically an empty map... where you can spawn random characters... and undress them through a very annoying inventory screen.
that's it?
that's it?
- Mar 1, 2020
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I'm glad you're working on this again. Looking forward to where this develops!
Keep in mind we haven't seen an actual game release yet. What we have been seeing are essentially tech demos, which are specifically designed to demonstrate different aspects as the developer makes them. It is not uncommon for tech demos not to have every feature that came before them in previous iterations.
This is a side of game development that would normally happen behind closed doors, Patreon developers are some of the few to put out a game before it is even into beta state and the bigger companies usually do closed betas if they do any betas with outside testing at all.
i get that... but this has been in development for years and almost no progress has been made.
Besides there is no reason for 1min tech demos to be released of an early-early alpha game. That is horrible PR, achieves nothing and is essentially a waste of resources.
It would be way more efficient to just put out a demo map with all features put together that gets gradually updated. That way you can have a backbone/skeleton already built for the game that you can use as a reference for future builds.
You're talking about a single person project in Unity, which is not exactly an easy engine to work with. Even most AAA games have been in development for years before they even get announced and those have entire teams working on everything. The tech demos serve the same purpose they do for AAA games, to attract attention, and in this case potential funding, where the only difference between the two is we actually got to play the tech demos of this game where AAA developers typically don't release anything short of beta. It doesn't achieve nothing, it showcases different mechanics, which is the main purpose out of the three listed so far.
m8 i've done game development, both as a University project and a fun group project with friends.
With just 6 people we made a Tomb Raider style map that was about 5-10min long with puzzles, platforming and a cinematic.
We used custom built models we made ourselves and only used premade assets for background stuff.
Took us about 3 months to get all the models, animations and coding ready for Unreal. Then another month to optimize everything and compile a working build.
And no, these tech demos do not showcase anything. The biggest mistake a dev can make (and this is something every QA person will tell you) is releasing something to the public in a choppy segregated unpolished state. Removing features or splitting them into different builds is a sure way of getting bad PR.
There's one rule in QA, that everyone seems to ignore. There is no such thing as "early access". The first thing you put out there for public eyes is the brand you will sell and what will define your project. First impressions matter.
Now if this dev is self taught and is learning coding via youtube, then sure... i get it. It can be a long annoying process of trial and error. But he should do so on his time off, not sell his self taught crash course as a product. Just make a short game on itch.io, get a fanbase, improve your skills, then go for a patreon project. It's how each one of the devs i know started out.
As a university project, meaning you got training in the field, which, while not quite AAA developer level depending on the amount of training, is still more than most Patreon developers. A lot of these developers aren't trained in game development like a university student or a AAA developer would be. In fact, for some of these developers, it is their first time developing a game ever. You also had six people, you said it yourself, while this only has one.
So, in these tech demos, the player is literally only able to stand there looking at a wall? That's what it would mean if they didn't showcase anything. The first showcased the girl's model and reaction to being stripped as well as a trapping mechanic, the second showcased the ability to steal her clothes from her locker and her routine as it was at the time, and this one showcases a new way to strip her from fully clothed without having to sneak into her locker. As minor as those are, they are new mechanics to be showcased.
Releasing to the public like this is not an uncommon practice among Patreon developers. They don't have a company behind them to front the costs of initial development, which as you should know from your university training, isn't free in a lot of cases and the ones that are free are usually very bad for use in attracting potential patrons. Not releasing choppy or segregated builds is all fine when you have funds to work with from the start, like AAA developers, but when your funding is entirely based on subscriptions from potential players, you can't just release nothing and expect to get to a good release quality.
I agree, first impressions do matter, but there isn't a whole lot of options for Patreon developers when their funding is dependent on people playing their game. It would be great if there were ways to get some initial funding so that Patreon developers could put out a proper showcase, but there aren't, they literally have to pay out of pocket, which is not always possible, or out of their funding from Patreon.
Firstly, There is not 1 good reason you can give me as to why these simple basic features would need to be separated. Other than to be sold separately.
Secondly, you're talking as if he NEEDS funding to make this game.
None of the assets he uses require subscriptions or any investment.
Yes i had a team of 6. But each one had their own job to do and like i said it took us only 4 months. For Free.
My point still stands. If you want to LEARN to be a dev, do so on your free time. Don't sell your education as a product.
There are literally thousands of freelance and indie devs doing this on websites like Itch.io and on Steam. Yet out of all those hard working devs, most of which are self taught, Patreon devs seem to think they are an exception and entitled to get paid.
Finally, in my uni we had a competition. A gamejam. Where 1 Person. Not a team. Would make a simple, fun minigame or at least a demo of a game.
The time limit was 1 week. The conditions were: the game has to be functional. It has to be playable by anyone. It can use recycled assets but it has to have at least 1 unique main character. Within just a week we had quick 5min games like maze a runner, a Mario style platformer, a zombie shooter and a superman simulator. The size of the team does not matter. It's the motivation and drive that really matters.
I will say this again, this is just 3 separated demos, years in development. Not months, Not weeks, Years. So what exactly is the holdup?
I support anyone that wants to try game development. We need more enthusiastic and creative devs, but what i cannot support is someone trying to cash out on what's essentially a brute force/ trial and error, crash course with little to nothing to show for it. Because it looks to me like this Dev is using this "game" to get money for cigarette packs. Do the work, climb the mountain, Then get your reward. We've all been there, school trained and not.
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Because these are tech demos deicated to those features and not an actual full release of the game. If they were a full release, not necessarily the complete game, but a proper 0.1 version even, these features would not be separated.
I am talking as if he needs the funding, that's because he does. Not everything in game development, especially Unity game development, is free and the things that are free aren't the best choice for a publicly available game, even at the tech demo stage. Then there is one aspect that a lot of Patreon developers have in common, not sure about this one. A lot of them have their games as their sole source of income, which means the assets aren't the only expense to add into the equation. Yes, each member of your team had a job to do, that's the way it should be with teams, but you still had six people where this game only has one. It doesn't matter if your team had every aspect split amongst them or if everyone was doing every aspect as a group by taking little chunks of each per person, the work is still being split into six different places whereas ALL of the work in this project is on the shoulders of one. That said, yes, motivation and drive are key in any project, but especially a solo project. The holdup is there is only one person working in Unity with an unknown and potentially low level of skill in the engine or in general. It is going to take a while, especially if this is his first project.
ALL first projects are brute force/trial and error at first and evolve later as the developer learns, that's the way it was for me learning the old Visual Basic. That is not to say this is his first project, he would have to say it is for me to know that, but that is a possibility and a high one at that. I have seen no evidence of this developer milking his patrons, my standard for comparison being School of Lust, where the developer spent an outrageous amount of time trying to stop people from modding back in content he removed, because Patreon told him to, by implementing and then continuously updating DRM of some sort that also had adverse effects on game performance.
To give my input and provide some context and clarify some things, I'm a full time software developer and making this game has just been something I do in my spare time. It isn't the typical kind of work I do in my day job, but it's not my first project. I've been a hobbyist game dev and 3d artist/animator for over a decade, and I've done a few projects in Unity in the past.
I did those kinds of game jam fests back in the day as well, and fzdc is right, it's relatively easy to pump out a simple game in a week. I recall making a platformer with a few different levels during a 48 hour gamejam when I was in uni. Even though creating one off small games is fast and easy, designing and creating a clean scalable codebase that doesn't turn into complete spaghetti code takes much more time and effort.
That's not just in code either, it applies to a lot of elements that go into making a game. One example for instance, I spent a lot of time integrating the UMA (unity multipurpose avatar) system into the game because among other reasons it allows combining all the character and their clothes into one mesh and hiding parts of that mesh, which meant I could hide the underlying body mesh so it wouldn't poke through clothes, and also meant not rendering the body when it was covered - this saves (perhaps trivially) some rendering time.
Making this game in a gamejam sort of environment you would probably just take the easy solution of making the clothes separate game objects, scaling them up so the body wouldn't poke through while animating, and call it done in 5 minutes. But that gives you the problem of slightly weird looking clothes. There's countless solutions to this problem of course and there's advantages and disadvantages to all of them.
Maybe time would be better spent on developing the mechanics of the game, or something else, but the way clothes work is very core to the foundation of the game. Yeah doing all this work isn't flashy, yeah it doesn't look like anything changed when I released a new version with that change, it isn't something most people would even know about, but it's there and time was spent on it because I want to do it right.
Regarding money, it's a nice incentive, but it's not why I do this - I do this because I want this game to exist, and I try to be fair and make sure I'm only charging when I believe the amount of new changes are fair. Patreons have only been charged when I released a new version (and I released the last version for free because there was relatively little new content), and every version is made free after a month or two. Ultimately it is all free content and the patreon is just there for anyone that likes the idea of the game and wants to show their support and get that early access.
Regarding the lack of updates, the heart of the issue is I can't work on this as much as I want to. My job became unexpectedly more demanding early on which has left me with less spare time to develop, and I've unfortunately ran into some health issues on and off the past 2 years, most recently I had a 3 week stay in the hospital and I just got out last week.
I guess the main issue fzdc raises boils down to: what's there isn't enough for how much time has passed. Which I understand and I see where they're coming from, and in some ways I agree. But it is what it is, maybe I should have stayed underground developing it until all the core features are done, but I do like to hear the ideas and excitement from the people that see the game and where I want to take it. Maybe it's delusional but I had some hope that by putting it out there it might inspire other developers to also make ENF games. Regardless, I'm going to keep working on it when I can, people are free to support me if they want, if not that's fine too, and I hope they will still enjoy the free versions when they come out.
Lastly, I want to say that I really appreciate the responses from both fzdc and alex2011, there's a lot of thought put in both of your writings, towards the project and the ecosystem as a whole, and it gave me a lot of insightful reading through. Thank you.
I did those kinds of game jam fests back in the day as well, and fzdc is right, it's relatively easy to pump out a simple game in a week. I recall making a platformer with a few different levels during a 48 hour gamejam when I was in uni. Even though creating one off small games is fast and easy, designing and creating a clean scalable codebase that doesn't turn into complete spaghetti code takes much more time and effort.
That's not just in code either, it applies to a lot of elements that go into making a game. One example for instance, I spent a lot of time integrating the UMA (unity multipurpose avatar) system into the game because among other reasons it allows combining all the character and their clothes into one mesh and hiding parts of that mesh, which meant I could hide the underlying body mesh so it wouldn't poke through clothes, and also meant not rendering the body when it was covered - this saves (perhaps trivially) some rendering time.
Making this game in a gamejam sort of environment you would probably just take the easy solution of making the clothes separate game objects, scaling them up so the body wouldn't poke through while animating, and call it done in 5 minutes. But that gives you the problem of slightly weird looking clothes. There's countless solutions to this problem of course and there's advantages and disadvantages to all of them.
Maybe time would be better spent on developing the mechanics of the game, or something else, but the way clothes work is very core to the foundation of the game. Yeah doing all this work isn't flashy, yeah it doesn't look like anything changed when I released a new version with that change, it isn't something most people would even know about, but it's there and time was spent on it because I want to do it right.
Regarding money, it's a nice incentive, but it's not why I do this - I do this because I want this game to exist, and I try to be fair and make sure I'm only charging when I believe the amount of new changes are fair. Patreons have only been charged when I released a new version (and I released the last version for free because there was relatively little new content), and every version is made free after a month or two. Ultimately it is all free content and the patreon is just there for anyone that likes the idea of the game and wants to show their support and get that early access.
Regarding the lack of updates, the heart of the issue is I can't work on this as much as I want to. My job became unexpectedly more demanding early on which has left me with less spare time to develop, and I've unfortunately ran into some health issues on and off the past 2 years, most recently I had a 3 week stay in the hospital and I just got out last week.
I guess the main issue fzdc raises boils down to: what's there isn't enough for how much time has passed. Which I understand and I see where they're coming from, and in some ways I agree. But it is what it is, maybe I should have stayed underground developing it until all the core features are done, but I do like to hear the ideas and excitement from the people that see the game and where I want to take it. Maybe it's delusional but I had some hope that by putting it out there it might inspire other developers to also make ENF games. Regardless, I'm going to keep working on it when I can, people are free to support me if they want, if not that's fine too, and I hope they will still enjoy the free versions when they come out.
Lastly, I want to say that I really appreciate the responses from both fzdc and alex2011, there's a lot of thought put in both of your writings, towards the project and the ecosystem as a whole, and it gave me a lot of insightful reading through. Thank you.
So more of a real life getting in the way issue than anything else, I see, that makes sense. A hobby project is meant to take a back seat to real life and any money project on your plate, so it is perfectly understandable even if updates are years apart. Life can have many twists and turns that may or may not block your path forward entirely or at least slow you down.
To be honest, I would be taking my time with it as well, though I personally wouldn't choose to say anything about the game, aside from it existing and probably that I wouldn't be releasing a playable version until the end, before completion so as to avoid negativity surrounding the amount of time it is taking. That's just me, I'm the type who doesn't do the whole 'update when 100x a day, dev is milking when I don't release' thing, I'm more liable to not take that kind of thing very well and I don't mean in the 'going dark for ages' or 'abandoning the game' kind of way. Even negative constructive criticism is better.
You just keep doing you and this game will be great.
Probably safe to call this "abandoned". The last Patreon post was at the start of 2022, and before that, the tail end of 2020. Even the last post from the dev here was end of February 2022.
Taking 12-18 months (and longer still) to make any sort of update, even if it was just a general "how have things been? " one, it amazes me that they have any backers left. Maybe there's stuff going on behind the scenes I'm not privy to, but... just from an outside perspective, it's not a good look.
Damn shame, too—the premise had a lot of potential, but it seemed more and more like every new version had less to offer than the last.
Taking 12-18 months (and longer still) to make any sort of update, even if it was just a general "how have things been? " one, it amazes me that they have any backers left. Maybe there's stuff going on behind the scenes I'm not privy to, but... just from an outside perspective, it's not a good look.
Damn shame, too—the premise had a lot of potential, but it seemed more and more like every new version had less to offer than the last.
- Oct 8, 2024
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Wanted to give an update that I saw on a 4chan post, apparently it's the dev himself that answered to someone who was wondering if the project got abandoned.
He is working on a totally new version of an ENF sandbox game just atm he didn't release anything to the public expect this 4chan post.
Now we can't confirm if it's really him or not, but who knows, keep an eye on his patreon/twitter to see if any updates will come in the future.
I've put the image and video he shared on that 4chan post.
Here is what he said:
Don't tell anyone, but that's literally me. It's not abandoned, just been quietly going through a very lengthy transformation that I think will be worth it.
You can follow that account and eventually I'll make more posts about it. I've discovered that I have a hard time posting updates and developing, seems to kills my motivation for whatever reason and it's easier to grind away without posting, so I'll keep doing that.
He is working on a totally new version of an ENF sandbox game just atm he didn't release anything to the public expect this 4chan post.
Now we can't confirm if it's really him or not, but who knows, keep an eye on his patreon/twitter to see if any updates will come in the future.
I've put the image and video he shared on that 4chan post.
Here is what he said:
Don't tell anyone, but that's literally me. It's not abandoned, just been quietly going through a very lengthy transformation that I think will be worth it.
You can follow that account and eventually I'll make more posts about it. I've discovered that I have a hard time posting updates and developing, seems to kills my motivation for whatever reason and it's easier to grind away without posting, so I'll keep doing that.