- Mar 9, 2020
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- Jan 10, 2018
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I assure you, as I've said right above, the game is still being actively worked on.
- Apr 3, 2018
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So it's still ''being actively worked on'' but why does it take a year and more? i was really hyped for this game a year ago :/ sad to see how things go/went
- Jan 10, 2018
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It take a lot of time cause most of the team have full time jobs, it's just something we work on during our free time after work and when we find time where we're all free to do team discussions to make sure we don't accidentally work on incompatible stuff.
Like for the art, which is the part that by far take the longest right now (and the only obstacle left), imagine the amount of art needed take like 30 hour to complet (random numbers since I'm not the artist, it's probably higher). Now imagine the amount of time it take to find those 30 hours when you also have to work, rest, do what you have to do and live your life every day compared to if said art was your job and you could just work on it like 5 hours a day. And that's ignoring how a lot of this time was laying down the groundwork for a lot of stuff like sprite work and stuff that wasn't in the demo and will serve going forward.
Also glad to hear you were interested in our game and don't worry, it will come out and other updates won't take as long.
- Apr 3, 2018
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That's unfortunate of course. hope u guys will be able to make enough money in future from patreon to focus only on this game and maybe even future games.we have seen examples of it so why not for u guys as well right? i wish u all good luck and can't wait to see more!
- Jul 7, 2020
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The good news is with the quality of this demo, I 100% expect that this will get enough support on patreon for you all to quit your jobs if you want. It's just gonna take time of course.
- May 10, 2017
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Can we have an update like some character introduction, new art or a demo v2? You say actively worked on but other say it's dead. Kind of conflicted on that one
- Jan 10, 2018
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I'm not really in charge of that and the artist said he'd prefer to reveal the art only once it's in the game but give exemple of what you'd want as a sign of progress and I'll see what I can do.
We tried a bunch of stuff like the newsletter and the discord but it didn't really seem to garner interest so we're kinda stumped there.
- May 10, 2017
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I already gave an example
my brother in christ, post updates in this thread. It exists for the dev himself
This project is a side hobby, which the dev group feels they might be able to make some easy dough off of. Since they all have actual jobs and lives to focus on, they don’t really have a need to work on this game unless they are completely bored. 30+ hours of artwork, pushed to 2 hours a week takes less than 4 months to finish. More than enough time for someone with a busy job.
I think it’s more likely the devs or artist just doesn’t really care about the project, so they don’t feel any need to put effort in to it. That’s why there is no art to show. A lame excuse like waiting for the game is a lazy excuse because sharing a single still of work for proof, isn’t something that should be difficult after a year. Also, considering teaser stills were given prior to the demo release.
I think it’s more likely the devs or artist just doesn’t really care about the project, so they don’t feel any need to put effort in to it. That’s why there is no art to show. A lame excuse like waiting for the game is a lazy excuse because sharing a single still of work for proof, isn’t something that should be difficult after a year. Also, considering teaser stills were given prior to the demo release.
- Nov 16, 2018
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Hi, I'm the Artist on this project. I think I'm the one most of these assertions are directed towards, so I thought I'd respond directly so you can get it straight from the horses mouth.
Believe me when I say, I share your frustration about how long the project has been taking and the pace of progress. I'd go as far to say that I'm even more frustrated given I have a vested interest in it's completion and success, especially considering the time and effort I've invested into it. You're not wrong that my work and other real-life commitments take time away from this project and slow it's development, and that will continue to be true so long as I need to do other work in order to pay the rent and bills. Hopefully, and I'd imagine you and others share this desire with me, we'll get to the point where I can work on this project as though it were a full time job. I do have to balance that against my financial obligations though, as I couldn't work on the project if I don't have a roof over my head or food on the table.
Having said that, I do want to address some of the other assumptions you made, as they aren't reflective of the realities of this type of work, or the specific circumstances facing this project and I want to dispel any erroneous assumptions or misinformation. As I've stated before, this project is something I've been working on when I have the spare time to do it, but it is not a hobby, I don't do it for fun (although I do enjoy working with the team). This is very much a serious endeavor for me and the goal is make it my sole source of work and to transition to working on this full time should it gain the necessary support and traction. I'm under no illusion that this might not happen, and that the need to balance my current work with this project may hamper it's ability to succeed, but there is only so much that can be done to mitigate this in the meantime. It's a difficult balance to manage and one that's only really solved with support. As of yet we haven't been able to garner that support as, rightfully so, people are probably still waiting to see that we can deliver on the product. It's a "chicken or the egg" situation, we can't expect support without demonstrating that we can deliver on our work, and we're constrained in our ability to deliver on the work without support. Hopefully we'll get to the point where we can earn peoples trust and faith, and I understand that the pace of development doesn't help with that. If you have any ideas or solutions to this problem you think we may not have considered, I'd encourage you to share them with us, we'd love to hear it.
Secondly, I'm not sure how familiar you are with this line of work, but I assure you it requires a great deal more time than 30 hours. To give you some context, I work as an animator/motion-graphics designers for my day job and have worked in the animation industry for about 10 years now. These types of projects, with the feature set we've planned out, typically employ a team of artists to complete it in a timely manner. I've spent hundreds of hours on the artwork for this project, and I wish that was an exaggeration. CGs alone can take me 20-80 hours to do, depending on the complexity and amount of new assets required. If I was working on this full time with no other artists on the team, we could probably push out a full update once every 2-3 months, but as it stands right now I'm only able to work on this part-time, with the hours varying by how my free-time I have. I genuinely wish you were right and that it took less time, but unfortunately it requires far more time than you think and we'd be way further behind then we are if I were only dedicating 2 hours a week like you suggested.
Finally, as we've mentioned before, a lot of the work that goes into the first few releases is foundational work. That includes UI elements, backgrounds, sprite assets etc. basically it's all the boring stuff that we feel most of that isn't really "teaser" worthy (if you disagree, please let us know) and largely goes unnoticed unless it isn't there, so we haven't shared it. For example, I've spent a bunch of time drawing different facial expressions, arm poses and outfit variants for multiple characters in order to support the wardrobe system we want to have for our sprites (basically allowing you to dress them however you want). Is something like contact sheets of arm poses and facial expressions something you'd want to see? Maybe this is something we were wrong about and something people would want to see? Most of the "teaser" material is being kept under wraps because we don't want to spoil too much of the next release. This area is has a lot of unknowns for us, so we would genuinely appreciate people's thoughts and opinions on this point specifically. Long and short, what sort of updates or things do you think we should be sharing during development? How much is to much and results is spoilers? Any feedback would be appreciated.
Anyway, I hope this brings some more context and clarity to the issue. It seems that you're frustrated about the pace of development, and I get it, I really do. I'm right there with you, but you should know it's not for lack of effort, interest or dedication like you suggested.
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- Oct 16, 2017
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I have been a patreon supporter from the moment you dropped the demo but dropped the support because of the very long silence. Even if you dont want to spoil much long silence is your worst enemy. So i would say poses and expressions are sure a lot better then silence. Put the diffrent poses and experessions in a gif format and people would at least know that you arent dead
- Nov 16, 2018
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That's a very valid and fair criticism, our activity on the Patreon has been insufficient. Thanks for the feedback, I'll talk to the team about your reccomendation.
Thanks for the response.
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- Nov 16, 2018
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I'm out tonight, but I'll see if I can post some teasers by tomorrow evening so that people can see work is being done.
- Nov 16, 2018
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I might post some more this coming week. Still trying to find the balance between "teaser" and "spoiler". Hope you guys like them, these CGs take a lot of time, especially the ones with animated assets.
honestly this is the content we are missing, some teasers, just showing that work is being done is all it takes, personally i know i don't care if it's just UI elements, or over the span of a week, even hearing that something even sketches of the work have been drawn up. so please do post more of these when you can, it will also bump the thread if you do, so that when people find it, it's with recent work, more posts that are positive to show work being done, a lot of the time we have projects scraped and abandoned that seemed promising, and that's how a long silence feels.
I appreciate the level of detail. TBH, it seems almost too well done, meaning that it seems time-consuming.
- Nov 16, 2018
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Lol, I'm glad someone does.
Yeah it is very time consuming, each CG frame takes 30-80 hours to do. There's about 8 of them in this update. I'm debating whether I should tone down the detail and polish to speed up development for future updates, or stick with the standard I've set until we can afford to bring on another artist to help with it or do backgrounds. Backgrounds are by far the most tedious and time consuming asset to make, and I'm not very good at them.
When you guys get to see the entirety of it, I'd love to hear what people think, but in the meantime I wouldn't mind hearing what people's initial impressions are on this with the teasers that have been shared.
Nice art! These are great pictures, like as stand alone pictures already the detail is extremely high. As a developer myself that has dabbled in a few similar projects all the way back to the Newgrounds flash days up until Adobe CS5, I'd suggest this to guage your bang for your buck: look at similar projects.
Let me suggest Four Elements Trainer for this exercise, seems an obvious example: that project was extremely successful and has tons of content and hundreds of scenes. I'll leave aside the gameplay loops and other elements, and focus on the artwork: a lot of it is "good enough". Characters are recognizable and faithful, expressions are varied enough to be engaging, but most importantly because it's not terribly detailed (highlights and shadows often skipped, high definition ignored, lots of *rough lines* especially for backgrounds or even lazy for single use and discarded environments, etc.) there get's to be *A LOT* of it.
Anyone getting to the H-scenes is fine with rough lines or lack of detail, the context of the scene and the imagination do some heavy lifting. Infact in true anime/cartoon style, rough lines and action lines do a lot more to denote passion and movement because they aren't clean. I don't think I was terribly disappointed ever with that game, and even if I was disappointed once or twice, there was a scene soon after where other artwork was very satisfying. That made that project shine.
One of the most disappointing things about these games is when there's a very rare amount of art but a ton of gameplay loops or *grinding*... for like, 5 different scenes (or even just 5 different positions total) for each love interest. The art is potentially one of the most valuable and often rarest commodities in these games, because it's difficult to do, so when there gets to be a lot of it, that's truly amazing.
Looking at the teasers, I feel like you really love getting the details right, but if you also would like to express these characters in a few different situations (as what drove me when I worked on these projects), ask yourself how satisfied you'd be with art like FET had, whether that saves you time, and where you'd like to be in time invested to be able to continue. Maybe these frames are really important because the girls are in makeup and beauty is very relevant to this scene in particular, but don't burn yourself out for it, people will appreciate what you can put out without the perfection of Instagram in every frame... or any frame, for that matter. Already these frames are masterful capturing the likeness, art, style, but we all know ATLA was never this detailed hahaha.
anyways great stuff just some dumb thoughts from a fan who's also a project manager / program manager by trade, I hope it helps. And FWIW, don't ever care about anybody trying to insist the project is dead or lamenting progress, you don't owe anyone anything, make the art you want to share when you want to share it, it's yours, they can kick rocks.
Let me suggest Four Elements Trainer for this exercise, seems an obvious example: that project was extremely successful and has tons of content and hundreds of scenes. I'll leave aside the gameplay loops and other elements, and focus on the artwork: a lot of it is "good enough". Characters are recognizable and faithful, expressions are varied enough to be engaging, but most importantly because it's not terribly detailed (highlights and shadows often skipped, high definition ignored, lots of *rough lines* especially for backgrounds or even lazy for single use and discarded environments, etc.) there get's to be *A LOT* of it.
Anyone getting to the H-scenes is fine with rough lines or lack of detail, the context of the scene and the imagination do some heavy lifting. Infact in true anime/cartoon style, rough lines and action lines do a lot more to denote passion and movement because they aren't clean. I don't think I was terribly disappointed ever with that game, and even if I was disappointed once or twice, there was a scene soon after where other artwork was very satisfying. That made that project shine.
One of the most disappointing things about these games is when there's a very rare amount of art but a ton of gameplay loops or *grinding*... for like, 5 different scenes (or even just 5 different positions total) for each love interest. The art is potentially one of the most valuable and often rarest commodities in these games, because it's difficult to do, so when there gets to be a lot of it, that's truly amazing.
Looking at the teasers, I feel like you really love getting the details right, but if you also would like to express these characters in a few different situations (as what drove me when I worked on these projects), ask yourself how satisfied you'd be with art like FET had, whether that saves you time, and where you'd like to be in time invested to be able to continue. Maybe these frames are really important because the girls are in makeup and beauty is very relevant to this scene in particular, but don't burn yourself out for it, people will appreciate what you can put out without the perfection of Instagram in every frame... or any frame, for that matter. Already these frames are masterful capturing the likeness, art, style, but we all know ATLA was never this detailed hahaha.
anyways great stuff just some dumb thoughts from a fan who's also a project manager / program manager by trade, I hope it helps. And FWIW, don't ever care about anybody trying to insist the project is dead or lamenting progress, you don't owe anyone anything, make the art you want to share when you want to share it, it's yours, they can kick rocks.
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