Others Completed Future Fragments [v1.0.1] [HentaiWriter]

[HentaiWriter]

will absoutely every bit of h-content be viewable in gallery or will some of it be annoyingly on the 'side' h-content thats in the background/stumbled upon by playing?

Yep, every animation will be viewable

The caveat though is that you need 5 out of 10 achievements per level to see all the animations for that level...
...except for one.

There's a special extra animation for the first four levels each that is unlocked by getting all TEN achievements for that level, and as an added bonus, it unlocks a cheat code (and something else regarding the plot) too.

 

[iamnuff]

Feels like a big reason for all the delays was just honest Scope-Creep.
I remember years ago seeing a post talking about adding a stupidly huge amount of items into the game that gave pretty mediocre buffs, over on ULMF before F95 was even a thing. (or at least long before I'd ever heard of it)

It was such a bizarre post because I could see how much effort had gone into making this, and how much more effort would be taken to actually complete this enormous task and how much it would delay production on the actual game, and the only response I could give was 'But why though?'
Did anybody actually care about the item sets, given the amount of work it would take to get them into the game? Did they really add anything?

I think they went through at least one revision in scope after being initially implemented, but my overwhelming response to them is 'Do they even do anything that matters though?' because the buffs they gave you seemed easily ignorable.
Plus, the fact that you could only equip three at a time out of the 50 or so that you said that you were adding, and the fact that you had to go find the individual parts of the set you wanted throughout the game, and then if you ever swapped any of them out you'd lose the set bonus.
The whole thing just felt like an enormous waste of time.
A game mechanic that i'd probably just never bother using because it was a huge waste of time.

Voice acting? Cutscenes? Additional endings or H-scenes?
Those are all value-adds.

But the items just felt like make-work.
Something that somebody thought up, thought would be cool and decided to implement with no real regard for how much development resources it would take away from things that actually matter.

There have been a couple of posts like that, but that was the big stand-out one, to me.
Although of course, I have no idea how much time and resources actually went into that subsystem, or even how much of it is still in the current version of the game.

I was a patreon subscriber at one point. I'm pretty sure my username will be in the credits somewhere, but... there's no way i'd have stayed subscribed for all this time. It's been unreasonably long.

Plus there was the inevitable engine-change. Every Patreon H-game seems to go through one or two, and most of the time rebuilding the game after the change is what kills the project.

Now, all that downer-stuff said, i'm still pretty excited for the game. ('again', actually, rather than 'still' The hype died and then came back when I heard that it was actually almost done)

Plus, the fact that this game looks like it will actually eventually be finished is a major mark in the Devs favour.
Most games that went through half the shit that this project went through would have just been marked as abandoned and forgotten about long ago.
This one... for all the development project's faults and stumbles, it's actually approaching the finish line.

The jury is still out on the quality of the final product, of course. We'll have to see.
But we will see.
... Probably.

 

[HentaiWriter]

Feels like a big reason for all the delays was just honest Scope-Creep.

The actual reason for delays was just simply running into the following cycle over and over;

1) Neat thing we've had planned for a long time for the game
2) We put in the writing, programming, art for this thing
3) We play it
4) Realize this gameplay feature or enemy or boss or etc. wasn't as fun as we had thought it'd be on paper
5) Scrap all the parts that suck, rebuild it with new knowledge of how to fix things
6) Repeat until polished and high quality, because the players don't deserve anything less

We can think something is great and such on paper, but until it's actually in the game, there's no way to really know.
With the experience we've gotten from this game though, we've got a much better idea of what will and won't be fun for future games.

But we just refused to put out something that was mediocre, not fun, and a cash grab. We would have rather went broke and refunded everyone in full than put out something that we weren't proud of and that we didn't feel was the best we could have done at the time.

-----------

Regarding the scope creep thing; we planned for this amount of content from the getgo.

In fact, the game was originally meant to be much larger than this; here's a short list of only a few of the things we've taken out over the course of development.

- Powerups having "set boosts" (equipping specific sets of powerups = more abilities)
- Every level having a secret miniboss
- Multiple ways to defeat main bosses
- Being able to play through the entire game with a second set of cutscenes in a sort of "genocide mode" with new endings for it
- Playing through the whole game as Faye
- More enemies per level
- Enemies having elemental immunity to your abilities
- An entire item based system of using potions and other items to buff your character
- Much much more content for the True Final Boss
- Multiple full vocal songs for bosses
- Much larger areas
- Portraits for all NPCs and enemies during cutscenes
- A full range of facial expressions for Talia's GUI in the upper left
- Visual modifiers to make the game look CRT style or other styles
- The level editor allowing you to inject your own art/audio (it doesn't allow this now)

And so on.

Here's even a screencap from a document from January 2015, the same month we started development; I'd post the whole document here, but it contains the game's ending (which hasn't really changed too much over the years).



And here's a picture of that document's date;



You can notice quite a few things that are extra in this from the actual game;

- 5 enemies per area instead of our 4 in the full game
- Earth elemental attacks (full game has nothing for this)
- Elemental abilities causing actual status effects to enemies
- Not only databanks, but also archives and books to read through
- Enemies being immune to elemental damage (no idea how this would have worked)
- Healing was completely different; you could only heal with healing potions in a limited supply
- Regular shots would have been elementally charged, not just charge shots
- Fantasy creatures in Ice became aliens

The rest of the stuff on the document is identical to what we have now, from level order and level content, to the purpose of NPCs and sex animations, even how Mage A (Talia) and Mage B (Faye) behave and their attack specialities, etc; even the idea of "respawning" from checkpoints was there too.

I remember years ago seeing a post talking about adding a stupidly huge amount of items into the game that gave pretty mediocre buffs, over on ULMF before F95 was even a thing. (or at least long before I'd ever heard of it)

It was such a bizarre post because I could see how much effort had gone into making this, and how much more effort would be taken to actually complete this enormous task and how much it would delay production on the actual game, and the only response I could give was 'But why though?'
Did anybody actually care about the item sets, given the amount of work it would take to get them into the game? Did they really add anything?

I know this is talking about the whole "powerup sets" thing which we abandoned, but just for the record, regarding powerups themselves, people have spent a good while theorycrafting them.
There's an entire section of our discord (#speedrunning) just dedicated to speedrunning and trying out stuff with powerups to try and break levels.

Here's an example of things people have been able to do with just one of the powerups;


---

And people speedrun levels in the game, too;

I think they went through at least one revision in scope after being initially implemented, but my overwhelming response to them is 'Do they even do anything that matters though?' because the buffs they gave you seemed easily ignorable.

The powerups have been revised to be a lot more versatile and do a good degree of things now.

Some of them include things like;

- Creating shockwaves when you land from jumps
- Being able to hover in the air by firing downwards
- Shooting shots that grip the walls/floor and roll along them
- Being able to masturbate to regain health at a cost of max health
- Stunning enemies temporarily by jumping on them
- Charge shots doing more damage based on your timing
- Spread fire shots with more shots per damage you've taken
- Shots instantly traveling
- Increasing your movement speed based on the damage you've taken
- Buffs that are based on your personality values throughout the game

Plus, the fact that you could only equip three at a time out of the 50 or so that you said that you were adding, and the fact that you had to go find the individual parts of the set you wanted throughout the game, and then if you ever swapped any of them out you'd lose the set bonus.

Yeah, that's why we removed it. It definitely wasn't a good design.

But the items just felt like make-work.
Something that somebody thought up, thought would be cool and decided to implement with no real regard for how much development resources it would take away from things that actually matter.

To be clear, the powerups took probably 1 month to come up with them, 2-3 months to implement, and about 2 months to bugtest.

The reason we wanted to have them in was to allow for players to theorycraft and come up with broken combos, or ways to deal with certain bosses.

For example, if you equip the Blender (fast charge shots) and Knife (shockwaves when you land from a jump while charged up), you can do quick hops and spam shockwaves up and down the maps, wiping out enemies left and right.

Or if you equip the Wall Clock (exponential movement speed), Men's Sneakers (extra jump/hang time), and Brain Implant (ignore enemy collision but lose minimap and alter visuals) you can speedrun through most maps pretty efficiently.

There's also the Maine Coon Cat (heal from damaging enemies), Clover (more shots at low health), and Rugby Helmet (take less damage per hit the lower your HP is) to effectively never die.

I was a patreon subscriber at one point. I'm pretty sure my username will be in the credits somewhere, but... there's no way i'd have stayed subscribed for all this time. It's been unreasonably long.

It has been, but there's a three point thing of quality of content x density of content x time; one of those things had to give, and we refused to give leeway on the first two.

But we always encourage people on the front page of the Patreon, on Discord, on Twitter, in PMs on Discord, in emails, etc. to only pledge a single time and then back out to get their rewards forever, to ask for refunds if people want them, etc.

The last thing we want is for someone to stay backing us for a super long period of time if they can't afford it or don't want to.

The jury is still out on the quality of the final product, of course. We'll have to see.
But we will see.
... Probably.

I do hope the game lives up to the hype, as well as being something that was worth the wait; I have faith in both, but that's from my perspective, and everyone's opinions are different.

I also hope that my replies here cleared up some of the stuff about the game, and its development process as well.

If I came off a bit irritable in this btw, it's because there's some IRL stuff going on that's made things a massive pain in the ass over the last few days, apartment troubles and all that.

 

[HardcoreCuddler]

I mean, in full transparency, it's still definitely gonna take until right up to the last minute to get stuff in and done, but it's looking good still and thanks!



For the record, there's no cutscenes or events where she;

- is physically injured in any way
- gets her bones broken or body bruised or etc.
- is degraded verbally (calling her a bitch, or cunt, or whore, or slut, etc.)
- vomits, shits, pisses (or has any of those done to her)
- bleeds

You get the idea.

The mana barrier she's got is a buffer that protects her from damage, similar to the concept of how in dragon ball z or other series someone can get hit with a bomb or laser or sword and nothing happens because their "ki" or "magic power" or whatever else is protecting them and taking the damage for them.

So you can think of her life bar as more like her "mana shield bar".

When it hits 0, the reason her suit explodes is because the mana shield, when drained, does a final "push" of explosive energy all around her, in a last ditch attempt to knock off anything damaging her (think like if your clothes or skin was on fire, or drenched with some toxin).

Unfortunately, the shock from having the remaining bit of mana she's got left bursting out of her like that, so that's why she gets knocked to the ground and is without much strength left.

The reason her gloves are left intact is because a mage's most valuable body part is their hands; they have to be protected at all costs, because without hands to heal any injuries they COULD get while defenseless (once their mana trickles back), then the entire system would be pointless.

As for the WORM themselves (and other enemies), they all have different (sex based) incentives as to why they'll never beat her up or stab her or step on her or whatever else, once her mana is drained.

Hope that gives a bit more detail into the type of content in the game

PERFECT
FINALLY A GAME THAT ISN'T MADE BY DEGENERATES I FUCKING HATE SEXUAL VIOLENCE

 

[MortimerScharf]

Well, it's amazing to see you and your team have made such hasty progress on this game. It's been sitting on my wishlist on Steam for quite a while now, so I'll make to buy it day one.

One thing though, I find it absolutely criminal that the only corruption and transformation scene is the one we've all seen by now. I wish more had been included in the final game, but that's alright.

 

[HentaiWriter]

PERFECT
FINALLY A GAME THAT ISN'T MADE BY DEGENERATES I FUCKING HATE SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Just being clear, there is a significant amount of dub-con in the game.
But if you're talking purely "sexual violence" as in literal "physical violence during sex", then there's none of that at all, yeah.
She even outright says she enjoys what's going on in all the CG scenes, but she just wants to escape from them because she's on a time-sensitive mission.

Well, it's amazing to see you and your team have made such hasty progress on this game. It's been sitting on my wishlist on Steam for quite a while now, so I'll make to buy it day one.

One thing though, I find it absolutely criminal that the only corruption and transformation scene is the one we've all seen by now. I wish more had been included in the final game, but that's alright.

So there's that one scene, yeah, but also to be clear there, she's still in her right mind; she's not like brainwashed or hypnotized or anything, even with being transformed.

That said, while it may not be in the way that's typical of it, there is a good chunk of "corruption" scenes throughout the game if you manage to play really, really outside of the box.

They're just not sexual corruption scenes; they're corruption of a pretty different nature where things go off the rails.

Endings-wise, all the True Endings are affected by your sexuality Ideal points (or lack thereof), which in itself is a sort of corruption with how sex plays into a good amount of the endings. You don't see the sexual events in these cases, but you definitely hear/read about them.

Finally, there's the three "bad endings" (like actual endings, not game overs); these differ based on your sexuality points too, as to whether Talia and Faye are just ehh about being gangbanged by the entire Kingdom, or they're massively into it.

 

[j01ntr0l1a]

do i still download the earlier version? or the v49?

 

[HentaiWriter]

do i still download the earlier version? or the v49?

If you've never played the game before, definitely get v0.27EX.
The other demo levels don't have nearly as much content.

 

[Sologor]

I haven't been paying much attention lately and only read this last page but what is going on? The release date was said to be end of summer 22 for some time now and, last time I checked, September 22 is THE end of summer. Technically not delayed even if right on the edge, am I missing something?

To be clear, submitting the game on September 22 means we get to play the game like what? A day/week/month later?

This may have already been answered but how many H scenes will there be in the game roughly? (don't need the exact number)

Do you already have a price range for the game?



That's all, keep up the good work and can't wait for the release

 

[HentaiWriter]

I haven't been paying much attention lately and only read this last page but what is going on? The release date was said to be end of summer 22 for some time now and, last time I checked, September 22 is THE end of summer. Technically not delayed even if right on the edge, am I missing something?

When people reference "delays", they're talking about previous times we've had to delay the game's release; it's still set to be submitted to Steam on the 22nd.

To be clear, submitting the game on September 22 means we get to play the game like what? A day/week/month later?

That's the thing that's up in the air; once it's with Steam, it's out of our hands. They may even reject it for one reason or another that we have to fix some sort of incompatibility with Steam API stuff or whatever else.

This may have already been answered but how many H scenes will there be in the game roughly? (don't need the exact number)

Roughly;
- 25 CGs
- 100+ sprite sex animation loops

Do you already have a price range for the game?

Yeah, it'll be $20 USD, with regional pricing, so most other countries will get it cheaper.

That's all, keep up the good work and can't wait for the release

Thanks a lot, we're doing our best

 

[Sologor]

Nice, thanks for the info.

This is just out of pure curiosity and I don't mean it as a suggestion but why didn't you try to release on Epic Games Store (EGS) first as timed exclusive? I've heard they give e better deal than Steam especially for indie devs. Personally I don't like the EGS client and I don't buy from them but some steam devs seem to like it a lot.

The price was exactly what I expected so that is a plus. Future fragments and Crisis Point have been on my radar for a while and I'm a very patient player if the devs are willing to make a good game. I only hope that Steam doesn't fuck up and releases the game asap

 

[HentaiWriter]

Nice, thanks for the info.

This is just out of pure curiosity and I don't mean it as a suggestion but why didn't you try to release on Epic Games Store (EGS) first as timed exclusive?

You must be registered to see the links

This is why

That, and we have all of our wishlists already on Steam, which isn't something we'd want to abandon for anything, etc.
(Yes, House Party and some other NSFW games are up there, but they're SFW versions that have patches; with the way our engine and content is structured, patches are impossible, so we couldn't go that route.)

The price was exactly what I expected so that is a plus. Future fragments and Crisis Point have been on my radar for a while and I'm a very patient player if the devs are willing to make a good game. I only hope that Steam doesn't fuck up and releases the game asap

When we submit it to Steam, they have to approve it, but we still get to release it of our own volition, so they won't like actually make it available for sale without our permission.

 

[omp123]

They can't all be based as fuck like gabe newell.

"Porn games sell for how much? Fuck it, we sell porn games now."

 

[omp123]

When people reference "delays", they're talking about previous times we've had to delay the game's release; it's still set to be submitted to Steam on the 22nd.

I know the Steam upload date is the 22nd, will it also be uploaded to itch or whatever other non-steam platform you plan to release it on at the same time?

 

[HentaiWriter]

I know the Steam upload date is the 22nd, will it also be uploaded to itch or whatever other non-steam platform you plan to release it on at the same time?

Once it releases on Steam, we'll release it on itch; we'll probably wait about a month after that to release it on other platforms, as that'd be the time we'd need to get in remaining voicework and polish.

We'll be updating the Steam build nearly every day for that first month, so while that's not much of an issue on Steam since it auto updates, on other platforms, it'll be a nightmare to update it that much since we can't manually update it ourselves on them.

Itch is the only exception, which is why we'll be posting it there too at launch.

 

[omp123]

Once it releases on Steam, we'll release it on itch; we'll probably wait about a month after that to release it on other platforms, as that'd be the time we'd need to get in remaining voicework and polish.

We'll be updating the Steam build nearly every day for that first month, so while that's not much of an issue on Steam since it auto updates, on other platforms, it'll be a nightmare to update it that much since we can't manually update it ourselves on them.

Itch is the only exception, which is why we'll be posting it there too at launch.

Got it, so it'll wait til it gets the pass on Steam to go on Itch? Sounds fair, can't wait!

 

[HentaiWriter]

Got it, so it'll wait til it gets the pass on Steam to go on Itch? Sounds fair, can't wait!

Pretty much yep! And thanks, we can't wait either

 

[HentaiWriter]

By the way, if anyone's wondering where the weekly progress report is at, we're going to post it Fridays from here on out until we submit to Steam, so as to align with the submission date to Steam (the 22nd of September; we'll likely be up until the last moment on the 22nd, then submit and pass out, and then I'll post the progress report when I wake up, hence the 23rd/Friday).

Progress has been a bit slow this week on my end though, thanks to someone trying to break into my bank account as well as spending a lot of time ripping audio instead of writing, but I've been back on track for writing as of a day or two ago.

 

[omp123]

Sorry to hear about the bank account, hopefully that gets patched up soon.

 

[HentaiWriter]

Sorry to hear about the bank account, hopefully that gets patched up soon.

Oh, it's all good now, just took a lot of calling back and forth between my bank and credit agency and two or three other places sorting things out. Didn't lose any money or anything like that; the main reason it exhausted me was because the call came in at like 8 in the morning, right after working all night (went to bed at 6am), so staying up another 5 or 6 hours after that totally burned me out for the rest of the day.