- Dec 1, 2018
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Awesome thanks for the update, cant wait for the release, its been a long time coming
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Absolutely, we can't wait to finish it, grinding away on work on it every day!
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Damn, what a time to get covid. Hope you're on the mend soon HentaiWriter. Looking forward to the game!
This game has worked very well in terms of story, gameplay, and characterization, but I had a question:
How many sex scenes has this game so far? I don't mean pixelated animations, I mean quality renderings
How many sex scenes has this game so far? I don't mean pixelated animations, I mean quality renderings
The majority of the game's sex scenes are going to be in the pixel style, but I made a list of all the content here - with the caveat that some of it is guesses/hypothetical, and HW hasn't confirmed or denied whether it's accurate.
I went to the link you gave me
The number of items with CG written in front of them is 5
Does that mean that apart from the pixel animations, we only have 5 high-quality sexy renderings?
It's definitely not quite that bad:
-Each of the generic enemies get their own set of scenes with Talia, including a CG scene with variants. That's four enemies on each of the first four levels, and one on the fifth level.
-All five bosses also get both sprite sex scenes and CGs.
-And at least two additional scenes will also get CGs.
That's just what we know about for certain. A couple of the other already-existing scenes may yet get CGs added, though this is still an unknown, and the four end-of-level POV scenes are supposed to be in a third style somewhere in-between the sprite and CG styles, though we haven't actually seen any full images in this style yet.
Overall, though, while they're definitely in the minority compared to the sprite stuff, we are looking at a minimum of 24 CG scenes.
24 numbers of CG is not a small number, it is great
I thought we only have 5 CG, because I searched on Google, without letting it be a spoiler, I guess it was under 5 CG.
That survey also showed that people want this game to be sex-oriented
Of course, I say again that the story and character creation and giving depth to the character, text, events, logicality, etc. are as important as sexual tension.
Yeah, for the full game, there'll be 24 sex CGs, each with 2-3 variants.
There'll also be CGs of other kinds, to be clear (endings, opening cinematics, etc.)
Yeah, there is a lot of sex content in this game, but overall, it's probably 2-3% of the game's content total, with the rest of the content being totally fine for SFW stuff and a big gameplay/story focus.
Sex-wise, a large focus is on the sprite scenes over CGs, per the game's aesthetic/gameplay style, of course.
Been following this game for a long while, looks great and can't wait!
Just curious on how much money in total has this cost to this date right now? Like how much money have people supported you guys with in total.(I know its not finished) And when did you guys start working on it?
Best of luck with the release!
Just curious on how much money in total has this cost to this date right now? Like how much money have people supported you guys with in total.(I know its not finished) And when did you guys start working on it?
Best of luck with the release!
It's been just over 8 years, since January 2015; i'd estimate (since Patreon doesn't give full numbers) it's somewhere around $890,000 or so, with probably $150,000 of that going to audiowork.
So broken down into 3 people, that's about $246k per person over 8 years, or $30k a year average.
Couldn't have made the game without that support, so we're grateful as hell for it, and it's what's allowed us to work full time on the game all these years.
- Aug 4, 2020
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If what he's saying is true (which I'll just assume it is; since HW doesn't seem to have a history of lies unlike others), that's $2k per month for each person working on this.
Then if you take into account that $2k is "before tax" per say, as in, nobody is going to put money down for their retirement as a "normal" job would before you'd be paid that $2k, for example.
So in contrast to a "normal" job, that would be around $1k each per month...which to me is reasonable for the amount of game they delivered
This is before tax numbers, yes.
Actually, to go on a little spiel here, a lot of indie games cost way more than most people think; as an example, Indivisible cost around $3.5 million, and Bloodstained cost around $5 million, with characters in Skullgirls costing around $200,000 a character.So in contrast to a "normal" job, that would be around $1k each per month...which to me is reasonable for the amount of game they delivered
Just wanted to put things into perspective because in the last few years, I think the general public has gotten a very skewed image of how much it actually costs to make a game, and not in a good way; when you Kickstarters asking for like $5,000 for a full blown game, it's almost guaranteed they're not gonna have enough to complete the game.
I would estimate something like the following needs for games, in terms of the money you'd need to pay a team long enough to accomplish said game + assets needed etc.
Bare bones game - $100,000+
Decent quality/slightly above average game - $300,000+
Exceptional quality game - $1,000,000+
The thing is, for a game to get made on a budget below $100k, you're going to need one of (if not multiple) things to be true;
1) The game has a secondary source of funding (devs already well off financially or living with parents or with a partner with significant income); therefore, the actual cost of the game is much higher than the Kickstarter/Patreon might come off as being
2) The game has a secondary source of funding (devs are using their day job to put a small amount of money from it into the game); in this scenario, the game will take a very, very long time to complete
3) The game is made by very well known devs or with a very well known IP, and thus a publisher or some other entity is willing to foot extraneous bills (either paying for all assets etc. or paying for the employee rents, utilities, something like this), again, not giving a full picture of the money spent/needed
4) The game is being made by a 1 in a million, supremely skilled developer who can do practically everything themselves (audio, programming, writing, art) and do it well, and do it fast, meaning that the only thing the money even goes towards is just paying their rent/bills and no one else needs to get paid
Outside of those four cases, I can't think of a case where a game would get made with decent quality, and made quickly (within 1-2 years time), while having enough money to pay everyone working on the game, that would get made for less than $100k or even $50k.
And if you extrapolate out the time spent on a lot of these games, many indie game creators are effectively working for way, way less than what a typical programmer/artist/writer/audio specialist would make in a salaried career.
The average programmer in the USA makes $20-30 an hour; if you take that $100,000 for a base level game up above and assume three people on a team will take 2 years to make a game, that's $16,666 a year, or $8 an hour, assuming a 40 hour work-week. That's almost the federal minimum wage, for a job that typically pays 3x that much in normal circumstances, minimum.
Sure, they may make a lot of money back with game sales, but there's no ensuring they'll actually sell well; this is also assuming they pay no one else for any other assets (and no money spent on marketing), and it assumes they even raised $100k in the first place when many, many indie game kickstarters raise only a fraction of that.
This isn't even considering either that most indie devs are doing 20+ different skillsets usually (an artist doing CGs, backgrounds, animation, sprites, special effects, GUI, design, linework, coloring, tiles, when on an AAA team they'd have one or more people dedicated to each of those skillsets), and... you get the picture.
Figured that might put things in perspective though for some people, not in relation to our game, but just indie games and video games in general.
(On the other end of the scale, here's some of the most expensive games ever made; take special note of how much these companies spend on marketing versus the actual game itself, it's wild.
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)
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yeap, things get expensive fast. I was surprised to hear some prices myself for profesional software development in my own career
Would just like to point out exceptionally rare exceptions even if just to give credit to amazing studios
Also Dead Cells, Terraria and a few others
Cannot find the actual sauce but iirc, hollow knight was made with a budget of 90K dollars in under 3 years. It's because of teams like this and I even include you HW that I always believed indies are the best. Many triple A game studio have grown way too fat and complacent (sometimes even insulting their own fans)
Yes, I love 2d metroidvanias
Just to stay on topic.
Has it ever occured to you to just give up with the project or to abandon some feauture because of time/money/technical issues?
And this is pure curiosity considering the nature of the game but how were H-scene considered? What was the process involving how the ladies were going to be "handled"?
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Also Dead Cells, Terraria and a few others
Cannot find the actual sauce but iirc, hollow knight was made with a budget of 90K dollars in under 3 years. It's because of teams like this and I even include you HW that I always believed indies are the best. Many triple A game studio have grown way too fat and complacent (sometimes even insulting their own fans)
Yes, I love 2d metroidvanias
Just to stay on topic.
Has it ever occured to you to just give up with the project or to abandon some feauture because of time/money/technical issues?
And this is pure curiosity considering the nature of the game but how were H-scene considered? What was the process involving how the ladies were going to be "handled"?
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So this would fall under my example of both #1 and #4 from the above; they did take out a loan, so it was around $90k like you said.
For them to take just over 2.5 years (May 2014-Febuary 2017), that'd be $90,000 divided by 3 people divided by 30 months, for a total of only $1000 a month.
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According to this, it's roughly $1300-$2580 a month just to live where their offices are at; they would have had to pay rent on this office and on their own homes/apartments as well, and this is assuming they paid no taxes and outsourced no content (hence #4 on my list above).
Total guess, but I'd say a better estimate of how much was actually "spent" on Hollow Knight was probably around $200,000 with the extra $110,000 coming from their own funding from their prior projects, with at least one of the devs for Hollow Knight having worked on large studio projects prior according to their posts/media etc. (and this is assuming they lived pretty frugally, but that's what I mean about the full costs not being immediately apparent.)
Terraria is kind of an odd case since, like Minecraft, it's one of those "never complete" games, so the actual amount of money that's went into it is pretty much a total black hole/wild guess.
Dead Cells got released in early access very early on (only taking a year), by a studio with
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20+ years of experience, so this likely falls under again #4, and also #3 (as they had many prior successes) and #1.They had a lot of prototyping methods that got the game out very fast, like all the characters actually being 3D, then just painted on with pixels;
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As with before, none of this is meant to disparage these games or companies, nor make their accomplishments seem lesser; they're all amazing games/companies.
I'm just pointing out the stuff I noted above where these guys are outliers, but unfortunately that ends up causing a disconnect with the public in thinking that this stuff is the norm, when it's 1 in a million exceptions, and then those same expectations get expected of every indie dev. And of course, that's not the fault of the devs; they didn't cause this effect, it just is what it is.
We made a pretty huge list of stuff we got rid of earlier in the topic, I'll copy-paste it from that;
- 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
- Powerups were originally going to give extra boosts if you had three equipped in a set theme (set boosts)
- There were going to be secret mini-bosses in each level that would have tied into a larger, arcing theme across our games
- Talia was going to have a ground pound of sorts as her earth ability
- You were going to be able to have a second, secret way to beat each boss
- Beating a level would bring up a tally that would have had lots of data on your performance etc.
- The ice level enemies were originally going to be mythological beasts/creatures
- The stealth area was going to originally be much, much more complex programming/aesthetically
- The struggle mechanic was, for a brief period, going to be something where you'd actually put in commands to break out
- The fire area was, for a brief period, going to have a mechanic where you'd knock rocks down from the ceiling to plug lava spouts or have the lava spout burst to blow a rock across an area as a platform
- The fire area was also, for a longer period, going to have a type of room where you'd have to run through it as fast as possible to get through before actual 1-hit-ko lava caught up with you
- The ice level was going to have all the enemies react to sound when you walked on snow vs ice (this was later used for the infected grunt)
- The electric area's milk machines were going to deposit milk bottles on the machine, which would then heal enemies that walked past it
- The earth area was going to have a tentacle vine that would have reached down from ceilings to grab you as you passed by if you didn't dodge it or shoot it
- The ice level was going to have an environmental trap where a round, smooth icicle would pop up and penetrate talia, which would then melt over time
- The End's mechanics were going to involve a decent amount of use of the fact that time "freezes" in the other dimension when you're in the one you're in, so we were going to have puzzles where you'd have to say, fire a shot in the real world, then jump to the alter world quickly, run around, and end up in a portal back on the other side of the real world portion of the map before the bullet hits, for the platform to stretch a certain way and carry you through the map
- The boss fight for the fire level was originally going to be a huge version of the flying imp/glider enemy; the blob version was also, at one point, going to be invincible and you would have to outrun it until it hit a wall and died
- Reading silver databanks would have given you "code letters" per databank, which, when put together, could be unscrambled to get a secret sex animation for that level
- The earth power you'd get for beating the boss was also, at one point, going to be an ability to fast-travel using vines you rammed into the ground or wall (so teleporting through the ground/walls basically), but this turned into the portal system/stretchy platforms, so there became no use for it
- We also considered giving her an earth attack (not utility ability) that would have healed her upon hitting enemies with it by leeching their energy, but this was decided to be way too broken
Not sure what you mean on this one, if you could clarify; we did want from the start for the H-scenes to have the following features though.
- Nothing brutal or extreme or painful
- Clothed animations would be about Talia's pleasure, unclothed ones would be about the enemy's pleasure (we had to abandon this some towards the end of the game to maintain uniqueness in animations/poses)
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1 - Wanted to point out how you don't need a massive budget for REALLY good games
2 - Was more interested in the "were you ever close to give up?"
3 - I meant how did you decided what kind of cutscene to develop? Who came up with the idea to chain a gal upside down and let her get plowed by a robotic tentacle? How the ero content got introduced? Did you all got in a room and brainstormed the best way on how you wanted the ladies to get down?
PS
Terraria is finished by the way. Last update was over a year ago (maybe two? can't remember) and was called "end of the journey" or something, just to signal the end. Still, I get your point
2 - Was more interested in the "were you ever close to give up?"
3 - I meant how did you decided what kind of cutscene to develop? Who came up with the idea to chain a gal upside down and let her get plowed by a robotic tentacle? How the ero content got introduced? Did you all got in a room and brainstormed the best way on how you wanted the ladies to get down?
PS
Terraria is finished by the way. Last update was over a year ago (maybe two? can't remember) and was called "end of the journey" or something, just to signal the end. Still, I get your point
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1 - Yeah, this can be true, but it does fall into requiring your team members to be those "1 in a million people who can do it all", as usually the large budget is a result of A) having to outsource/hire others for assets your team can't do, and B) development time running long when team members aren't super experienced or super 1 in a million people etc.
2 - Oh, no, there was never a point where I was like "yeah, let's just quit this game and do something else". There were lots of points where I thought "ok, we gotta not do this particular thing because it would be a nightmare to do now that we've tried implementing even a tiny bit of it", but never wanting to give up.
3 - Generally, the ero scenes came about as the last thing planned for a given area, in that the first thing we considered was the overall storyline and gameplay mechanics for a level.
Ex. "ok, we want a sex toy level because people would need SOME form of release in a government where sex is banned... that means lots of technology and factory type settings, so stuff like conveyor belts is a given, but we need some sci-fi element in there, so gravity reversal, and the obstacles should all be sex-toy/sex-machine related, etc."
The conversation didn't go 1:1 like this, of course, we spent a long time discussing this kind of stuff, but that's an example of the general initial mentality.
Then, once we had the level's theme, worldbuilding/connection to the overall plot established, and gameplay mechanics, the next thing was the enemies themselves, as they'd need to fit the level.
Once we'd decided on those, then we'd come up with sex animations that would fit the enemies/lore/gameplay/level design and aesthetic, that also wouldn't be duplicates or too similar to earlier level's animations.
We also had to consider things like how best to balance gameplay with the sex animations with the level design; we didn't want it to be far too hard to trigger a sex animation, or far too easy either, plus a million other things to consider and playtest and stuff like that.
According to Wikipedia, it says "An update known as "Labor of Love" was released on September 28, 2022." for the Steam version of the game, not sure how accurate that is though.
I'm usually a lurker who prefers to just silently watch threads but this is a topic I feel passionate enough about that I'll leave a comment.
I think a large part of the problem when it comes to expenses is that modern game studios have gotten their priorities mixed up on necessary expenditures on what they think they need for a successful game. The cost to produce games has gone up over the last 2 decades but I'd argue the quality of games has not matched the increase in cost to produce. Think of all those triple A games putting hundred millions into trying to have the most detailed textures and graphics possible, but was it really necessary to begin with to be putting that much into it for people to buy the game? If they cut that budget in half and instead used it to hire dozens-hundreds more programmers would it of been a better use of money or would the game of died in marketing hell? I don't know the answer, and I really wish we could live in a reality where we could test that sort of thing.
To tie it back to future fragments, assuming the 150,000$ was spent on voice work (I'm sure its not and it was a mix of music, sound effects, etc...) I know in the past you've polled people and they said they wanted the voice work but I'd love to see the result of a poll where the question is "Which would you prefer, money put on more gameplay by hiring another dev, or money put on voice work" and I'd bet every dime people would pick gameplay. And I know going from 3 devs to 4 does not mean there is 33% more game. But I'd still struggle to believe people would pick voice work over getting an extra level full of content and CG. Especially for a porn game, I could see justification for voice actors for at least the 3 main characters, but voice acting every single NPC almost seems over the top, and would of been a feature you could of cut without losing a single player over it. And even if you didn't hire another dev, at the very least it would be less stressful than having to sit here and sell your house in order to keep producing a porn game because you ran out of budget money and are stuck in development hell.
I've never seen a game encompass the 90/90 rule as much as this one. The first 90 percent of the game accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the game accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
I'm honest to god not flaming you for how you spent your money, or how long you are taking on this game it can release in 2024 for all I care and I'll still enjoy it and I applaud you for not giving in to the unwashed masses crying for it to be released now (these people are part of the problem with the modern game industry) though in the future rather than saying "We will release the game by this date" you should instead just give estimates and make sure people understand its just a guess, and not a release date. It's one thing to give a release date, and due to gaben it gets delayed a week or 2, its another to give a "we will release the game in its current state by this day" even though you know it will get rejected due to not being complete. Good luck finishing this game out, been following it since 2016 and I look forward to getting it on steam.
I think a large part of the problem when it comes to expenses is that modern game studios have gotten their priorities mixed up on necessary expenditures on what they think they need for a successful game. The cost to produce games has gone up over the last 2 decades but I'd argue the quality of games has not matched the increase in cost to produce. Think of all those triple A games putting hundred millions into trying to have the most detailed textures and graphics possible, but was it really necessary to begin with to be putting that much into it for people to buy the game? If they cut that budget in half and instead used it to hire dozens-hundreds more programmers would it of been a better use of money or would the game of died in marketing hell? I don't know the answer, and I really wish we could live in a reality where we could test that sort of thing.
To tie it back to future fragments, assuming the 150,000$ was spent on voice work (I'm sure its not and it was a mix of music, sound effects, etc...) I know in the past you've polled people and they said they wanted the voice work but I'd love to see the result of a poll where the question is "Which would you prefer, money put on more gameplay by hiring another dev, or money put on voice work" and I'd bet every dime people would pick gameplay. And I know going from 3 devs to 4 does not mean there is 33% more game. But I'd still struggle to believe people would pick voice work over getting an extra level full of content and CG. Especially for a porn game, I could see justification for voice actors for at least the 3 main characters, but voice acting every single NPC almost seems over the top, and would of been a feature you could of cut without losing a single player over it. And even if you didn't hire another dev, at the very least it would be less stressful than having to sit here and sell your house in order to keep producing a porn game because you ran out of budget money and are stuck in development hell.
I've never seen a game encompass the 90/90 rule as much as this one. The first 90 percent of the game accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the game accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
I'm honest to god not flaming you for how you spent your money, or how long you are taking on this game it can release in 2024 for all I care and I'll still enjoy it and I applaud you for not giving in to the unwashed masses crying for it to be released now (these people are part of the problem with the modern game industry) though in the future rather than saying "We will release the game by this date" you should instead just give estimates and make sure people understand its just a guess, and not a release date. It's one thing to give a release date, and due to gaben it gets delayed a week or 2, its another to give a "we will release the game in its current state by this day" even though you know it will get rejected due to not being complete
. Good luck finishing this game out, been following it since 2016 and I look forward to getting it on steam.