So as a patron and frequent participant in their Discord server, I feel I need to lay out the current situation of the game because this new thread has seemingly gotten worse than the old one and the front page feels extremely misleading to anyone that views it.
In August of last year, Abelius left the project(Reasons shall not be discussed, it happened, he's got a new project, lets move on.), and Kuja along with Vlad decided to reboot the game with the intent for it to be better. And by all accounts it would have been. They originally started with a remake that was exactly the same in design, just with a new codebase and tools. It was still a 2D game. However, along the way, they had some ideas they wanted to try out which led to a new 2.5D version of the game with 2D characters and eight direction sprites, as well as a 3D environment. There were many setbacks such as slow animation progress, learning curves, and just problems in the developers personal lives such as an entire hard drive filled with game data dying unexpectedly and a personal loss for Archie, the lead animator, in December. Eventually they hired on two more animators to speed up the progress of animations as well as trying to optimize their workflow. They've actually hired on enough people that Vlad has to take cuts to his own income to make sure these new people were paid as he really wanted this game to succeed.
Fast forward to June and we finally got the promised tech demo for their 2.5D vision. However, there are a lot of problems. Some great ideas that were worth trying to explore, and the tech demo was made for the purposes of feedback. If they had more time, they could have found a way to make the sprites work better with the backgrounds, however due to the growing impatience and frustration on the part of not just their patrons, but also fans, they have decided to revert to the original 2D plan, though they do still intend to finish the content for the tech demo as promised, as some of that, such as the sex scenes, are still to my knowledge intended for the full game at some point in time. But rest assured, if you do not like what you see in the tech demo, it is not what you will be getting anymore and the front page does the new version no justice, especially since the preview images are the old work in progress versions and not the finished ones.
To further my point about the new version, here are images from their Discord showing the progress of the new background art.
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Keep in mind that these are not 100% finished, Kuja is still working on them. The shots with Krystal also aren't in-game, that was done merely to show the direction they're reverting to based on feedback to the tech demo. They're hoping to have backgrounds with multiple layers to show more depth and distance, possibly moving clouds, a background that moves faster than the foreground, etc. in addition to the possibility of dynamic time of day and weather which they are exploring.
As someone else pointed out, Krystal herself is customizable to a large extent, including hair, hair color, and fur color. One thing that also needs to be understood is that in the old version the characters were drawn with their bodies at an angle, which may have made them appear larger or more detailed, whereas the new version uses true side view. For the time being they've prioritized the side view animations, the ones for the other six directions have been pushed to the back burner for now to reduce animation load, but they do plan to get them finished at some point. The game also will not be all that different from the 0.8 version in terms of content. They're goal is to remake all of that as it was and keep most of the characters the same, with the exception of the Razorclaw leader and Cenvir, and as a result Cenvir will have less than he did in 0.8, but eventually will get back up to that with his new personality and story.
