CouchPillow
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- Aug 6, 2016
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The listed changelog is literally these two things:
1. One quest you can do
2. More ways to download the game
They literally listed "downloading the game" as a change.
SamYote
Newbie
- Jun 27, 2024
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And that's why I gave an in-depth changelog a few posts ago (on the previous page), because that one was... lacking. There were a good few details that Tib forgot.
Not to heckle or anything but do you know how many times this project has changed hands? You aren't the original dev from what I gather, right? I had seen this project ages ago and I'm honestly just surprised it's still being worked on at all. To be clear, I'd love to see it in a completed state at some point. Mostly just for closure I guess since it's been in development for nearly a decade iirc. Maybe you can drop a little lore on it? When the project ran into a hitch and where it got picked up again? Mostly out of curiosity.
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I've been following the game a while so I think I can answer this.
The project has changed hands 0 times. Sephra is still the head dev, they've just been adding members to the team over the years. It was originally just Sephra, who is a good artist but had no coding experience, so the first builds were a bugfest. I think Spriggs was added first, and may have helped with the code, I don't remember exactly what their role was and they eventually left to do their own thing. Tib was brought on as a programmer, allowing Sephra to focus on art and is the reason the game is playable. Sammy joined some time later and afaik they're a PR/bugtester in-the-loop, though I'm sure they can elaborate.
A rough development timeline off the top of my head: before Tib, Sephra would repeatedly go months of radio silence; if you look back far enough in the Patreon, I believe you'll find multiple posts literally titled along the lines, "I'm still alive!" dated many months after the post before it. Not a ton of progress was made in the latter part of this period, presumably due to mounting spaghetti code, but the occasional new h-animation was still pushed out. With Tib, progress was relatively steady, until level 1 was first complete in release 1.0 (this is the "Old Version" link on front page) almost exactly 5 years ago. For a number of reasons that I could not accurately recall right now, the devs decided shortly after the 1.0 release to rework practically every aspect of the game. I'd say this is when the game really entered development hell. Since then, progress has been snail's pace.
If you compare the current build to 1.0, you'll notice significant differences in lighting/sound design as well as environment detail and even ui/animations, but for whatever reason the actual gameplay content barely progresses build-by-build, despite there being, on average, a year of downtime between builds. Part of this could be the heightened standard for detail making level design take longer. Something that stands out to me is that apparently Tib has been "working on enemy AI" pretty much since the rework was first announced, but for some reason only one enemy has been re-added to the game and even that was only recently. From the build it seems like the new AI works pretty well so I'm not sure what's holding them back from adding the rest of the enemies or why it took this long.
If I had to guess, I'd broadly say the current state of development is a product of misplaced priorities, perfectionism, feature creep, and burnout. That said, I wouldn't lose hope yet, but it's very much a wait and see. I think my confidence would be brought back if they get to a point where level 1 is "finished" again.
SamYote
Newbie
- Jun 27, 2024
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You've pretty much got the right of it. I've been part of the team, unofficially, since around 2019. I was swiping up the bug test builds when they were being given out, and going absolutely ham on them. This was back when the main coder was Byful. I was made a moderator of the Discord after a while. Then Sprrigs joined the dev team. Sprrigs is a great friend of mine, and part of the reason why I started working harder. I was super happy to work with them, in some capacity.
A while after that, Tib was brought into the dev team, as an actual coder. Like, someone who went to school for it, instead of just fiddling with code in their spare time.
There was tension in the team, because Tib and Sprrigs stopped getting along very well. There was a bit of drama when the credits started being added. Sprrigs had retired from coding, by that time, and was left entirely out of the credits, despite the work put in. After a bit of back and forth, Sprrigs completely departed from the project, but was added to the credits as a legacy coder. It was around that time that I was asked to join the team, officially, as Lead Quality Assurance and the PR representative, doing more work beyond just proofreading pre-existing dialogue and rooting through the bugs on my own time. You'd probably see around that time, a few years ago, that just about ANY communication with the pages was actually with me. Twitter, BlueSky, Patreon, etc.
I'm... still honestly not sure why the first level overhaul became necessary, beyond porting to GODOT. Whenever there was a deadline posted, that was Sephra asking me to put that information out there, because it was understood that we'd have the next build ready for posting by then. But, as you've gathered, there are times when there was still more work to be done, to the point where I wasn't given the build to post.
On the side, I wrote a few admittedly self-indulgent stories from my character's point of view. To my absolute surprise, Sephra ended up liking them so much that he added my character to the game, and as of just a few weeks ago, asked me to take over in writing scenes. This takes that responsibility off of Tib and Sephra, and I get the chance to contribute DIRECTLY to every build. Some of my writing is currently in the game, which I'm super excited for.
I haven't heard from Byful in a long time, and Sprrigs has essentially washed their hands of the project altogether. The project has never changed hands - but there were people over the years who joined and left the team.