VN Ren'Py Abandoned Stormside [v0.23.1.4] [Atemsiel]

[Your step dad]

I'll reply to both of these at once.





The purpose of my post was to put something a little less speculative out there. The full context is in the public Patreon post, but Atemsiel would, be reason/logic of his past involvement with Companion of Darkness, fall into one of the categories listed by Invader Gary.

Atemsiel and Berkili4 are good friends outside of development (https://f95zone.to/threads/companion-of-darkness-s2-ch-10-berkili4.154533/post-15287259). So while this isn't definitive, I thought I'd make a comment based on what information we do have. Gary didn't name Atemsiel, but Berkili4 doesn't appear to want to revisit the Chapter 10 animators, which flags the reliable dev as most likely being Atemsiel.

The only other read, if he's not the one with health issues, would be what Gary said ("every animator he found either wasn't interested, or asked absurd prices").

As to the 'copium' part of it: I like the unknowns and the story of the game, but I'm not that taken with it. I don't like the universe it's set in, and the biggest draw for me was Atemsiel had a 'play it your way' approach (where you could ditch your actual job more or less as much as you wanted). The degree of freedom was nice in a setting/domain that has been overdone a bit. At the end of all of that, I was just trying to provide information because people may miss it, or not put it together. Sure, it's possible it's not Atemsiel with health issues, but I can't really see him fitting into the other categories all that well either, and health issues would track with the delays.

Yes they are related.
Last time Atemsiel post on discord in public channel

He shared this the 28 sept 2024

Something really bad must have happened to him to give up so much money.


He dont use to much F95 discord, just 3 messages.


Last message here from Atemsiel

CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity company founded in 2011 and based in Austin, Texas. The company provides digital response tools to cyberattacks, secures the cloud, and secures its customers' data.

I shortly after doing some research confirmed that Atemsiel was indeed his animation dev


Atemsiel has never posted a message on Berkili4's discord, same for Iru.

Flynn, who developed Stray Incubus, abandoned his game due to the health of a family member, which echoes Berkili4's message about Atemsiel's health.
I wouldn't be surprised if he's related to Atemsiel; their games are very similar.


They are all on each other's discords
They are all on Rogue one (That new teacher) discord, DebatingPanda (between humanity) too except atemsiel (but it's a game from his wishlist on his discord) you take Atemsiel's wishlist on his discord they are all on each other's discord.


Anyway, this health problem seems serious. I'm still surprised that his Iru moderator for Atemsiel isn't aware of it. If he goes through this, he'll know by now.

The only thing to do is wish the best for Atemsiel, that he can regain his health.

I really liked this game Atemsiel you have a great talent, good luck to you for the future.

 

[Your step dad]

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Yes they are related.
Last time Atemsiel post on discord in public channel
View attachment 4722118
He shared this the 28 sept 2024
View attachment 4722122
Something really bad must have happened to him to give up so much money.


He dont use to much F95 discord, just 3 messages.
View attachment 4722129

Last message here from Atemsiel
View attachment 4722139
CrowdStrike is an American cybersecurity company founded in 2011 and based in Austin, Texas. The company provides digital response tools to cyberattacks, secures the cloud, and secures its customers' data.

I shortly after doing some research confirmed that Atemsiel was indeed his animation dev
View attachment 4722153
View attachment 4722163
Atemsiel has never posted a message on Berkili4's discord, same for Iru.

Flynn, who developed Stray Incubus, abandoned his game due to the health of a family member, which echoes Berkili4's message about Atemsiel's health.
I wouldn't be surprised if he's related to Atemsiel; their games are very similar.
View attachment 4722172

They are all on each other's discords
They are all on Rogue one (That new teacher) discord, DebatingPanda (between humanity) too except atemsiel (but it's a game from his wishlist on his discord) you take Atemsiel's wishlist on his discord they are all on each other's discord.


Anyway, this health problem seems serious. I'm still surprised that his Iru moderator for Atemsiel isn't aware of it. If he goes through this, he'll know by now.

The only thing to do is wish the best for Atemsiel, that he can regain his health.

I really liked this game Atemsiel you have a great talent, good luck to you for the future.

If you want to know if the game is really abandoned or why, read my previous post, I have enough information.

 

[DeiMan2077]

To be honest, such news is just heartbreaking.
Really, let's all wish him good health and good luck.
#Atemsiel_get_well

 

[Meiri]

View attachment 4722153
View attachment 4722163
Atemsiel has never posted a message on Berkili4's discord, same for Iru.

Flynn, who developed Stray Incubus, abandoned his game due to the health of a family member, which echoes Berkili4's message about Atemsiel's health.
I wouldn't be surprised if he's related to Atemsiel; their games are very similar.

I don't understand what you are trying to say, from these messages we cannot conclude that Atemsiel = Flynn or even related to him, also in nowhere says that he is sick, it just says he went MIA for him.

Devs being in other devs discord is nothing special, many do for promos or simply to know fellow devs.

At this point everything would be speculation, the reality is what his mods said on his discord, he's being MIA since his last message on Christmas.

 

[Vic Sage]

If he has health problems, it's weird that he doesn't tell Iru, the patrons or the others instead of ghosting them. It would be a perfectly valid excuse to go offline and not post for a while.

 

[Your step dad]

I don't understand what you are trying to say, from these messages we cannot conclude that Atemsiel = Flynn or even related to him, also in nowhere says that he is sick, it just says he went MIA for him.

Devs being in other devs discord is nothing special, many do for promos or simply to know fellow devs.

At this point everything would be speculation, the reality is what his mods said on his discord, he's being MIA since his last message on Christmas.

The dates still correspond enormously with the time when we last saw Atemsiel.

 

[Your step dad]

If he has health problems, it's weird that he doesn't tell Iru, the patrons or the others instead of ghosting them. It would be a perfectly valid excuse to go offline and not post for a while.

Maybe he had a serious health problem, he is in the hospital or he can't get out of bed, unfortunately we don't have any details.
But we are sure, Berkili4 said Atemsiel have health problem.

 

[Meiri]

Maybe he had a serious health problem, he is in the hospital or he can't get out of bed, unfortunately we don't have any details.
But we are sure, Berkili4 said Atemsiel have health problem.

I mean, you just have to read the entire line:



He is saying that Atemsiel was not the animator with health problems.

 

[DeiMan2077]

To be honest, we could try to find some kind of connection with what was happening in the United States (as far as I understand, he lives there), namely with forest fires, or something else, but honestly, without any real clues, nothing can be said anyway.

 

[Vibesy]

Man we are back to the hardcore cope in here. With all the speculation, I wouldn't be surprised if Atemsiel had a complete mental breakdown at this point and was currently residing in one of His Majesty's finest insane asylums (yes he's British, not bloody American), slamming his head against the rubber wall while chanting "I"m not the Magistrate!" over and over.

But that would be a recent development since he specifically said his health was fine in December. So what is the excuse for him essentially not updating the game in 2024? Why didn't he ever pause Patreon billing last year?

I'm not going to defend someone who milks to that extent. Let's not forget that he repeatedly hyped an update and then withdrew back into silence, multiple times, before stating in December he was aiming to have it out "before the end of the year". He is also ghosting his own team- who are fucking volunteers- while continuing to rake in the dosh. The reality is that Atemsiel took his carefully-earned reputation, piled it up nicely on the village green and then unleashed a blowtorch to it like with Guy Fawkes on November 5th.

I suspect it's just the typical sleazy dev behaviour we've seen time and time again. Anyone still supporting Atemsiel should follow his discord team's advice and withdraw that support immediately, since a precipitous decline in free patreon money is probably the only thing that will cause MIA Atemsiel to resurface.

 

[Black Orchid]

Man we are back to the hardcore cope in here. With all the speculation, I wouldn't be surprised if Atemsiel had a complete mental breakdown at this point and was currently residing in one of His Majesty's finest insane asylums (yes he's British, not bloody American), slamming his head against the rubber wall while chanting "I"m not the Magistrate!" over and over.

But that would be a recent development since he specifically said his health was fine in December. So what is the excuse for him essentially not updating the game in 2024? Why didn't he ever pause Patreon billing last year?

I'm not going to defend someone who milks to that extent. Let's not forget that he repeatedly hyped an update and then withdrew back into silence, multiple times, before stating in December he was aiming to have it out "before the end of the year". He is also ghosting his own team- who are fucking volunteers- while continuing to rake in the dosh. The reality is that Atemsiel took his carefully-earned reputation, piled it up nicely on the village green and then unleashed a blowtorch to it like Guy Fawkes on November 5th.

I suspect it's just the typical sleazy dev behaviour we've seen time and time again. Anyone still supporting Atemsiel should listen to his own discord team and withdraw that support immediately, since a precipitous decline in free patreon money is probably the only thing that will cause MIA Atemsiel to resurface.

harvard should do a study on the mortality rate of being a adult vn dev.

 

[Vibesy]

harvard should do a study on the mortality rate of being a adult vn dev.

Yup, apparently its got roughly the same longevity as that for professional skydivers, up-an-coming rappers and people who get on Hillary Clinton's bad side.

 

[FratBoy2019]

To be honest, the situation is unclear. According to him and his moderators, the update was almost ready and it only needed to be completed and posted. And then the silence? To be honest, it seems to me that he really wanted to just take a break from this. He wrote that the previous year had been hard for him and there was little time. I think he'll be back, but it's unclear when. I'd bet he'd show up before the summer.
And if we talk about the status of the game on this site, then I think that at the moment the status of abandoned only means that he has not written anything on his official pages for 3 months. This clearly corresponds to the dates, and before that, one of the uploaders had already written about it.

I do hope he comes back. During initial releases, he was very vocal in the community on multiple platforms. Even gave tips to others wanting to get into visual novel devrlopment. Quality of the game was always super high and you could tell this was a passion project. If he needs to take a breather, then resurrect this game down the line, it'll still be worth the wait

 

[Tiur]

Flynn and Atem aren't related. They met via AVNs and interest in animation, and became decent friends.

As for the timeline, I'm not going to share private Discord DMs between myself and Atem, but the last time I heard from him (other than the December Patreon post) was 14 Oct 2024 as well (slightly later than the public posts above), and that was a completely normal conversation with no indication of anything of concern. He was even literally working on Stormside during that conversation, too, since he was asking my opinion about some aspects of the scene he was working on.

 

[Your step dad]

Flynn and Atem aren't related. They met via AVNs and interest in animation, and became decent friends.

As for the timeline, I'm not going to share private Discord DMs between myself and Atem, but the last time I heard from him was 14 Oct 2024 as well (slightly later than the public posts above), and that was a completely normal conversation with no indication of anything of concern. He was even literally working on Stormside during that conversation, too, since he was asking my opinion about some aspects of the scene he was working on.

Can you spill Atemsiel's secret? Was he ICSTOR?
No, seriously, does he have another job in real life?
Did he have trouble concentrating? He seems to want to do something one way before abandoning it very quickly.

As you said on Discord, you can't ask people to keep paying, if he doesn't have a job in real life it's the only thing that will bring him back as it says Vibesy , life is easy when you have a comfortable income while during the day you just play games on Steam.

One day we should really think about calling an exorcist, there is a curse on VN developers, in terms of deaths in their family, their house burning, floods, tornadoes, depression, sometimes I have the impression their father died 3 times, they have a new child to take care of every 15 days.

If he's afraid to continue Stormside because he's taken too many different paths and it's becoming too difficult, he should start a new, simple project. He'll come back to Stormside later... or not, or he'll do a simple remake of Stormside.
Often, when the game gets bigger and bigger, the developers can't keep up, and it becomes too difficult.

 

[Tiur]

Can you spill Atemsiel's secret?

No secrets, and this is his only game and identity in the community. He's a hard-working dude with a day job, a perfectionist streak, and vastly more than enough stubbornness to see even the most complicated project through.

I've had a lot of conversations with him about a ton of AVN-industry-related topics over the last couple years, including game abandonment, and we talked frequently about Stormside development itself. He's never given me any indication of burnout or loss of motivation for this game in any of those conversations.

 

[JigglyPal]

I don't know how much we should believe about any of that but my life is happier if you're telling the truth so

 

[Tiur]

I don't know how much we should believe about any of that but my life is happier if you're telling the truth so

It's up to you whether to believe me or not, but I've been pretty consistent here, and there are several examples in this thread of Atem confirming things I've said about the game's development.

 

[crotch69]

I hope the dev is well and healthy.

 

[dewayne4478]

if he is not doing well, i wish him well. but he could posted something on Pastreon or have someone do it.