Unity Completed Timestamps: Unconditional Love [v1.1 Steam SE] [Motkeyz]

[hameleona]

Thanks for your feedback!

We can't really do much about your preferences to some of the characters but we appreciate that you like the comedic parts of the game, which is something we indeed hope to convey in the game. We do like it when its not too serious. But the story itself I wouldn't agree is on a sit-com level, for example then thing you mention about OMJ messing with the time-line is not a rescue thing to put in to explain inconsistencies, we hoped that people maybe would have realized this sooner, but there are multiple parts about the game that "isn't right", so that they will be mended later. For example bacon really early in the game mentions that he fucked some things up, you still don't know what it is he did. But there are other things too that are off. It's still early in the story, you don't more about OMJ's daughter.

Regarding who was dead in a glitch in OMJ's garage, that was bacon's dad, not an older bacon. That was also explained shortly after. However also yet to explore why this happened, if it happened really and where it could have happened.

Regarding some of the technical feedback, i have thought about adding an internal timer that would pop up after x amount of seconds after it has looped for a "Continue..." in the corner. This is something I have actually had planned and I wished for having more time to add things like this. There's always a few usability tweaks in every update.

We have an update potentially planned for today with some usability improvements, if i can get all of it done, i can add this to my list and see if I can make it.

Judging by our speculation and spoiler channels on discord and feedback here on the forum too the story doesn't seem all that bland, and me knowing the main story and being a fan of many other games, know it's not bland

Thanks!

/A

Wow, I got noticed! Cool!
Just a note: I may have come much more antagonistic on the story and character part of the game, than I intended to. The thing is, the story in the end may be great, but from what's in the game atm, the best I could say about it... well, I've said it. I'm happy to hear it's not intended to be just a background.
In the overall package, the story probably deserves a higher mark, if only because it serves the game in a good way. It has potential to go some very interesting (both funny and very dark) places and so do the characters. It's also better than most games that use this premise.
I am really glad to see that you are working on the usability - something I personally hold in very high regard when it comes to any product.

 

[Aesouh]

Wow, I got noticed! Cool!
Just a note: I may have come much more antagonistic on the story and character part of the game, than I intended to. The thing is, the story in the end may be great, but from what's in the game atm, the best I could say about it... well, I've said it. I'm happy to hear it's not intended to be just a background.
In the overall package, the story probably deserves a higher mark, if only because it serves the game in a good way. It has potential to go some very interesting (both funny and very dark) places and so do the characters. It's also better than most games that use this premise.
I am really glad to see that you are working on the usability - something I personally hold in very high regard when it comes to any product.

Well right now i potentially fixed a resolution thing that annoyed some people, so if you played the game in windowed mode in custom size, it will not force on a fullscreen for you anymore unless you go in settings and update resolution.

I did put this in for a reason in 0.4.1 for some fades that acted bad, so I hope that it will work well,

I also added a "close button" to the quick menu in dialogue, not everyone uses the esc key to open/close it.

I fixed the issue with mac on wine that you cant pick up the phone (at least its something)

And we are working on a tutorial, and also a task list and improvements to the hint system.

When i made the hint system it was done very fast, it was a last minute idea i got right before a release. I see that its very popular, and now that we have paths that run simultaneously, like seen now that people get stuck with "go to the shower" when you also need to go to the store, I hope to be able to show Both in a list instead on the screen, and then expand upon this even more in the future. This takes a bit more work, but hopefully I will get that done today too.

Also I want to add "Continue..." button to the animation player after it has looped and x time has passed. It will do the same thing as stop but just bit more apparent to indicate that you won't miss anything else in it if you move forward.

Some of our animations early game are much longer and do not have loop enabled, and you do miss a thing or two if you don't watch it to the end,

Edit: And also, beeing able to change your name if you get someone else save or if you change your mind. The thing that makes this from "super easy" to "quite easy" is because of the last choice feature. It remembers your name from when you did the choice too, as it makes micro-saves, so I will have to override this.

 

[Aesouh]

I've finished coding the name changer and continue button after timer on animation (after looping)

I am looking at the hint system now but I don't know how long this could take if i I will be able to add it now or in the next one, maybe at least I can tweak some descriptions short-term.

/A

 

[Aesouh]

The shower thing was in this case actually just me not adding the hint correctly to go back to Molly, due to the new way i did the Molly scene, her scene to tell you to go fix the photos is repeatable until you sent them, so now it's properly telling you to go to Molly before you can take a shower.

I think the bigger new objective system might have to wait until next content release.

/A

 

[cold_arctus]

We are really at that point right now where we will not be able to keep up what we did for this release in terms of speed of release, and amount of new content.

The passion we have for the project remains and always will push us to do so much more and better, we do our best to deliver regardless of situation.

Timestamps is a fun and challenging project to work on that's for sure, while we don't see quitting the game as an option AT ALL, one of the natural options is to slow down, treat this as a hobby and basically spend time on it when there is time to spare, putting work, and life ahead of the game.

What you saw in 0.5 was a glimpse of what we can do!

400(!) new renders

13(!) new animations

Plenty of story continuation.

-Content focused on Juliana, Heather, Molly, with a nice hint of Nika -

A few more short freeroam events in town.

New platinum menu animation.

May I ask how much time it took to make the content for v0.5.0 (incl. coding etc.)?
How many renders and animations could be considered as a regular basis for a new release?

I know that resources and time are tight and we should not anticipate the next update to be as big as 0.5.0 ( still haven't seen the new content :coldsweat:!).

So instead for a small update (end of November?), you could skip it and focus on a release for end of December with new content of the size of 0.5.0 ... or even a release every 3 months (with a little bit more content as 0.5.0)... just to make sure you have enough new content. Why I suggest this, is, because I have seen people complain about monthly releases in a lot of threads, because the amount of new content were to small for them. Maybe this could be a way to keep the high standard (in matter of content quality and quantity) and the gamer satisfied.

The other thing is about high tier patrons: Pls reach out to them and tell them to wait a bit before their share they download link - at least for a few days after silver patrons got the game (maybe a kind of watermark can prevent early piracy). [I'm a pirate myself and do support piracy, but the early release of 0.5.0 were just not fair for silver patrons (IMHO)]

Those are just some thoughts I have regarding update frequency and size of new content. No complain or bashing here :coldsweat:

 

[Aesouh]

May I ask how much time it took to make the content for v0.5.0 (incl. coding etc.)?
How many renders and animations could be considered as a regular basis for a new release?

I know that resources and time are tight and we should not anticipate the next update to be as big as 0.5.0 ( still haven't seen the new content :coldsweat:!).

So instead for a small update (end of November?), you could skip it and focus on a release for end of December with new content of the size of 0.5.0 ... or even a release every 3 months (with a little bit more content as 0.5.0)... just to make sure you have enough new content. Why I suggest this, is, because I have seen people complain about monthly releases in a lot of threads, because the amount of new content were to small for them. Maybe this could be a way to keep the high standard (in matter of content quality and quantity) and the gamer satisfied.

The other thing is about high tier patrons: Pls reach out to them and tell them to wait a bit before their share they download link - at least for a few days after silver patrons got the game (maybe a kind of watermark can prevent early piracy). [I'm a pirate myself and do support piracy, but the early release of 0.5.0 were just not fair for silver patrons (IMHO)]

Those are just some thoughts I have regarding update frequency and size of new content. No complain or bashing here :coldsweat:

Thanks for your info

I don't have the exact numbers on hours spent, but usually our release cycle is about 6 weeks give or take 1-2 weeks, right now we released after 4 weeks, and its important for us as well to have a monthly release, the way that things have gone now, we lose far too many patrons out of nowhere for unknown reasons, even people who join and imminently just leaves. We have pay up front so that has saved us now, but still dont understand why people pledge 1$ and then pull it shortly after.

We tend to have around 300 - pure scene renders per release and a few animations, this time was exceptionally much work all around not only in terms of renders but the overall production quality. Motkeyz render machine never sleeps ever, he either works on it or it's rendering at night. Only thing that would speed this up in general would be better hardware right now.

For coding, there are always a lot of time that goes into it, but it varies a lot more for me, as i can face an unexpected obstacle on the way, its not like i can just move on.

The whole issue of this might not be so evident to you guys as we are really doing everything in our power to push out the updates and keep our fans happy and not see how stressful all of this is, but in reality we sacrifice our social lives almost completely, spending less time with family, and perhaps not as good on personal health. We sacrifice things like this short-term because we really believe that we can make something great, and long term.

Motkeyz post was to indicate that that short term sacrifice, has become a long-term sacrifice for far too long. And honestly, if we have to go for the option where we slow down, we will be disappointing at ourselves, like we did something wrong or didn't give it our everything, even if we did.

Regarding the guy that uploaded;

Actually it was not an active or frequent patron this time that shared our game, same with the previous people that leaked the game.

This time the guy registered specifically on f95 to share the game, and left. He got banned pretty quickly off patreon, and has a permanent patreon ban pending as well. We can't really stop people from sharing the game eventually, if someone joins just to share it's a dick move that can't be stopped unless we sit and do DRM stuff like accounts, and we don't really want to go that way at all.

That's why we have to plead to the people that do this, to please wait at least a couple of days or a week, i mean this time we didn't even release it for gold, he hurried so much that he didn't even upload the fixed version for all of you, and now people complain about issues i already solved the same day on the release?

Platinum and above tiers get the game first, Special platinum edition
Gold gets Normal version after 24 hours.
Silver gets it after about a week.

I don't mind piracy in itself, when it comes to allowing people that were never able to pay for it, to play it. But the biggest hit to us is people who would consider pledging but then they don't because there is a "free" alternative. That's what hit us the most.

Not only that this was a platinum only version but it wasn't meant to go out to big masses, it's an earlier build that could potentially contain issues and thats why we make sure to fix it before it goes out to next version. Normal version was released with all fixes in it.

So not only did the guy who shared the game hurt us in patreon numbers, but now people think that the game has more issues than it actually does, cause you are not on the correct version.

For those that say that piracy doesn't hurt, maybe normally it doesnt hurt as much but it really hits specifically us more than i've ever seen. We are always here and helping even though ofc we prefer that people are on our discord and support us.

Just look at this. You can see it yourself on graphtreon


You can clearly see as soon as it went out here on F95 and then copied over to all other sites like svs and whatnot. There's always a drop around billing and payment processing which is normal, but you can see we grow really fast on a release until the exact same moment we get pirated, then right away our support slows down completely.

We got pirated before prime time hour in europe as well, i mean come on. That's a huge slap to our faces and to the future of the game.

Maybe now when you see the chart you can understand better why we keep saying these things. It's to the point where it's ridiculous. Many of our patrons come here from F95, and they know the struggle that we've been facing over the months.

To everyone that pledge to other patrons, or would have money to pledge and say that our game is top class, their favorite or at least a top 3 or top 5 or even top 10 right now, can you explain why this game is not even worth pledging a dollar or more for? This isn't about greed anyway to earn as much money as possible but its to sustain the project long term.

We know things are not going to be easy, but we are resilient and passionate to keep pushing and hope for a bright future, hopefully with many of you with us

/A

 

[Irgendwie Irgendwo]

but still dont understand why people pledge 1$ and then pull it shortly after.

Possible theory: Somebody just wanted to read the Patreon only posts.

 

[♩♪♫ ŤЦ尺尺ØЛ ♫♪♩]

my saves!!!:FeelsBadMan:

 

[Aesouh]

I'm uploading a new version 0.5.0P1, soon up on Patreon, where we have added and corrected a few things. In addition to the fixes we added to the initial release that fixed some other issues. Here are some features that people wanted (Sorry i couldn't add a persistent save folder in this fix, had some file writing issues)

- Fixed the Hint system now correctly telling you to go see Molly and not go take a shower on Day 6
- Added "Change Name" in Options Menu, just remember to save! (Will not update mid-dialouge but next scene)
- Added "Close" button to Esc Menu.
- Added "Continue..." button to animation player, to pop up after a while of looping so you know you won't miss anything from stopping animation.
- Removed Resolution override when you star the game, it now remembers your game size.
- Fixed phone pickup problem for people playing with Wine on Mac/Linux
- Updated MC's computer corner to a better render.
- Updated Juli bedside table to a better render.
- Corrected a few spelling mistakes.

 

[hildeb]

Loved the game -
Imho old Jones is Bacon - sufers from to much time travel
=> Sorry to leave the girls @ the beach - However - Maybe will come later ...

 

[Aesouh]

Loved the game -

=> Sorry to leave the girls @ the beach - However - Maybe will come later ...

Thank you!

And Oh yeah, it will, it's going to be in the next release.

 

[cold_arctus]

Thanks for your info

I don't have the exact numbers on hours spent, but usually our release cycle is about 6 weeks give or take 1-2 weeks, right now we released after 4 weeks, and its important for us as well to have a monthly release, the way that things have gone now, we lose far too many patrons out of nowhere for unknown reasons, even people who join and imminently just leaves. We have pay up front so that has saved us now, but still dont understand why people pledge 1$ and then pull it shortly after.

We tend to have around 300 - pure scene renders per release and a few animations, this time was exceptionally much work all around not only in terms of renders but the overall production quality. Motkeyz render machine never sleeps ever, he either works on it or it's rendering at night. Only thing that would speed this up in general would be better hardware right now.

For coding, there are always a lot of time that goes into it, but it varies a lot more for me, as i can face an unexpected obstacle on the way, its not like i can just move on.

The whole issue of this might not be so evident to you guys as we are really doing everything in our power to push out the updates and keep our fans happy and not see how stressful all of this is, but in reality we sacrifice our social lives almost completely, spending less time with family, and perhaps not as good on personal health. We sacrifice things like this short-term because we really believe that we can make something great, and long term.

Motkeyz post was to indicate that that short term sacrifice, has become a long-term sacrifice for far too long. And honestly, if we have to go for the option where we slow down, we will be disappointing at ourselves, like we did something wrong or didn't give it our everything, even if we did.

Regarding the guy that uploaded;

Actually it was not an active or frequent patron this time that shared our game, same with the previous people that leaked the game.

This time the guy registered specifically on f95 to share the game, and left. He got banned pretty quickly off patreon, and has a permanent patreon ban pending as well. We can't really stop people from sharing the game eventually, if someone joins just to share it's a dick move that can't be stopped unless we sit and do DRM stuff like accounts, and we don't really want to go that way at all.

That's why we have to plead to the people that do this, to please wait at least a couple of days or a week, i mean this time we didn't even release it for gold, he hurried so much that he didn't even upload the fixed version for all of you, and now people complain about issues i already solved the same day on the release?

Platinum and above tiers get the game first, Special platinum edition
Gold gets Normal version after 24 hours.
Silver gets it after about a week.

I don't mind piracy in itself, when it comes to allowing people that were never able to pay for it, to play it. But the biggest hit to us is people who would consider pledging but then they don't because there is a "free" alternative. That's what hit us the most.

Not only that this was a platinum only version but it wasn't meant to go out to big masses, it's an earlier build that could potentially contain issues and thats why we make sure to fix it before it goes out to next version. Normal version was released with all fixes in it.

So not only did the guy who shared the game hurt us in patreon numbers, but now people think that the game has more issues than it actually does, cause you are not on the correct version.

For those that say that piracy doesn't hurt, maybe normally it doesnt hurt as much but it really hits specifically us more than i've ever seen. We are always here and helping even though ofc we prefer that people are on our discord and support us.

Just look at this. You can see it yourself on graphtreon
View attachment 172402

You can clearly see as soon as it went out here on F95 and then copied over to all other sites like svs and whatnot. There's always a drop around billing and payment processing which is normal, but you can see we grow really fast on a release until the exact same moment we get pirated, then right away our support slows down completely.

We got pirated before prime time hour in europe as well, i mean come on. That's a huge slap to our faces and to the future of the game.

Maybe now when you see the chart you can understand better why we keep saying these things. It's to the point where it's ridiculous. Many of our patrons come here from F95, and they know the struggle that we've been facing over the months.

To everyone that pledge to other patrons, or would have money to pledge and say that our game is top class, their favorite or at least a top 3 or top 5 or even top 10 right now, can you explain why this game is not even worth pledging a dollar or more for? This isn't about greed anyway to earn as much money as possible but its to sustain the project long term.

We know things are not going to be easy, but we are resilient and passionate to keep pushing and hope for a bright future, hopefully with many of you with us

/A

Thank you for your detail explanation for future updates and development insight.

Regarding Patrons and pledges: Do be honest, this whole system is a mystery to me! Some games, like Summertime saga, earns a shit ton of money every month and other games - in my opinion better ones - nearly nothing or just peanuts! Of course SS has a lot of patrons, but is this an indicator for a good game (including good story and content)? Maybe they were one of the first, who actually delivered something unique and kept reliable over the time??!!

Looking into some other dev patron earnings shows, that a lot of them lost patrons and cash (someone drop from $10.000 to $8.000 after a month). Maybe those patrons got tired of getting milk for a game with small content updates... But who knows that for real?!

Taking Timestamps and a few other games, starting patron for almost the same time, shows that the average of earnings is about $2.000 a month. I would consider this a healthy growth after a year in comparison to the direct competition.

I think there is also a group of Mac user, who are willing to pledge but don't do it yet, because there isn't a native version for Mac. (Those are people who won't waste their time with Wine and VM)

I do see and understand your motivation and goal behind 0.5.0. It was aimed to become a setting milestone for future pledges, development and making a name as a Dev-Team. The early piracy copy was a huge setback for the games reputation - maybe less in form of pledges (in year perspective) but clearly for your reputation. My theory in this case is: that you got sabotage by some other dev-team (JUST MY SPECULATION WITH NO EVIDENCE!!).

The other thing I noticed is: almost everyday someone announce a new game and ask for patrons etc... - Obviously the market gets flooded with ren'py games with the same daz3d or Honey Select models, and lame stories. The daily rise of new games/devs could also be an indicator for a slow increase in patrons.

I look forward to next year, to see, if Timestamps gets more recognize by new patrons. Because now the year is almost over and Christmas is about to start, where people spend their money for other things.

Keep your heads up and continue the great work!

 

[Aesouh]

Thank you for your detail explanation for future updates and development insight.

Regarding Patrons and pledges: Do be honest, this whole system is a mystery to me! Some games, like Summertime saga, earns a shit ton of money every month and other games - in my opinion better ones - nearly nothing or just peanuts! Of course SS has a lot of patrons, but is this an indicator for a good game (including good story and content)? Maybe they were one of the first, who actually delivered something unique and kept reliable over the time??!!

Looking into some other dev patron earnings shows, that a lot of them lost patrons and cash (someone drop from $10.000 to $8.000 after a month). Maybe those patrons got tired of getting milk for a game with small content updates... But who knows that for real?!

Taking Timestamps and a few other games, starting patron for almost the same time, shows that the average of earnings is about $2.000 a month. I would consider this a healthy growth after a year in comparison to the direct competition.

I think there is also a group of Mac user, who are willing to pledge but don't do it yet, because there isn't a native version for Mac. (Those are people who won't waste their time with Wine and VM)

I do see and understand your motivation and goal behind 0.5.0. It was aimed to become a setting milestone for future pledges, development and making a name as a Dev-Team. The early piracy copy was a huge setback for the games reputation - maybe less in form of pledges (in year perspective) but clearly for your reputation. My theory in this case is: that you got sabotage by some other dev-team (JUST MY SPECULATION WITH NO EVIDENCE!!).

The other thing I noticed is: almost everyday someone announce a new game and ask for patrons etc... - Obviously the market gets flooded with ren'py games with the same daz3d or Honey Select models, and lame stories. The daily rise of new games/devs could also be an indicator for a slow increase in patrons.

I look forward to next year, to see, if Timestamps gets more recognize by new patrons. Because now the year is almost over and Christmas is about to start, where people spend their money for other things.

Keep your heads up and continue the great work!

Those asking for mac versions may be vocal but it's actually a pretty tiny minority, it wasn't until recently when you brought it up that it really started buzzing about it. We do get the occasional "Where is the mac version" or "when will the mac version come out" but we are working really hard now converting all the over 100k players we have that somehow don't want to pledge one dollar for a good cause And i'm not exaggerating, back when we hit the 200 patron mark, we had accumulated over 70k unique players. That's a lovely conversion rate of 0.285%. That was built up over about a year.

It's a huge difference per game and game in how much you invest in making it, everything from assets to quality, buying assets and not using free, getting correctly licences resources and not ripping from places that are actually licenced/copyrighted. Using licenced software to do your work.. You never know what you get, some of the most popular games previously that i've seen a year ago used tons of assets just from googling "free game assets" and "free game sounds". Quality of course doesn't always translate to money and we know that. That's why some harem games are hugely successful because some segments just want to watch constant sexy renders and don't care too much about the rest.

Goes the same with porn in general, each to their own with preferences.

/A

 

[Retro]

OP updated with Bugfix version

 

[yusuke1]

I'm stuck in "explore the city before go home"
I already click on "Boutique(scene), Park(scene), Bacon, Jones, Motel, Mall, beach, tatto, college, clinic and cinema".
What should i do now?
pls help!

 

[Aesouh]

I'm stuck in "explore the city before go home"
I already click on "Boutique(scene), Park(scene), Bacon, Jones, Motel, Mall, beach, tatto, college, clinic and cinema".
What should i do now?
pls help!

Hm, did you go to your bedroom after?

 

[yusuke1]

Hm, did you go to your bedroom after?

Thanks man

 

[KeinBa]

OP updated with Bugfix version

I just downloaded the workupload link ,compared the files with the old ones , nothing has changed it seems.You sure updated the OP ?

 

[monroe]

I just downloaded the workupload link ,compared the files with the old ones , nothing has changed it seems.You sure updated the OP ?

Its a bugfix not an update. Read the changelog to know what has changed.

EDIT: Alright it has new features but no progress storywise. Thanks for the clarification Aesouh.

 

[Aesouh]

Its a bugfix not an update which is why it won't appear on 'Latest Games and Updates'.
Read the changelog to know what has changed.

i'm pretty sure you only have the lower part of the patch notes correct, the top part with the added features and updated images and some fixes is called P1 and was released on patreon?