Progress Report + A Request
Added 2022-09-15 10:33:59 +0000 UTCAlright. Time for another progress report...but before that, I have a request.
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A Personal Request - Skip if you just want the progress report! The Start of the Progress Report is Marked with another bolded section like this!
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I'm not a fan of making requests, as I feel I'm here to make/do stuff for you guys, not ask you for anything but your support in return. That said, I've hit a sort of plateau with Patreon that I'm struggling to get over. I'm going to be brutally honest here, I'm bad at putting myself out there on social media, or planning advertising, or generally a lot of the things that are required for monetization of anything. I'm a writer, artist, and programmer...not a businessman. It's a common problem and one I heard echoed frequently from my fellow creators. The people you see with big patreon support often aren't the best developers or the best projects, but happen to belong to people who are (or know others who are) good at the social engineering and advertising aspects.
So...what am I asking for help with? Honestly, it's not a huge thing, I hope. Given the type of content I make, I'm not going to ask people to go shout out about the kinky games you play to friends and family -_-. What I am willing to ask for is for those of you who have accounts on F95Zone or TFGames...to please, please, please consider going and leaving a review? For Haven's Port or Left Hand Magic, or both?
Frankly, like most creators, I have a...mixed relationship with F95zone. The place is a pirate haven that has hurt a lot of creators. I've been extremely lucky/blessed to have amazing patrons who've not leaked my content like crazy over there so far (Seriously. Thank you all for being awesome). And I know that drawing attention to myself there risks that changing. Unfortunately, it's also the single largest adult gaming community on the internet. A significant percentage of traffic has always come through there, and so have a lot of bug reports and other helpful things. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, both Haven's Port and Left Hand Magic have just...not been noticed over there. Both of there threads are filled with largely positive commentary...and neither of them have more than 5 reviews. Hell, Left Hand Magic has only 1. This results in the game getting buried in search results, which hurts an chance of driving more traffic from there. So, please, I'll drop the links for the game threads below. If you have an account over there, please consider taking five minutes to help me out?
As for TFGames...man do I wish that place wasn't just for Transformation Games. Seriously, there everything is less scummy and horrible than F95Zone. Currently, because of the relative lack of TF content for Left Hand Magic, only Haven's Port has an entry there (well, plus my older games). If you have an account capable of reviewing there (they require a minimum of five posts in their forums first, I think), please help a brother out and drop a review there? Or even just a like, if you can't review!
F95Zone Links:
TFGames:
Other Places You Can Help With Likes or Follows:
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Progress Report
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Okay, enough of that awkwardness. Time for a progress report.
Haven's Port
This is...mostly on target? I've completed (or will have, the last renders for one are running as I type this) eight of the planned render sets for the month. This includes two Jerta Island dates (Mione & Miona, as pictured in the images), which are of the usual longer-than-typical format that dates always get. It also includes the first of the 'Quest' type scenes, which is just as long.
Things are going a little bit more slowly than I'd anticipated. But the schedule hasn't slipped enough for me to worry about. Not yet at least. And as an additional plus side, my attempts to build up an account on Furaffinity as an additional platform for advertising have resulted in me compulsively updating random bits of old content. I'm not redoing the renders, but I am improving them by doing some additional post-processing to make them look closer to the current quality I'm making. Which ones I'm doing is pretty random for now...but eventually I'll be giving that sort of treatment to the whole game to try and even out the quality a bit. Seriously, I hadn't realized how big of a quality jump I made from the early days to now until I looked at some of the early render sets again. Ugh. They make me cringe a little now T-T.
Silas Station
Once again the winner of the Mixed Media poll, the work on this has actually been going faster than I expected. The only downside is that it's looking like it might be on the shorter side (at least for number of renders, not necessarily amount of text/story). That's not because there's anything wrong with it. But simply a result of needing a viable ending point in the greater plans for the overall arc. Plan which have, in fact, actually been fleshed out at this point. As with Arc 1, Arc 2 is now planned out to include six total entries. Of which the current one is entry three. To be clear, there's still going to be somewhere around 14-15 renders to this entry, so it's not that much shorter than usual. Just a little bit. I think the average is somewhere around 16-17.
Short Story
I'm still struggling a bit with this, this month. However, I have gotten the first thousand words or so of the next Alyia and the Magic Shop entry down. And I'm intending to try and knock out another thousand before I crash this morning. I'm still not particularly worried, as it's only mid month. And with Silas Station going faster than the MMS entries usually do, there shouldn't be any issue with getting the shorts done. Not unless Haven's Port goes screwy somewhere. Which...technically it could, since I've got a more complex code bit planned for the Quests. But, I don't think it's likely to go too far sideways on me. TWINE is inherently a lot simpler than Renpy.
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Anyways! That's all for now folks! Sorry again about badgering you with the request thing. I hate asking for stuff like that...but I am trying to make this work as a profession and I'm starting to hit some mental health limits trying to do absolutely everything on my own.
