Conway end of the year talk

Hey everyone, I hope you're having a pleasant holiday season.

Now that the year is coming to an end I figured it'd be a good moment to talk about 2024 and how it all went for the Conway project and, by extension, myself as well.

First of all, another whole fecking year of Conway?! I'd say that's pretty amazing already, isn't it? I'm not sure if i really saw making Visual Novels as my future even as early as a month or two before I started Conway, but here we are.

We're just about to finish day 12, which honestly has taken a bit longer than I thought it would, but I feel like that is just game design in a nutshell. Everything always takes longer than expected.
But I hope you've enjoyed day 12, and especially now the tying off of the routes that we'll be doing for Update 16 & 17.
Day 12 has been pretty nerve wrecking for me truth be told. It's unlike what i initially thought it would be, and it probably was a bit of a diversion from day 1&2, but for some of the characters, namely Arthur, Rajeeyah & Wolf, we just needed a bit of a kickstart to get their balls rolling. Thus the more tense tone of day 12 was needed and I hope that you all enjoyed it so far.
(I mean, we opened with a literal storm, I didn't exactly study in Subtle University.)

But yes, what did 2024 bring then?
Well, I don't have the exact numbers (also since Update 16 is still in the process of being finished) but we've more than doubled the wordcount from where we started in 2024. Not to mention the refinement efforts of day 1 which are almost done now( and of course don't necessarily add much, if anything to the actual wordcount). Which of course is in no small part to the three little helper bees I've somehow roped into my mess!
Well, four, sort of. Though unfortunately Rubric hasn't done a scene in a while. :(
It would have been impossible if not for the help of Sandy, Televassi and our newest addition, Mando.

Sandy's work you've seen in,
for example, the undocking section of day1, the rewrite of the dinner with Sam & Julian, Perce's booze acquiring scene or the absolutely fantastic latest Rajeeyah section, where she talks about her past back in Morocco a little bit.
I really can't praise Sandy enough and the way she manages to really bring the characters alive in the most delicate manner is quite something!
And to think that I just cold-noted her because I was like "Hell, I love her writing, can't know if she'll say yes until I try!", and now here we are.

Televassi joined next,
funnily enough we actually met at NFC earlier this year shortly after deciding to work together. Time flies. Their work you would have seen in many of the section on the leaving-the-ship path, that's been their domain recently, but if you're patient then I'll have you know that the sexual bribe for Arthur will also be done by TV! It's a goodie!
And yeh, TV has become a bit of a right hand, I suppose. Always there when I need some ear to sanity-check my ideas, or need to have someone have a peek at my writing. It's so important to avoid me going crazy, worrying about getting things right and if my ideas are shit and all that fun stuff...

And rounding the trio out is Mando.
Mando is the latest addition and another absolutely wonderful writer. Naturally as the latest addition his contributions are a bit sparse for now, but he's worked on the rewrite of the Wolf dinner scene and a recent addition to the leave path, which is in the WIP Update.
So I'm very excited to see Mando flourish as more of his writing gets added.

All of them deserve your applause, really. I can't tell you enough about how difficult it is to jump into a project like this as a writer and try to hit the tone for the characters and story in the way that is needed. With all the story and character building that has already happened. I know it just too well from my time doing commissions. The first time you are asked to draw a character it's quite tough. There are so many small flourishes to them that are just hard to put together in your first go and you get better at developing a feeling for it the more often you have the chance to paint/write.
So all of them are absolute troopers!

And that is also in no small part to you all. Our funding has increased this year from 1200$ to now, where it's hoovering at about 1800$ a month at the time of writing this.
This actually allows me to currently offer them 50$/1k words for their assistance. Something i'm quite proud to be able to do and something that you all make possible. In the grand scheme it's not a breathtaking amount by any means. They aren't exactly gonna quit their day jobs to write for Conway full time anytime soon, but at least within furry writing circles I think we are sitting quite alright with that rate. And in the end I want to be able to pay them well, because that in turn means good writing for the game if the people helping me feel appreciated.

We also had Nopan help with some animations.
Namely all the tails that were added throughout the year. So that was good fun and thankfully some pretty easy additions. I actually would like to do some more but currently life is catching up a little bit with me.

I had to put any further animation efforts on halt for now and as far as future funding goals go, I think we'll only be able to talk about it once/if we cross the 2k mark.
Next year will be more expensive for me, so any increase for now just will have to be added to my living expenses buffer, to allow me to hopefully not thread quite too close to a knifeedge with my own bills and all that.
And we'll see if we ever actually reach that. 2k per month is a big ask, really. Especially for something in as niche of an area as furry VNs. Not many do and really, having the funding that we do is already quite remarkable.

So yeah, that means for now, next year we'll hopefully keep on trucking as we are right now and tackle Morocco! And perhaps we'll manage to dream about some fun new additions. Maybe some short stories about the characters, or additional art? We'll see what might be possible.

But yeh, as i said earlier, we've reached a point where we are at least sitting decently comfortably, and the days of me having to nervewreckingly decide if it's worth it to try and work the game for another month are certainly behind us. So I really, really want to thank you all for making this possible with your incredible generosity.
I'll try my best to make sure that you all get a VN that is worthy of what you are putting in.
I'm super excited for 2025 and the upcoming Morocco section, and I hope you all are as well. I think we've all earned some good times in the sun, don't we?
Well, mostly good... 50/50 perhaps? Look, some characters have struggles, of course. You probably wouldn't be here if they didn't! But I won't be pulling out a storm as a metaphor anymore, deal?

Anyway, enough goofing. I hope you all have lovely holiday period. Get some rest, get that goooood food. Spend time with the family, avoid the family, just chill on the sofa and watch christmas movies, hell whatever it is that you need to do to take care of yourself, do that!

<3