7-27-24 Progress Update (Public)

Recently we asked everyone to complete a survey for us on our fourth anniversary, and the main purpose of this post is to share the results and where we are as a team.

Overall, you all rated us very highly as a team, especially happy with the quality of content in each build, but with a slightly lower score for "frequency of builds" than any of the other categories. This is a pressure that many of us on the team have been feeling as well, but unfortunately we are completely at the mercy of our artists' real life schedules to be able to meet deadlines and put builds out. We've been asked about supplementing or even replacing artists, but that is not something that we are willing to do. There are many games in this industry that have tried something similar, and what results is a hodge-podge mess, where there is no consistency between character models and scenes, and you are taken completely out of the experience.

We also asked what membership benefits you would like to see, because we're always looking to increase our member fanbase. Adding "extra scenes" is always tricky, because then there will be accusations of paywalled content. This is why most of our rewards now are external to the game, such as the walkthrough, asset pack, and voting for new content. By the way...we offer a walkthrough, asset pack, and voting for new content as member benefits (for those of you who suggested we should start doing those things) ;)

You praised Park After Dark for its variety and breadth of content, while staying true to the source material character designs and personalities. Hearing that you also really enjoy the writing, relationship building, and inclusion of some lesser-known characters also really makes our day, because in the end, this is a game by fans, for fans.

When we asked what you didn't like or would change, many of the responses were similar, so we wanted to address them. We will not be adding human voices in or out of scenes, nor will we be adding animations any more complicated than the frame animations that already exist. If not executed perfectly, both of these things can do more harm than good for a game, and besides animations are outside of our artist's wheelhouse. More outfits are coming, more villains are coming, and more events are coming which will provide additional content for our older, "completed" girls. Pregnancy is coming, but with two caveats: first, we will introduce it via one specific girl, just like the rest of the current cast each has their "thing". Second, it will be used as an endgame state for the other girls, so still relatively far off. When we asked about furry/anthro content, the responses were VERY divided, either strong yesses or strong nos. This is not something we've decided about either way yet, but rest assured that the content will be skippable if it does happen. Finally, in terms of an in-game guide or hint system, this is something that we've been playing with in our free time, but it would unfortunately cause quite a big overhaul for the game. There's simply no good way to make it work overlayed on top of our current systems, so our options are 1) rewrite the entire game and make everyone restart from the beginning, or 2) hold off for now. Believe it or not, 1 is being worked on behind the scenes, but our current plan is to also wait until the game is finished and then release a "Golden Game" version with this implemented, as well as many other improvements like replacing the lower quality backgrounds, adding additional art for the date scenes, and much more...essentially making the game worth a full replay at that point. But for now, our priority is still going to be forging ahead with the story and new girls.

Magixxx Conquest is much harder to say anything about. Over half of the survey responses indicated either not playing the game, or just not answering anything about it. It was praised for also having great art, and the corruption tone being a nice contrast from PAD for those who were looking for something like that. It was criticized for the minigames (which thankfully are all completely skippable now!) and for simply not having enough content yet to make better judgements on.

The Patreon model makes it hard to tell how many fans of MC joined specifically for it, and how many have checked it out simply because they were already subscribed for PAD. It's unknown whether interest and support will grow if the game has a chance to grow more. Unfortunately, we're facing a much more threatening issue, however: the artist for MC has continually broken promises, missed deadlines (some by MONTHS, now), and has recently stopped responding to messages altogether. None of the rest of us on the team are quite ready to abandon this game yet, but obviously without art, there is no game. We will of course keep you updated as the situation changes.

In much better news, the next build of Park After Dark will be releasing TONIGHT at midnight for Prince-level supporters, and following the usual schedule after that. As a reminder, this build will have less content than usual because we're spending a little time each dev cycle working on the big event planned for the end of the year. Everything for that is now completely planned out, the script is half done, and the art is now getting started. This event will include half a dozen new characters, a whopping 15 scenes, and content that's been requested basically since PAD got started. We know it will be worth the wait, so we hope you'll bear with us for the next couple updates as we work to make sure everything for that is ready on time.

Until next time, keep it here for more news and updates, and thank you as always for your support!

-SID Gaming