VRR : Bad news

Hi all,

So bad news, a few days ago, the artist I was hiring to work on Vampire Revenge Rebirth announced me she found a full time job and would not be available to work on the game anymore. I can't really blame her, her situation would be more stable and the salary much hire than what I can afford to pay her at the moment. The same problem happened for Vampire Revenge with the first artist except he didn't even warn me at all, he just never replied after a few months of work. I'm coming to the conclusion that working with freelancer artists is a horrible choice... Which is why I'm not sure I want to find a replacement at the moment. Maybe it would work better if the artist was working on a full game, just updating placeholder I would have created myself. This leaves me a bit confused about how to react now. I do have enough materials to release a proper alpha version for VRR with good quality sprites but after that, it would be either finding a new artist or working myself with placeholder until the game is completely finished and I can hire an artist to rework everything at once.

After some thinking I checked other Patreon creators to see how they were doing. Most 2D creators are artist themselves and create their own sprites so they do not have my problem. The rest uses 3D softwares to render their images. I do like Glassix because it's indeed easier to create the scenes even if less flexible in term of animation. I don't want to use Illusion Studio for my next game since it's a bit in the grey zone legally (game is not supposed to be available outside of Japan plus non commercial part even if the game is free, the use of Patreon could be a problem). So I checked other 3D softwares and I found a really nice one. A lot of options and a lot of paid materials to use, plus the models are SUPER HOT. I tinkered a bit with it, the image up is the result and it's not using proper mods for the pussy :p I will definitely switch to those in a future game.

This made me think of another solution to solve the problem which would be to start a whole new project without requiring extra people. I could work much faster that way and since I do have commercial rights on those, I would be able to create proper Patrons rewards and new sets. I could even create nice 3D animations even though it would take me some times to learn the ropes. But that's how I've always learned and it has been fine so far. It's quite similar to what I'm using for Glassix, but more complex. Another great part about this is that I'd be able to work with the Unity engine and create full 3D games in the long run. However, I'd prefer to start low with a static 3D sprites to start on a small project and crawl my way up. This could lead to a possible new Glassix game in full 3D with full animations :p

So I have multiple possibilities on what to do but I had an engagement with you all, my patrons, to deliver a 2D game in the following months. I don't want to appear like an asshole switching plans like that which directly involve your expectations how your money is used (even though most of you only care about Glasssix lol) so I'm planning to release a poll in the next few days to let you decide what I should do. Either keep going on VRR or switch project. I'll introduce the possible new game ideas in the next poll post so you can properly decide, but it would be either a zombie survival game or an apartment management game. I'm also open to ideas you might have, as long as it is a small to medium size project. In case a new project is started, the first version will be used as replacement for VRR and all previous patrons who were supposed to receive VRR will of course receive the first version of this new game.

Even though the vote access should be restricted to 10$ patrons reward, due to the importance of the vote, I'll extend it to all my current patrons so be sure to vote for it when it's out ! Your vote matters !

I'll go back to finishing Glassix 0.12 now, it should be out in a few days :)

Thanks for your time and support !