Brace yourself

Hello everyone,

This post will contain different stuff that don't necessarily have link between each other but that I need to mention (or to vent about :x).

I'll start with a little point on how things are going in terms of income. For now things aren't alarming. Despite the fact that I'm losing patrons on SubscribeStar everyday (you remember, they're shadowbanning me so you can still have access to my account as long as you stay pledged but if you get "unfortunately" unpledged, you can't pledge back), things are okay. I'd like to mention that when all this started (in October 2024) I had roughly 200 patrons on SS. Meaning I lost 45% of patrons.

Thankfully, some of them moved to Fanbox (not all since I lost 80 patrons on SS and gained 30 on Fanbox) and some of the new patrons there are subing to higher tiers so let say it evens out. All in all, yes I earn less per month, but there's a reason it's not really alarming: the development speed.

This part is going to be the big block of that post. I'm not going to beat around the bush: when I started SoVR, I never expected things to be so slow. There are three reasons explaining this:

- My own realization that this is probably my last SoV project as a game (I'd still like to "write" SoV3's story even if I know many people won't read it.) As such I want it to be a great huge game. I started it as a "small game" and the base game is. But now, I want to make sure everyone can have their share of fetish and stuff. I want all the girls to shine at least once. And I think it's a good thing. But that definitely turns the project from a small-medium one to a big one. I'm not hiding it: from my expectations, when the game will be completely finished, SoVR will be bigger than SoV2 (both in terms of playtime than in terms of amount of scenes.) So yeah, if a project is bigger, no matter how regularly you update it, it always feel slow because you're always so far from reaching the ending point.

- Some personal changes in the lives of some members of the team that I could never have foreseen in the past led to change of their pace. I can't go into details but let say that this is probably the element that is the least controlable and the most legitimate. Yet it exists.

- But the worst part is probably about "newcommers". I'll be blunt, I have the feeling that I'm living a reverse "Breeding Life" situation. For those who don't know, apparently (I say "apparently" because despite showing proofs and stuff, I never dug too deep in the drama) the creator of the game at some point ended up being completely uninterested in the project, leaving the team working on its own without a proper management. That led to them being less and less involved in the project as well, leading to the project cancellation etc... You have no idea how much (if this is true) I DESPISE that guy. He was making tens of thousands bucks PER MONTH, had a full team to deal with everything, he only had to give directions etc. It's basically my dream (though I admit I'd still would want to write dialogues because this is where I'm having the most fun.) Getting so much money and a whole working team, being the highest Patreon +18 project (Summertime Saga was nothing back then) and throwing everything like that feels like one of the biggest waste ever.

So yeah, when I say I feel like I live a "reverse" Breeding Life situation is because I sometimes feel it's the other way around. I'm the only one still interested in my own projects and the people I work with are getting more and more uninterested in it. With one exception: PeakJump. To be totally frank, I've worked with enough people to know that I will NEVER find someone like him again (he's setting the bar high in terms of professionalism) so yeah, he's slow, but damn is he constant (I remind you that in 5 months we'll celebrate our 10 years of cooperation.)

However, the other artists, it's another story. Most of them have other commissions and stuff and what I ask them for the game gets more and more delayed. And if it was just delays. But no, you have to check the coloring for the colorists, point out all their mistakes (to give you an idea, the last coloring I checked I spent a whole hour just writing down all the mistakes to correct), re-check and re-point mistakes (because in a majority of cases some of the previously mentioned mistakes are still not fixed), sometimes, it's a question of skill. You show how it should be done, they try once, twice, thrice... And you give up and go "Okay, PeakJump will handle it." And the same thing can happen for the backgrounds as well. We were 6,5 for SoV2 (the half is for JFC, he worked for the game but only did the chibi illustrations and a few cards illustrations for Slice of Art). Right now, for SoVR we are 8 and things aren't necessarily faster. Of course, you can't go faster than the main artist but still.

And if it was JUST a problem of delays but no, it's also a problem of skills. No one among the colorists is able to do proper liquids (at least how we want them to be.) So Peak was handling them, but the time he loses doing that is time he loses not drawing. So I HIRED someone JUST for the liquids. At the moment I'm writing this post, she's supposed to make adjustments to her test based on PeakJump proper explanations and screenshots on what she should do to improve her style (so we're still in the teaching phase, not even the proper commissioning part.) That was two weeks ago. We're the 10th. I'll need some of these liquids for this month's update. What am I gonna do? I'll have to ask PeakJump...

See? It feels like no matter what I do, I'm bound to have problems with the people I hire (and I'm not even mentioning everything going on backstage.) So yes, we are slow, and if I have to end up asking for PeakJump to deal with the liquids to have proper liquids, then we'll be even slower. The older I get, the more I feel like fighting against windmills. No wonder I manage to be more regular with TH2 update: I'm responsible for everything but the pixel content (and thank God nito's still around to do his share whenever I need it.)

Soooooo, this long rant was meant to introduce something. I know some of you don't want me to do that but I've already made my point in a previous post: 2-month updates where I finish my part in one month and spend the other month only waiting for the art content is just not doable. It's the best way to shoot myself in the foot and lose ALL motivation to work on SoVR.

So we're back to SoV2's situation. Back then, I started a small game to have fun supposed to buffer the dev time of SoV2 (That's how The Hunter was born.) I'm going to do the same. I posted a poll about that in mid November. You guys voted. 66% are in favor of the Pokémon-style game (33% for the TH2 side stories one). As promised, I hired a pixel artist (other than nito because he can't work on big resolutions) just for that and we've started working together. And as I stated in the post back then, it's going to be called Animon (because who the fuck are we kidding?) and the main character will be Kaya because she'd rock as a pokemon trainer.

After this month's update, I'm going to try and alternate one update of each game every month. Animon is supposed to contain not much content per update but at least you'll have something to eat while waiting for SoVR. And by doing something small, I can spend a bit more than a single month on SoVR updates if needed and (more importantly) the artists will have two months to work on the content of each update. In an ideal world, that's how things will progress starting March. But of course, I'll talk about all this details during March.

For this month, don't worry, you'll have your SoVR update with it's nice share of new elements!

Sorry for the long post, but sometimes I feel it's important that you know what's happening to understand my decisions. I know some of you will be afraid that by adding another project in the chain, I'll never finish SoVR, but if I manage to properly alternate the two project like I did with SoV2 and TH, it should be good enough of a proof that I'm heading in the right direction.

Unfortunately, since I'm leaving next week, the only other post I'll do this month is to unlock the game for the Intern Tier and when I'll come back, it'll be time to upload the update.

I'll see you then! o/