abelius

Important poll

Added 2025-06-21 16:39:58 +0000 UTC

Edit: I've temporarily deleted the poll until I clarify the options a bit more.

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Knowing me, this will go on for several pages even though I’ve just started to write this. So, bear with me?

Anyway, let’s start by saying I’m just one man.

Sure, Naikal exists, but he’s ‘just’ my artist and friend. He’s completely oblivious to this little perv world of ours and barely plays the game we’re making.

Of course, his art is overwhelmingly well-liked by fans, and many would think he also animates the graphics, given his artistic background. But nope, he supports me on the side, drawing what I ask of him in a very specific way, and that’s the beginning and the end of his participation in this project.

Again, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have an artist of his talent. So, thanks, Naikal.

But yes... It’s just me, my skills, my ego, my imagination, my pervy mind, my questionable creativity, my technical background, my self-learning attitude towards challenges, my insecurities, my real-life problems, my ambitions, etc., all in one big melting pot.

Therefore, I have many hats to wear in this project. Animator, coder, writer, designer. Even choosing music and sound effects consumes more time than you’d imagine.

Also, there is another very simple reason why I wear so many hats...: financial feasibility.

You see, some people may look at those numbers on Patreon and SS and think they’d live a comfortable life in their countries, but the hard truth is that I’m barely keeping afloat.

Naikal gets his deserved share, then Patreon, SS, PayPal, Stripe, and Payoneer get their cut, my country gets its taxes, etc. You’d be surprised at what I’m making after all those hands have gotten their hands on your money.

So, hiring people to delegate some of my tasks to them is simply out of the question.

And there’s also the little, tiny thing that I know what I’m doing with my project at a very low level detail. Just trying to delegate coding or animation to someone makes me laugh hysterically, to be honest, because you can’t even imagine how intertwined those two are in my game.

In other words, the development ‘team’ of this project will always be a one-man army.

And what does that mean for the present and future of Pizza Hot!, you may ask? Well, to explain this, let’s first break down the time I spend on the project by the ‘type of hat’:

CODING

The task consuming most of my time, by far. I don’t know, maybe about 75%...?

This includes adding internal engine features, testing them, troubleshooting them when they invariably don’t behave as I want, spending days until I fix them, and crossing my fingers so they don’t break when I add another feature in the future.

It also includes refining old code, too convoluted or limited to go along well with the new shiny things I add... and then something breaks down and I need to fix it, of course.

And finally, scripting the events proper and making them look pretty. Yes, the content you ‘see’, which you may think it’s all I do when I speak about ‘coding’, but no, it is not. Not even close. It might account for about 25% of this Coding task.

ANIMATION

A surprisingly small percentage of my time goes to this. Maybe about 5% of the total time? Maybe less. And you might ask, “But this is an animated 2D game! How is that even possible?!”

Because I’ve become quite good with Spine after so many years, and I’ve never intended to make very good animations like you’d see in other games. For me, ‘good enough’ is my motto when it comes to animation.

And this is yet another reason why I wouldn’t gain anything by delegating this task. I’d have less money, and could only be satisfied by that expense with actual professional quality, like the one you would see in commercial games. And those guys aren’t exactly cheap, not even for five-digit Patreon projects.

WRITING

From the time I wrote dialogues in LOK Rebirth, especially that guy in the tent (I don’t remember his name, lol), I received consistent praise for how they were made. Yes, I know it sounds conceited, but most dialogue I see in other games fails to contribute to sexual tension and build up.

Many times, I end up writing a lot myself, but then I understand this is what most people want and why they play this game. It’s not all about graphics and animations, or even game mechanics. It’s how immersed you feel in the world, and how much you relate to Jenny and her plight, that makes her corruption all the sweeter.

So, I don’t think this is anything I could happily delegate to just about any of the dozen people who reach me because they have experience in writing naughty novels.

Writing for a video game requires more than a sequential, out-of-context story, with zero awareness of how the action would translate, or even be possible, for the engine and assets to deal with (one time I had this guy suggesting to create an animation for every single dialogue line, lol).

Anyway, how much time does this represent in my time budget, then? I’d say it’s a 10%. Nothing wild.

DESIGN/MANAGEMENT

The remaining 10% would go to other on-demand tasks, such as deciding how to go about a new location, some game mechanic, an event series, what music or SFX would go nicely in a given situation, etc.

I’d LOVE to have a guy who is better than I at this. I’ve been a technical drone for most of my life, following instructions and reading complex manuals. Following procedures to the letter is in my nature.

So, having someone who would tell me how the whole game could go, plan a years-long road map, itemize every single task to do, and assigning them to me every day, setting priorities according to goals... man, that would be a fucking dream. Not needing to be a Project Manager and Game Designer in addition to my other ‘hats’.

But the sad truth is that no one is going to fill those roles for me. I’m on my own, and I’m the one to take on the responsibility for this project to prosper in every area: technical, creative, management, and marketing.

Recapping:

Coding: 75%
Animating: 5%
Writing: 10%
Design/Management: 10%

And none of those above could be delegated.

Now, why am I even writing this if I’m already saying I’ll keep doing most tasks as I’ve been doing? What is that poll I’ve mentioned about?

Well, let me talk about another, apparently unrelated, observation before I tell you...

I’ve grown old.

I’m 50, and a parent of two. Not your stereotypical Ned Flanders family man, sure, but I’m still fucking overwhelmed by responsibilities other than creating a porn game, even if it’s the thing that pays my bills.

Thinking that my life is anything similar to when I was twenty years younger is wishful thinking at best. My only worry then was that I didn’t have a ~~pussy~~ girlfriend, and I spent most of my free time jerking off to games like Season of Sakura, skating the streets of Madrid, or being a shark in my WoW server auction house.

But now... well, let me give you an example.

One of my daughters broke my car’s passenger seat belt anchor point the other day (don’t ask me how that's even possible). So, I needed to use time to find a cheap, but original, second-hand replacement, research how to remove the seat without the sensors going haywire, and do the deed. About three hours in total.

Three hours less for the project. Three hours that I wouldn’t have spent if I were a single guy living in MGTOW-ry solitude.

And that’s just an isolated example. Don’t get me started on the freaking hell of battling the system to sign up my daughters to an adequate high school for next course (they’re autistic so no, not any high school is fine), or the research I did on my ‘ex-not-ex’ cancer some months ago.

Don’t get me wrong: I like what I have as a mature old family guy. Aside from the present drama, things have gotten a lot better thanks to these wonderful girls, and even my ex-not-ex finally getting diagnosed with a mental disease and getting appropriately medicated, so she’s now SO much more agreeable in everything, including the bedroom.

In other words, this is what I am: a fifty-year-old porn game creator with experience at being a pervert, some unique skills, solid motivation to continue doing what I do... but also a lot of baggage that sometimes gets in the way.

So... all this said, anyone thinking “You’re so slow!” should understand that my life is nothing like they imagine. I’m only slow from the perspective of someone with a much simpler life. I’d love to see them in my place, heh.

Three and a half pages to state a fact: my time is (very) limited.

Now, returning to the game and that poll... I’ve realized something important.

This game is more or less a hybrid between a visual novel and a sandbox. And both genres or styles of delivering content are basically opposed to each other.

A VN is linear but extremely dialogue-rich. A sandbox isn’t linear and usually dialogue-poor.

The way I’ve been developing Pizza Hot! has been trying to include both dialogue-rich and non-linear content... and that, I’m afraid, is pure madness for a sole developer. However, I don’t really think I could write a less compelling story and dialogue, or that I could switch to a linear content style at this point.

Then there is this little detail of how many locations I’ve planned. For each of them, it is assumed (by me, at least) that a location-aware gradual progression should be implemented.

For example, I’m not adding the beach, which is supposed to be accessible very early in-game. So, would it be sensible for me if the first event was about Jenny jerking off a guy? I guess not, right? After all, this is supposed to be a sandbox, and the poor girl is just visiting the beach.

Other locations I have in mind to add next would include the college, the gym, the park, and all of them would require their ‘low intensity’ events, which, from the development standpoint, consume the exact same amount of time as their lewder equivalents.

Trust me, I’m not holding those off in the hopes people will continue throwing money at me for some unknown reason. It’s been four years, and yes, I’d be quite frustrated myself at not having seen a blowjob so far.

But it is what it is: each location I add will make me restart Jenny’s corruption progression with new location-flavored events, and prevent lewder progression events from being made in other established locations.

That said, I see two approaches...:

a) Focus on variety at the expense of sex progression.
b) Focus on sex progression at the expense of variety.

I just can’t decide on one or the other.

And no, there is no option c), in which I magically deliver both.

And yes, I know the options are a bit ambiguous. Totally intentional.

Now, I’m sure that if I ask about this in a public poll, an overwhelming majority will say “I want to see their holes stuffed already, bro!”

But the truth is, most people don’t pay a dime to play this game. As I write this, I have 285 patrons on Patreon and 146 subscribers in SS. And most people don’t stay after a month of subbing to have access to a new update (which doesn’t happen frequently). In the meantime, downloads are counted by the tens of thousands.

So, in all fairness, if someone should decide, it should be the ones who have been with me for the long haul, giving them their rightful voting power in proportion to their financial efforts, in deciding how I should spend the man-hours they’ve paid for. And who knows? We all might be surprised by their responses.

It’s going to be a difficult poll to run because I want to include non-active users who have supported the project in the past, and SS deletes your data for good when you unsubscribe. Only Patreon keeps statistical data, which might not include your email.

It might not even be possible to do this, to be honest, but I’ll try.

For now, I’ll run a poll on both platforms, restricted to active paid users, and then see if I can click on your names to assign your actual voting power on a spreadsheet.

If you aren’t an active user and can't access the poll, but you contributed to this project, feel free to (directly) message me on Discord or here with...: