PURE ONYX - FAQ and Gameplay Video

Hey again!

We’ve got a very basic gameplay video for you, as well as a FAQ that should cover some of the possible questions you may have.  Keep in mind that the character animations in the video are not at all complete (including the movesets) – they are literally just frame-switched sketches that will help us establish what works and what doesn’t, and will act as a guide as we work on the higher quality animations. Also, consider everything about the UI as placeholder at this point.  Sorry we couldn’t have something super pretty ready, but keep in mind we’ve been at this for just under 4 weeks :D. Hopefully the FAQ will put some more clarity into our intent and why we think Pure Onyx is a good move.  Please ask if you have any additional questions at all.

Regarding the FAQ, this was originally posted for the Inner Circle. They brought up a lot of good questions and I’ve adapted it for this post. 

Patreon Stuff

• Patrons who have pledged a certain amount (to be decided, probably the retail cost of the game) to this campaign by its release will get Pure Onyx for free. This campaign has always been intended to be for our current *and* future games, not just MATM (hence the ‘Eromancer is making Adult Games’ at the top :D), and I think it’s very fair considering MATM is taking longer than a lot of people (including me) expected. I’m not sure if it would be in the form of a Steam key or what quite yet. 
• I think some really good print designs could come out of Pure Onyx’s artwork. If you previously pledged at the print reward tier and have been waiting on a print design for the new MATM art style, you’ll be able to use it on anything we come up with for Pure Onyx if you prefer. 
• You don’t need to increase your pledge amount or anything to receive updates on Pure Onyx.  They’ll be part of our regular updates.

Regarding Steam / Pure Onyx Release

• For anyone concerned about Steam's censoring -- there's no more need for R18 patches or any of that stuff. They really have opened up their doors to uncensored adult content. 
• Pure Onyx probably won’t be a Steam exclusive. The Inner Circle brought up some good points about it, one being that some people don’t like to play adult games on Steam since it’s a potential billboard that you’re some kinda deviant heathen.  Also, I haven't done all the research in that area to reach a conclusion for what would be the best retail strategy. It will probably end up being on as many retail sites as possible, but I can’t guarantee that yet.
• Surprisingly no one has asked about this on the most recent post, but the Inner Circle crowd had some questions about it. I don't want to talk too much about ideas for additional content for Pure Onyx yet, since the goal here is a quick development cycle :D. There are, however, lots of options for extensibility after its release! 

About Graphics and Gameplay

• Pure Onyx will use 2D fully animated skeletons that (we hope) will match or exceed the quality of any H game out there currently. Pretty parallax backgrounds are a definite (even prettier than our little video above). 
• Pure Onyx gameplay will adhere strongly to the classic arcade games of the beat-em-up genre; we don’t want to get feature-crazy.  Additional modes and features are a possibility after release.
• We’ll be using Unity’s shiny Cinemachine package for cameras, which will allow for scriptable and dynamic manual zooming.
• Gameplay will be very fast and fluid; certainly no input lag or anything. Anything that looks choppy in the video is just due to our simple animations. 
• There will be a gallery mode.

Regarding MATM Progress

• Just to reiterate, we’ll continue working on MATM while we work on Pure Onyx. We’re basically bottlenecked while we clear up the Maya and rigging stuff, so for the near future the only thing you’ll be missing out on is more asset production. That said, all of the work we put into Pure Onyx will be valid concept designs for future enemies and areas, since many of the locales in Pure Onyx will appear in MATM. 
• MATM definitely has more than a year left in development, and it’s exactly why we can’t push that obligation on you guys to hang out for the entirety of it.  Things will undeniably speed up with it once we get past the tech hump, but there’s a whole lot of content left, and it’s plainly visible that creating custom assets take a lot more work than using licensed ones, and therefore we need more people.  
• Nobody mentioned this in the monthly post, but the Inner Circle did post some valid questions regarding this. Some people were under the impression we could have just continued with the old art style for MATM and continued putting out similar releases, but it’s not as simple as that. We weren’t making custom assets at that point. We weren’t using the tools to make custom assets possible. The art style was bound to crappy tools. The quality of artists we needed didn’t want to learn a ridiculous process to achieve relatively artificial looking results, and it was clear that I couldn’t manage the workload without more help. The list goes on. It was a tough call, and not one made lightly!
• As mentioned in the monthly post, we’ll have an update ready for you in the next couple of days about MATM progress :D. It won’t be as flashy as usual, but TK and APL are working hard on their end of things.

About Music 

• The music for Pure Onyx will be similar to that of MATM. Some tracks we intend to use for MATM may end up being used in Pure Onyx (see the demos section of our Soundtrack Reward tier – the track used in the teaser is actually from that, as is the one used in the gameplay video), and there may be some shared tracks between the two games.

I know it’s not possible to please everyone, but thanks for being understanding about the situation. I encourage anyone who may not be a fan of this idea to hang out for a bit and at least let us show you what we can do with this new project.  As I mentioned in the monthly post, we intend to have something playable ready for you by the November update. I’ll try to make it pretty as possible but keep in mind we likely won’t have the final quality artwork for all of Onyx’s moveset ready. That said, we’re going to push hard to have an example of the H system functional.