Reflecting on Depravity - Open letter to my patrons

Oh how quickly time passes when we are having fun! Almost a year has passed since I first started work on Depravity, and how far we have come! I think this is a good time to share with you my reflections.

Today, Depravity has 300 people supporting its development, with $1500 pledges in total. This is something that I am very grateful for, and I must admit I have a great deal of pride when I recognise that there are people who appreciate my work such that they make the conscious choice to support me. This fact is never lost on me and I will never take it for granted. As I always say, Depravity is yours as much as it is mine.

I did not know that I would reach this point, to be frank. That is, to garner this much support. It was always a possibility in my mind, back when I started, but it was never a certainty. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about when I first started.

It was in November of 2018 that I had a certain number of characters in my hand, and that
I knew I wanted to tell a story. I tried using comics, but it wasn't great because I felt constrained by the format. It was around this time that I became more intimately aware of the format of Visual Novels. The first one I ever played was a game called Katawa Shoujo, and it really made me aware of the profundity of story telling that this format could achieve. And so I downloaded renpy and started creating renders to tell my story. This became the first render for Depravity, on 3 Dec 2018.

The first version of Depravity was short and simple. I had cobbled it together in 2 days, put in music that I produced, and shipped it as a 0.1. Since then, I've made many improvements and much of those early renders have been replaced now. As I have said, I did not think for real that my game would reach the status it has today. I entertained the idea of it, just as you would entertain the idea of winning the lottery. It's possible, for sure, but was it realistic? After all, I was halfway through medical school (and still am). I did not think that I would be able to deliver on a consistent enough basis. And I will admit, I struggled.

I would start work at the hospital at 8 am, admit patients and do hospital paperwork, and then come home at 5 pm. After that I would have to study some more, cook, and do everything else a bachelor has to do and then I can work on my game. It was very hard to do monthly releases, and I would read comments online about how the updates were too short, that I was being lazy. Sometimes I would go online and find out that one of the patrons had leaked an early access release, despite my early access window only being 5 days long. This is very disheartening.

Eventually, I would move onto a 2 month release schedule because I found that it gave me more time to release better content. This was the update that featured Nicole and Camille getting updated together. Remember that update? It was my best and proudest work by far and I hope you'll agree with me!

Overall, I am exceptionally proud of what Depravity has achieved. We did not have the luxury of any privileged treatment, and we have become more successful than many games who have had their banner sprayed across the front page of adult games websites. What we have here is testament to the strength of the relationship between you, me, and our characters in this game called Depravity.

Yours Faithfully,

Dante