I don't make a habit of arguing on the Internet, and I'm not here to throw around blame or take sides. I would, however, like to point out that "three" is a fairly low estimate. Considering the quotes below, there have been 10 release dates including the current, meaning 9 delays.
Oh, it's been way more than 10 delays / times we've expected something would get done and it took us longer than we thought.
But again, that's happening on practically every development team, NSFW or not. The difference is, you don't hear about it bcause of a lack of transparency most of the time; a lesson we've learned for future games, which is why we won't give out release dates until we're basically complete for anything in the future.
This is the point where voice acting should have been decided as too much of a financial burden rather than a major development point
Again, not sure why people are so incredibly fixated on the voice acting in this thread; nowhere else I've ever posted have people been this bent out of shape about it, so honestly, the audience here might just be a minority in terms of how they feel about it.
Just to be clear, the voicework, even at $70,000 total ($40,000 paid over years of time and $30,000 up front now), was less than 10% of the total amount backed for this game. Granted, most of the money went towards our rent, food, bills, etc. but the fact still remains that it's not like we were putting 100% of the budget towards it or something.
The reason why we're in debt
right now is because we took out that amount of money for the voicework up front; it's something we shouldn't have too much trouble paying off when the game launches. Prior to this, all existing debt came pretty much solely from the fact that I'd cancelled Reclaim Reality years earlier, and shouldered 100% of the amount paid for assets for that + refunding people who asked.
See all of that is nice and all, but when you start trying to throw yourself pity parties like this:
I'm not sure how this is a "pity party"; it's me just stating that I'm dedicated to getting this game out the way we wanted to get it out at all costs. Again, transparency.
It makes me believe you less and less. Also a few positive reviews on F95Zone, a forum primarily used for piracy, and Newgrounds is NOT worth a $30,000 debt. That just reeks of poor money management.
Now you're just being disingenuous. I gave you the links to those places; 70-80% of all reviews mentioned the voice acting.
Also, you do realize that AAA games and most games in general go into
far more up-front debt than this to pay for assets, right?
Saying that they're in active development is laughably wrong. Crisis Point has been in rework hell for over 4 years now
False, they stopped doing their rework years ago and have been doing new content ever since
Eromancer is a straight hack who can't release a full game to save their life and just releases pretty demos to rake in that sweet Patreon cash.
Haven't kept up with Pure Onyx at all, apparently.
Yeah but the thing is that every single lore screen, tab, and picture apparently needed voice lines that are most likely going to be skipped in the first place. I understand having voice acting for specific characters and all of your actual scenes, but this is just excessive.
The databanks
are scenes; they tie into the cutscenes. If you read them, they change the events of the cutscenes, and even if we only did the cutscenes, that's still 250+ cutscenes voiced.
With that being said, voice acting is all nice and good, but I must agree with TWGWWH: there is a balance to find. I, too, am just skipping the voice lines as soon as I finished reading the corresponding log. As for the voices themselves, I do not mind the principle for people who like it, but I am the kind of person who finds fully-voiced, pages-long dialogues during a sex scene to be either distracting or awkward.
People like me may not be a majority, but I think that they are not a rare species either.
And that's fine; this game isn't for everyone.
However, there
is, objectively, a large audience for this going off of pure statistics/votes/views/reviews on a lot of different sites (not to mention Steam wishlists) that clearly enjoys the game and the voicework of it.
Is it perfectly handled? No, of course not. We're still learning and improving our abilities.
But it is an asset to the game, and much more importantly, it's
what we want to do with our game.
If people don't like that, that's fine, but it's not going to get us to change the way we've made the game.
We don't regret the voicework, and there's nothing that could get us to regret it, either.
What I find much more important is the quality of the writing.
Past century or not, I would rather have a "low-budget" game with no voice lines, but a good story and good writing.
Why not both good voice acting
and good story and writing?
As for the "Pay once then you get it on release" strat-- it doesn't help when the release is so many years later that the funder may forget about it altogether.
We've put out 10+ emails over the years to backers to alert them of things like reminders to get their name in for backing if they haven't already, and we have multiple systems setup to contact people at launch to get them keys.
Otherwise it just gets flooded with the boring defense that people are willing to buy it from sites no one here mentions... I think, ever? I don't think I've heard someone mention NG on here.
There's 10 pages of posts on ULMF mentioning "Newgrounds".
Newgrounds was literally the birthplace of more adult creators than anywhere else in the west...
including this forum, which is named after a Newgrounds game developer.
There's a good reason we don't talk about Newgrounds on here, it's subliminal that it's either kids who don't know how to use a forum, or people who haven't left that plagued site since Egoraptor started doing animations. For your own rep, don't screenshot that place again. It's cringe.
Newgrounds is specifically the reason we got the funding we did.
Those two large bumps there were from getting front-paged on Newgrounds, twice.
I'd say the opinions and playerbase of that place are pretttty significant.
And I'm going to be the one to say it, those VA's are dogshit.
Yes, VAs who regularly get work in television, movies, and AAA video games are all bad, all 90 of them.
Honestly, it's pretty clear that you have a very strong bias against a lot of the things we do and how we do them.
We're likely not going to see eye to eye, so I mean, if you hate how we did things, that's fine, and if you want a refund, that's fine too, but we're not going to change any of this.
Maybe we should just take a moment of silence to quietly ponder what this game would've been like if made in an alternate timeline where they decided to have absolutely no voice acting, and instead spent all that money on resources/encouragement for creating more enemy variety, or overall upping the lewdness factor, or taking personal requests on including certain kinks, or additional levels, or mechanics, or whatever else the majority of the game's players wanted that "wasn't" voice acting, and just get those fantasies thoroughly out of our system.
It would have been worse, because if we didn't have any voice acting, the characters would be a lot less lifeless. That's the only change.
All that money would have just... sat around in our pockets. We had the enemies, levels, mechanics, and so on locked per level from the getgo, if we got $50,000,000,000 that wouldn't change.
We had no desire to add in any extra sex content than we already did, nor any more fetishes than we already did, nor to make it anymore "extreme" than we already did. None of that would change, either.
We
did take on personal requests; for a year or two we had a tier for fetishes, a tier for enemies, and a tier for animations. We closed those tiers because we wanted to make the game the way we wanted to make it (after adding in the stuff that was requested), not to make it some mish-mash of people's requests. If you want to "get those fantasies out of your system", there are other people making other games that will add in the content you want, but at the end of the day we wanted to make the game we wanted to make.
Player feedback and critique is good, and we've definitely modified a lot of stuff based on it, but we have a core vision for the game and no amount of money would have changed that.
(For the record, being on Patreon didn't change that, either. If we had no restrictions on content whatsoever, the game would have remained the exact same.)
Seriously though the LORE TERMINALS are FULLY VOICE ACTED. Having scenes voiced is one thing, having multiple types of grunts for scenes and gameplay is usually great. But you cannot tell me you want every walltext of AMAZING lore to be FULLY VOICE ACTED lol. It really just seems like a moneysink. Maybe they had an arrangement with the voice actress to pay her much more on paper than in reality, no clue, I'm not very experienced with scamming. Also frankly, western voice acting just isn't erotic to me. "UUGGG ACK FUUUUUUCK" etc
Again, check the reviews. They speak more objectively than anything else does, so yes, a lot of people
do want everything fully voice acted.
Our arrangement with the lead VA was simple; pay them 100% of the $20 tier so we can get them paid in advance, over time.
I'm not really sure how we could "scam" that, when roughly 50-60% of all the voicelines in the game are hers so they'd need a lot of money to pay for that, or what the benefit there would even be to "scamming" that.
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Obviously, you're all very much against voicework (and there is a very clear dislike of anything from the West), and that's fine.
We're still going to make the game the way we wanted to though, because there
is a significant audience for it and because it's what we like in games.
tl;dr of the above responses though;
- The game's budget itself did not suffer from voicework
- The debt itself was due to it being all paid for up front at the end of development (many games do this at different points in development)
- If we had a billion dollars or didn't pay for the voicework, the game would be 100% the same, just without voicework
- The core team (art, programming, and myself) are not "commissioned", so no amount of money would have resulted in "more content" in those areas
- We had a plan down very early on for # of enemies, stages, bosses, events, animations, etc. per area and for the game as a whole, no amount of money would have changed this
- Future games should have far less delays and issues due to having a complete team, a complete engine, and a lot more experience
That all said, I'm not likely to make much more responses about this, because I've said about all I can said. So if you're unhappy about how we've made the game, even after clarifying all of those points and that the voice acting literally did not impact the game's content besides just adding to it, then there's not much else I can say or do that'd change your opinion, so there's not too much point in debating it.
