Patreon SIM Abandoned [ HartistaPipebomb] Breeding Season

[stuntcock42]

Re: Breeding Season

Looks like this continues to be the flagship of what-not-to-be if you're starting a patreon.

It's a cautionary example for software developers (and/or project managers, depending on where you lay the blame for the various delays).

As a Patreon project, though ... it's undeniably successful. There's consistent engagement and feedback from the patrons. People are interested in the release schedule and they care about the content and quality of the game. A few of them are disappointed or even hostile, but I would prefer to see people be angry about my project than ignorant of its existence (or apathetic about its progress).

Quote from someone on this blogpost

Here's the actual

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. It's completely professional, and makes no reference to frustration with the Breeding Season team or with the progress of the project.

Blogspot dude is making shit up to fit his own narrative.

 

[YetAnotherLurker]

Re: Breeding Season

Anyone have a mega-link to the latest version? So I can see if it's still the same thing I played years ago? Thanks!

There's torrents available on kat.cr and such. I haven't really followed their recent development, but from their recent releases it seemed like they were finally getting their shit together.

 

[DerPeter]

Re: Breeding Season

I haven't really followed their recent development

Don't worry, you're not the only one, most other posts above yours have no clue either. Vanilly did not say why she left, but if you are looking for a reason, it is probably because of the hatred from some people, like those comments above are exemplifying. The icing on the cake where comments about how apparently her complete neighborhood must've died, just because she went to the funeral of one of her family members once.

And Spurple is easily the most useless teammember at the moment. All he does is coloring sketches drawn by others and drawing the alternative faces ad hairstyles.

 

[beanjam]

Re: Breeding Season

Looks like this continues to be the flagship of what-not-to-be if you're starting a patreon.

Why? He's still making more than 30k a month.

 

[satoshi1]

Re: Breeding Season

Why? He's still making more than 30k a month.

I think the issue is that they are making so much for very little progress as a "game". It has gone backwards quite a lot and it seems like the staff is frustrated with the progress. The consumers are paying constantly, which leaves them disappointed at time. And the lead member seems to have to deal with the complaints.

Patreon doesn't seem to be the best platform for funding games since consumers are more likely to pay too much than they desire too, and they get shafted or told to buzz off if they don't like what's happening.

It happens to a lot of these games where there is gap between the producers and consumers.

Imagine if Super Mario was made as a 2D side-scroller, but half-way through development, they decide to change the art style and animations to be 3D. Not only will this cost more time, the money spent on any previous work is going down the drain.

We can't know for sure if they are sitting on their hands or just terrible at creating a schedule.

All we know for sure is that this game may take more than 5 years of development at this rate, maybe less.

TiTs is the only game I know that has consistent updates, good communication, and no ban hammering people who ask questions.

I've been banned before for asking questions about development or when will certain game breaking bugs will be patched.

 

[Sonatafox]

Re: Breeding Season

I think the issue is that they are making so much for very little progress as a "game". It has gone backwards quite a lot and it seems like the staff is frustrated with the progress. The consumers are paying constantly, which leaves them disappointed at time. And the lead member seems to have to deal with the complaints.

Patreon doesn't seem to be the best platform for funding games since consumers are more likely to pay too much than they desire too, and they get shafted or told to buzz off if they don't like what's happening.

Pretty much this. This is probably the majority of the reason why this game is so notorious. It certainly doesn't seem that bad to a lot of people who have only recently heard of it but if you followed its development it is a major disappointment in terms of productivity in a timely manner. It originally started out as a subjectively bad character builder game with hentai elements. I say subjectively bad because literally everything from the legend of krystal forums is just a poorly edited sprites from playshapes; the same singular sprite edited a copious amount of times by everybody and nobody really creating anything themselves. This game kinda went beyond that and started to do their own sprites and adjusted as it went on. It was also free and a hobby of a single person.

Huge wall of text under the cut of my memory of roughly the development and patreon stuff since i've been somewhat keeping up with the project since the very beginning.

Spoiler

At some point the concept of patreon came about along with h-bomb and s-purple joining the team in order to make the game a lot better with a better animator and an actual artist. Of course because of this suddenly all of the scenes the game originally had were scrapped so it was a huge year or so of progress that was just completely scrapped. After that they redid the sprites and managed to put out the game with no scenes added to them. It was basically a leap for graphics but a huge drop for the gameplay itself. After that they kinda fiddled with scenes and such and i'm pretty sure they decided to scrap some of the characters again which meant that any scenes they had just released were also scrapped. Eventually they settled down with a style for each of the characters because people grew upset about the designs constantly being considered to change or not.

Eventually though the entire game itself was scrapped. They redid everything. The overworld, the breeding menu, the way the entirety of the stats work and how the breeding works and it pretty much fucking destroyed the game and rendered it completely unplayable. Once again a nice leap in graphics but a huge drop in quality of the game, seeing how there was no gameplay. Then they kinda fiddled with the story and added in the basic elements and worked out a rough idea of how the breeding menu would work and the way the new breeding system would work. Then they scrapped the menu again and remade it and i think they left it as it is now with maybe a few tweaks every so often. My memory of this whole trip is fuzzy but i think this whole thing was over the course of a year or two, which is a long time to be constantly destroying, removing, and remaking the entire game.

You also need to take into consideration that in this year or two of recreation and demolishing they were getting paid like 30k a month. That's a lot of fucking money for very unprofessionally live action planning of your game and being paid for it. It probably wouldn't be so notorious if they had decided to do the patreon shit after they finished deciding on sprites and graphics for everything but they chose not to and jumped on the patreon bandwagon and raked in the cash by a bunch of dumb furries who will throw their money at anything for little to no work at all. (Seriously though, there's a guy who gets paid to post pictures of his sphinx cats.)

Is it a bad game right now? No, but it certainly isnt finished and has a long way to go.

Is the development bad? Absolutely. They had a really rough ride of bullshit and still cashed in on it and a lot of people found that sort of move to be pretty scummy to pretty much get your fans to pay you to plan a game when planning should have been done long before the development started.

In the end it'll be what it is and I personally still hope it becomes a decent game but with how long they're taking to develop it I doubt it would be worth the money if you calculated how much they're getting for it across the entire game's devlopment. If they consistently get 30k a month (they're most likely getting less because of fake pledges and such, although im pretty sure that entire problem has been snuffed by patreon's pay first thing now) then thats 360k a year. The patreon page went live on march 14th 2014 and and already went well above 10k in about a month. Taking that into consideration that would roughly be somewhere in the ball park of $690,000 usd over the course of 2 years of development. Dunno how much patreon takes away from its users but you can decide if its current build in the development time it took and the money it took is justified or not.

Its a nice game but I personally think they make way more than it'll be worth considering the game is nowhere near being even half completed.

 

[thswherizat]

Re: Breeding Season

Why? He's still making more than 30k a month.

The other posters went over the details pretty well, but my point was essentially that if you wanted to make a game, having a good idea and then ballooning it to epic proportions way beyond your (apparent) capabilities is a really bad idea. This is like over two years later and they still have a very bare minimum of actual content, while constantly reworking the core concept over and over again.

As a cash-grab? Go for it. I still prefer to believe that most of the people on patreon making h-games are at least attempting to genuinely create a product and have a real investment in that product, so they should avoid Breeding Season's model. Keep it smaller in scope, don't suddenly bring on 4 teammembers, don't constantly rework the core engine, don't re-create the core concept, don't spend a whole month to re-do things like the save system...

So on and so forth.

 

[raska42]

Re: Breeding Season

I'll probably get neg rep'd for saying this, but these guys are deuchebags. I used to be a supporter, and these guys are one of the main reasons I hate patreon. Constant 'reworks', 'full-time' artists and animators that rarely manage to do more then 4 or 5 animations a month (2 artists, 2 animators, that's 700-800 man-hours a month...), oh, and like many ftp rpg forums, they delete negative comments and comments asking for clarification about time involved in the process. I think they're scum, but that's my opinion, and people can feel free to disagree and be scammed by them.

Edit: They're also a prefect example why patreon games shouldn't have pay-for-imput into the game. Maybe a year-year and a half ago they had 3-5 updates that were pretty much purely futa content due to the fact that their highest tier of donators (5 people at $200 a month I think) wanted that. I think they ended up dropping about 5k a month before they learned.

 

[Sigfried]

Re: Breeding Season

I supported them because of the promises they had given BEFORE they scrapped everything and remade a very different game from scratch.

For example, the creator had promised an interesting doll/automata like monster.

But after the rebuild, now we are mostly breeding slaves, with mostly common creatures getting implemented, and lots of futa variations that are, to me, annoying...

 

[mrpoppypenguin]

Re: Breeding Season

The patreon for this game is a complete scam. It's been going for years and they have LESS of a complete game than the horribly-drawn original flash version. They break the game every other update, then spend another month's "update" pretending to fix the saves again and call it a day. They've drawn, redrawn, slightly tweaked, and then redrawn the same sprites over and over again while swearing up and down that they're going to start adding real content to the game soon, only for them to have gone 2-3 years without any progression to the story. The only time anything happens is when they occasionally add a "seasonal" scene, which has like 3 lines of text and a 5 frame loop, yet takes up 2-3 months of development.

It's infuriating that I last checked on the game a year or two ago, and it's only gone backwards along its development cycle and is still making 30k a month.

 

[redfog]

Re: Breeding Season

I am just in awe that there are still no animations for catgirl and dickwolf breeding. They're the very first monsters you can get. Immediately having a nothing but a pop up saying they fucked when I try to breed them completely kills any interest I have in continuing to play.

 

[Architect]

Re: Breeding Season

I think the problem with Breeding Season, imho, is that nobody in that team had any real idea of how professional game development actually works. You just don't run into it with a rough sort of layout in your head and a couple of ideas you want to try out - unless you're just doing it for free/to learn, and no money or customer trust is involved.

They reworked and rehashed it way too much. This was exacerbated by the fact that they're raising so much money to basically sit in front of a drawing board. I doubt they did the most basic thing and made a master asset list, or even came up with deadlines or task sheets for their staff. As a sad sort of end result to something I thought really had a tremendous amount of potential, they're basically stuck in development hell.

 

[redx]

Re: Breeding Season

30k a month and progress hardly moves for a flash game... you'd think they were making a second game... called Future Season with rework DLC for patreons and delay DLC for filthy pirat.. free users.

(i'm joking Hwriter )

 

[Wynin]

Re: Breeding Season

Just a tiny fyi in regards to earnings. If you look at graphtreon.com it shows actual earned since Patreon permanently changed the earnings numbers to show the actual amount earned instead of amount pledged, sadly the site can only track back to april 2015 so for the long lived patreons it can get a bit tricky to look up.

Rough estimate is that from april 2015 to july 2016 they made 500k US dollars, might be 10k-20k off since earnings from before december 11th 2015 are purely based on pledges and not actual earning reports.

 

[Omnikuken]

Re: Breeding Season

I am just in awe that there are still no animations for catgirl and dickwolf breeding. They're the very first monsters you can get. Immediately having a nothing but a pop up saying they fucked when I try to breed them completely kills any interest I have in continuing to play.

Didn't they had 1 once upon a time ? Maybe in the 5-6 reboots they removed it ? Not trying to sound bitchy at you, but I think I saw 1 YEARS ago ...... Maybe not

 

[thswherizat]

Re: Breeding Season

Didn't they had 1 once upon a time ? Maybe in the 5-6 reboots they removed it ? Not trying to sound bitchy at you, but I think I saw 1 YEARS ago ...... Maybe not

Oh yeah it used to be there. In fact when the game only had like 5 or 6 animals to raise the animations were nearly up to date... The problem is just that either through intentional time wasting or general incompetence they've been 'remaking' the most basic animations of the game for over a year. Instead, we're left with playing a game of assembling stats with some flavor text thrown on top.

 

[HentaiWriter]

Re: Breeding Season

30k a month and progress hardly moves for a flash game... you'd think they were making a second game... called Future Season with rework DLC for patreons and delay DLC for filthy pirat.. free users.

(i'm joking Hwriter )

I know you're joking, but just so you know, we've been putting out weekly updates for a good long while now I wouldn't even put us remotely close to Breeding Season in terms of pace of development, haha.

 

[tmw]

Re: Breeding Season

And Breeding Season is dead.

Not sure how I feel about that. I guess, in the end, it was kinda too good to be true.

Though, I can't wait to see all those assets get utilized by the public at large. So its not a complete loss.

 

[Stuffie]

Re: Breeding Season

And Breeding Season is dead.

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This is one of the main reasons why I watch even very promising projects for a long time, before I consider financially supporting them - especially if it comes to more-than-two developer teams. I loved what "Breeding Season" was promising, but the HUGE financial support the project already had just had me stay put and wait, maybe buy the finished product, as the financial support seemed to be good enough.

R.I.P. "Breeding Season", you were very enjoyable, but apparently too good to be true. Or the development team was just not up for it.


Also kudos and handshakes to all those who financially supported "Breeding Season". You made the project go this far, and you now are the ones who got f*cked the most.

 

[Pykrete Blue]

Re: Breeding Season

Holy shit, tho.