What's new

ACT Patreon Active [HentaiWriter] Future Fragments


Status
Not open for further replies.

Renestrae

Devious Succubus
Joined
Jun 14, 2015
Messages
136
Reputation score
55
I can say that if you play the Electric Level demo (the one I linked above) it'll not really spoil you on much, there's tons of stuff that's not in the demos collectively either that'll only be in the full game :D glad you enjoyed it though!
Oh I didn't mean spoiled as in just knowing about plot points beforehand, I also meant gameplay. There have been several games where I followed the development/translation process so closely that once the big releaseday came it just felt like I played the same game I played before, just with a couple extra levels. Not saying that would be the case here, it's just my rationale that it's so much more satisfying to have a fresh game to discover in it's entirety :D
 
OP
HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

Tentacle God
Joined
Oct 28, 2014
Messages
751
Reputation score
366
That explains why a supposedly updated demo i got my hands on didn't have tons of stuff i've seen on videos.....mmm. Lol

edit: just to get this right, you handle your demos like the vivi magical girl guy? (from alps and dangerous forest next game) in the sense that one demo has one level and an updated demo has another level but not the previous one and so on?
Basically, we release the demos per level separately, because as we've been adding new levels into the game, we're also adding in planned mechanics per-level and globally as well, quality of life fixes, things like that.

If we were to do the game from the ground up and adjust every previous level with every new fix or tweak we've done, the game would take ten times as long with how much condensed content there is in the game; doing it separately, we can go back in one fell swoop and update everything to par, which saves us much, much more time.
 

derakino999

Demon Girl Pro
Joined
Jun 12, 2010
Messages
1,451
Reputation score
609
I really don't get it
You have a demo of any h -game and as the demo progresses there's new content. If there's a change you have to do in global mechanics you either would have to implement it in every build, or if it was just one build in every level

Don't mind me, i'm sure i'm the one who doesn't get it, since programming is a universe in itself and every developer has a different mind
 

super_slicer

Lord High Inquisitor
Staff member
H-Section Moderator
Joined
Nov 17, 2010
Messages
12,489
Reputation score
30,465
Technically, if they wanted to they could release the full game and just gate off access to any content other than what they want to show off for that demo. That's certainly not what's happening, but they COULD XD

Simplest way to explain it would be: think of how DLC works with mainstream games. Each level of this game after the first would be a DLC that you plug in and expand the game with.
 

goodolrub

Jungle Girl
Joined
Mar 30, 2012
Messages
274
Reputation score
67
i wonder how they will merge all of the levels together. that's a nice way to develop things.
 
OP
HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

Tentacle God
Joined
Oct 28, 2014
Messages
751
Reputation score
366
I really don't get it
You have a demo of any h -game and as the demo progresses there's new content. If there's a change you have to do in global mechanics you either would have to implement it in every build, or if it was just one build in every level

Don't mind me, i'm sure i'm the one who doesn't get it, since programming is a universe in itself and every developer has a different mind
To be more clear about why we're doing it this way;

Imagine you're building a house. Now imagine that after you've got the bathroom (level 1), kitchen (level 2), living room (level 3), and bedroom (level 4) all furnished and done, you realize that the piping in the bathroom is poor and doesn't heat the water well for showers (ex. playtesters pointing out a feature is unfun), and so you want to fix that feature of the house.

Unfortunately, to fix this, since it involves the piping that's going throughout all the rooms of the house, you're going to have to drill holes in all the other rooms and do major work in those too, taking you a long time, lots of repairs, and lots of bugtesting on top of that to make sure you didn't break something in the other levels.

What we're doing instead is assembling the bathroom, kitchen, living room, and bedroom entirely separate from one another, and then, after we've finished with all the rooms and testing them out for any flaws or issues, we stick them all together, and do one final pass to link up all their plumbing, wiring, and so on.

This saves a lot of time because it means that if there are issues with earlier levels (like how we're redoing the mechanics of the fire and ice levels), or improvements on global mechanics (like adding in damage numbers for enemies or the collections system), we don't have to update every level every time we make the smallest tweak; instead, we only have to do it once at the end of the game's development across the board.

Technically, if they wanted to they could release the full game and just gate off access to any content other than what they want to show off for that demo. That's certainly not what's happening, but they COULD XD
We likely wouldn't want to do this just because this would make the filesize massive for someone downloading just a demo; the electric demo alone is around 250MB, the full game will probably be around 1.5GB due to all the voicework and animations.

Simplest way to explain it would be: think of how DLC works with mainstream games. Each level of this game after the first would be a DLC that you plug in and expand the game with.
Just to clarify here, the full game will have all intended content (5 levels, 20 enemies and 6 bosses, 40-ish endings, etc.), we're not going to release any of the levels piece by piece after the game's been released for purchase, haha.

i wonder how they will merge all of the levels together. that's a nice way to develop things.
Each level will be separate, but the effects of the choices you do in each level will spread to subsequent levels, both in cutscene choices and your actions (killing/not killing enemies, saving/not saving faye, etc.)
 

derakino999

Demon Girl Pro
Joined
Jun 12, 2010
Messages
1,451
Reputation score
609
Oh ho ho so you finally decided to take the leap and enter the big leagues, awesome, wish you the best of luck bro
 

wming

New member
Joined
May 7, 2020
Messages
4
Reputation score
0
Which means I have to wait until October 30 to play?I can't wait

and why can't I find it on steam
 

Caernarvon

Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2018
Messages
50
Reputation score
32
Been holding off on this until the struggle system gets more difficult or altered, but have loved essentially all I've seen apart from that so far. Hoping there'll be a difficulty that makes them harder, since as of now they feel quite inconsequential.
 

Papanomics

Lurker
Joined
Dec 2, 2008
Messages
1,754
Reputation score
657
Always been a skeptic. Ain't gonna stop now. We are still a ways from October, but we will just have to wait and see.
 
OP
HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

Tentacle God
Joined
Oct 28, 2014
Messages
751
Reputation score
366
Been holding off on this until the struggle system gets more difficult or altered, but have loved essentially all I've seen apart from that so far. Hoping there'll be a difficulty that makes them harder, since as of now they feel quite inconsequential.
The struggle system itself isn't getting altered, but the stun system is getting a rework, I'll talk more about it once it's in.
The difficulty though is supposed to come from the gameplay itself, not the actual struggle stuff.

Always been a skeptic. Ain't gonna stop now. We are still a ways from October, but we will just have to wait and see.
We shifted it on Steam to late November, given that we were forced to change our original plan of a SFW version on Steam with a NSFW patch; Steam basically said we had to do it full NSFW, but we still want to offer a SFW version, so we're giving ourselves that extra leeway to be able to put in a SFW toggle, built into the game for youtubers, streamers, or just people who want to play the game entirely clean of sex content (and percentage-wise, polls on twitter/patreon/discord show there's a lot of people who want that, so we can't just leave it out).

We literally have to be done by November's end though; if we aren't, we'll miss the visbility round on Steam, which will result in massive losses in sales and make it pretty hard to recoup our own debts we'll have to go into to pay off the final chunk of voicework/music left for the game.

So we're pretty much working even more overtime than we already were to make sure at all costs it gets out by then, because if not, it's going to be really hard to start up the sequel smoothly (financially).
 
OP
HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

Tentacle God
Joined
Oct 28, 2014
Messages
751
Reputation score
366
What do you mean by that? Is that some thing Steam does to highlight certain games or something?
Essentially, when your game is in "coming soon", Steam mostly uses one algorithm to check things.
That's your wishlists; if you have a lot of wishlists, your game gets shown to more people as Steam has deemed it "important", and the reverse is true too.
So before the game comes out, wishlists are important, but they're also important when it comes out too.

When the game comes out, if you have at least 10,000 wishlists (estimate, some people put the number much higher or even slightly lower), you'll be put into the "popular new releases" section, which gives you significantly more visibility than just the standard "visibility" that Steam does on release.

This circles back around to what your original question was; when you release your game, Steam gives you a "visibility" push to get your game seen by lots of people, and the amount of people they push your game to is mostly related to your number of wishlists (and some other factors no one knows about).

That visibility push though is directly tied to your release date, so if your game isn't ready by that release date, then that sucks for you; you've missed your small window of a large amountof visibility, potentially (likely) dooming your game to obscurity on Steam.

So if you want to help the game out, definitely wishlist us! :D
 

Caernarvon

Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2018
Messages
50
Reputation score
32
The struggle system itself isn't getting altered, but the stun system is getting a rework, I'll talk more about it once it's in.
The difficulty though is supposed to come from the gameplay itself, not the actual struggle stuff.



We shifted it on Steam to late November, given that we were forced to change our original plan of a SFW version on Steam with a NSFW patch; Steam basically said we had to do it full NSFW, but we still want to offer a SFW version, so we're giving ourselves that extra leeway to be able to put in a SFW toggle, built into the game for youtubers, streamers, or just people who want to play the game entirely clean of sex content (and percentage-wise, polls on twitter/patreon/discord show there's a lot of people who want that, so we can't just leave it out).

We literally have to be done by November's end though; if we aren't, we'll miss the visbility round on Steam, which will result in massive losses in sales and make it pretty hard to recoup our own debts we'll have to go into to pay off the final chunk of voicework/music left for the game.

So we're pretty much working even more overtime than we already were to make sure at all costs it gets out by then, because if not, it's going to be really hard to start up the sequel smoothly (financially).
Apologies from the late reply, though I moreso mean grab/struggle difficulty as a part of the gameplay. As of now grabs and traps feel quite trivial when they could, for example, be used as an execute or something that needs to be played around as a threat. It's somewhat more difficult to mash out if you're low on HP but if you're actually trying it's still pretty trivial and there's no real danger to it if you get me. What I'd love to see is some difficulty options for how hard it is to mash out though I'm not aware of how difficult that is to implement. Maybe as an item?
 
OP
HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

Tentacle God
Joined
Oct 28, 2014
Messages
751
Reputation score
366
Apologies from the late reply, though I moreso mean grab/struggle difficulty as a part of the gameplay. As of now grabs and traps feel quite trivial when they could, for example, be used as an execute or something that needs to be played around as a threat. It's somewhat more difficult to mash out if you're low on HP but if you're actually trying it's still pretty trivial and there's no real danger to it if you get me. What I'd love to see is some difficulty options for how hard it is to mash out though I'm not aware of how difficult that is to implement. Maybe as an item?
Oh yeah, at least 2 powerups will heavily impede you when it comes to the mashout stuff, for sure.

The new feature I hinted at before though should also make things a lot more balanced "punishment-wise", so hopefully that makes things a lot better for you!

By the way, here's the new NSFW trailer;


------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------

You can see a SFW version of it over at

:D
 

Caernarvon

Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2018
Messages
50
Reputation score
32
Oh yeah, at least 2 powerups will heavily impede you when it comes to the mashout stuff, for sure.

The new feature I hinted at before though should also make things a lot more balanced "punishment-wise", so hopefully that makes things a lot better for you!

By the way, here's the new NSFW trailer;


------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------

You can see a SFW version of it over at

:D
Awesome to hear that! Very much looking forward to release in that case. Things have been coming along in an excellent manner and I appreciate how communicative you are with the audience.
 
OP
HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

Tentacle God
Joined
Oct 28, 2014
Messages
751
Reputation score
366
Awesome to hear that! Very much looking forward to release in that case. Things have been coming along in an excellent manner and I appreciate how communicative you are with the audience.
Thanks a lot man :D

also streaming map creation right now!
 
OP
HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

Tentacle God
Joined
Oct 28, 2014
Messages
751
Reputation score
366
As a note, if anyone here has ever pledged to the Patreon or wants to do so, the demo we're putting out on September 14th will go out to anyone who's ever pledged, even if at $1!

In worse news though, I realize it's been a while since an update here (if you do want to stay up with updates, follow us on Twitter at or the Discord at ), but due to things taking much longer than we thought to get done, we're going to have to unfortunately push the final release date of the game to March 31st, 2021.

As noted in an earlier post, this is definitely going to hurt us sales-wise if I'm understanding how Steam works correctly, but there's not much that can be done about it; we're not about to push out an incomplete game just to get more sales at the cost of the player's experience and quality of life on the game itself.

This is also going to hurt us financially because it's going to mean our "bail out" from game sales that we had planned for November isn't going to be there, so we're going to have to get a loan to finish up the remainder of voice acting (nearly $30,000 worth at $2 per line and roughly 250,000 words), but this too is something we'd rather do for the game than half-ass it.

----------------------------

There shouldn't be anymore delays after this, given that we're giving ourselves another 4 months for things like bugtesting (a month for this for sure), final polish, Steam approval (which can take up to 2 weeks or more), and the remainder of gameplay/content that needs to be done.

As noted above, we've still got to finish the massive amount of voice acting across nearly 300 interlinked cutscenes/databanks.
If you're interested, you can see the connections between just one level's worth here for one example;



Here's the databanks and their connections to other databanks by number and cutscenes by number on the right

cutscenes2.png

And here's the same for cutscenes and their connections to other databanks in the middle, and other cutscenes, on the right.


We really, really apologize for these delays, but we'd rather we make sure the game is every bit as good as you all deserve for supporting the game with your hard-earned money and time, than push it out the door incomplete and buggy right at the finish line like we're Electronic Arts or something.

As per usual too, if you're pledging on Patreon, you can always ask for refunds on Patreon for up to the last 3 months per what Patreon allows us to refund; we're happy to refund anyone for any reason.

Thank you all for continuing to stick with us; we don't intend to have any more delays like this from here on out, or at least we'll do our best not to have anymore happen.
 

Attachments

Status
Not open for further replies.
Top