Year in review Progress Report (Patreon)

A lot of you are new to this project, but there are a group of you that have been following the progression of SuperPowered for the last 2 years.  For you new patrons, I originally started this game on the RAGS engine as seen in the screen at the top of the page. It was good for a new developer, but it had it's limitations. 

One was scope. If I wanted to add a new power it took approximately 4 hours of work per character, and at the end of my work in RAGS I had 36 characters. All of the shortcuts afforded normal programmers only worked in RAGS if you kept the amount of action subprocesses low. At a certain point the engine would eat up too much memory, and the game would would become so slow it was unplayable. I am also not the tidiest of coders, as my main program wizard can attest too :P 

Another limitation I was running into was just visual content. As you can see from the above image, I initally was ripping off porn image sets and modding the images. Near the end of my work in the RAGs platform, I was spending as much time clean cooties out of my computer from all the porn sites as I was actually collecting images. Which was a lot time.When 80% of my time was surfing porn sites, editing porn images, or cleaning my computer of porn site malware, it really started to wear on me.

Finally...The Interface. The RAGS Interface is great for beginners. But....look at it. It's shit. Now I made it do as many backflips as I could, but in the end, it was still the RAGS basic interface, and working around it's limitations was a nightmare for what I had in mind for the game.

I had released the first version of SuperPowered(RAGS) in early March of 2015, and had been working on it since January.  The first version had an intro and only allowed you to move around the house a little, work at the airport, and use xray vision. 

Two months later, I had the school implimented. (only 6 characters then) and you had basic interactions,  sex scenes, and mind control. You also had the diner with two characters, Sister, Danni, Ivy, Maid Manners, the Initiative, Globex, the Mall, A used Car lot, and probably a few other options I'm not remembering. By August Flight was in the game, as well as a very crappy version of combat, along with the second job, the first gang, and 6 additional characters, and 6 additional locations. And by the end of October,  Super Empathy(a mix between sympathic Link, and Psychosisim) was added, along with the University with another character, and the addition of the first Profession (will be called Trade Skill in the Ren'py version) The first bits of equipment, a couple people added to the mall. And that was more or less the last update to the RAGS version, not counting bug fixes. 

In December I decided that RAGS was becoming to difficult work with anymore, and began shopping around for a new platform. I had also recieved a few nasty grams in the form of DMCA's  regarding the content of my game, and was A worried about some sort of lawsuit, and B tired of surfing porn for a super hero oriented images. They are not easy to find BTW. So I was also dusting off some old 3D software I had purchased a few years before, but never really bothered to learn, and giving it a serious try.

In January I was laid off from my IT job, and since I was already hip deep in a DEMO for the Ren'py version, and now had a lot of time on my hands, a decent severence package, and a good nest egg from all my cashed in vacation time, I decided to give this Patreon business a go. I had planned on maybe just finding a part time job outside the occasional bartending gig I was doing, and supplimenting my income with Patreon enough to afford to continue to buy art assests to work on the game, but 6 months in I was fully sustainable on just Patreon, and could focus solely on SuperPowered. 

The first DEMO of SuperPowered, only had a small scene with a bunch of inside jokes refrencing the differences between RAGS and Patreon. 2 weeks after its release I had added the first chat options into the game, but Mom was the only interactable character until  July. What I was doing between January and July you may ask. I was developing the most work intensive powers, and character interactions on mom. I was doing this so that I had a framework to use when developing future characters. Unlike RAGS where I added a crap load of characters at first, and with each new power, I had to go back and adjust all of them individually, I wanted to have the powers in place first,  so that developing a character was a known time cost. Currently it's close to 6 weeks, though that time is getting shorter and shorter as the software improves,as I get new hardware, and my contractors get to producing more and more content.

RAGS Feature list:

• Character - Alicia
• Character - Allie
• Character - Betty
• Character - Chance
• Character - Samantha
• Character - Chelsea
• Character - Courtney
• Character - Danni
• Character - Denise
• Character - Erica
• Character - Gina
• Character - Helen
• Character - Ivy
• Character - Jenine
• Character - Kathleen
• Character - Kelly
• Character - Lauren
• Character - Lisa
• Character - Maid Manners
• Character - Mary
• Character - Mom
• Character - Nikki
• Character - Anne
• Character - Officer Simpson
• Character - Principal Larson
• Character - Priscilla
• Character - Sandra
• Character - Sister
• Character - Jenny
• Character - Karen
• Character - Su Lyn
• Character - Terrorstrike
• Character - The Pixie
• Character - Jesse
• Character - Shelly
• Enemy - Mugger
• Enemy - Burglar
• Enemy - Male Troublemaker
• Enemy - Female Troublemaker
• Locations - EASTSIDE Airport, Airstrip
• Locations - WESTEND Globex, Advertising Firm
• Locations - HOME Kitchen, Your Room, Sisters Room, Garage
• Locations - UPTOWN Logistics Division,  Mall food court, NCE,  SSD 
• Locations - SCHOOL Library, Weight room, Debate Class, Cosmetics, Basketball court, Archery, Administration
• Locations - OUTSKIRTS Lawyers Office, PR Firm
• Locations - THE BURBS lan center, yoga class
• Locations - RIVERFRONT beach, volleyball 
• Powers - Mentalism, SuperEmpathy, Flight, X-Ray Vision, Partial versions of Super Strength and Super Speed
• Flaws - Public Masterbation, Incest, Ephebophilia, Anilagnia, Partial Gender Bender
• Jobs - School, Airport (Rank changed the picture, and increased pay, but that was it)
• Functions - Demerits, Rent, Investments, Equipment, partial PR, partial Advertising , Initiative Training, 1 storyline(incomplete), Combat
• Profession - Finance

Now The Ren'py Feature list:

• Character - Mom
• Character - Kelly
• Character - Samantha
• Character - partial Principal Larson
• Character - partial Allie
• Character - very partial Sophie
• Locations - HOME kitchen, your room
• Location - school
• Location -  partial Coffeeshop
• Location - partial Globex
• Location - partial Logistics Division
• Powers - Mind Control, Sympathic Link, Psychosism, Enhanced Senses, Flight
• Flaws - Public Masterbation, Incest, Ephebophilia, Anilagnia, Agateophilia
• Jobs - SCHOOL janitor, maintenance worker, hall monitor, teachers aide
• Functions - School grades, nymphomania, obsessiveness, partial volatile, MindCraft, MindCraft roles, passive power bonuses, GREATLY improved UI, partial tutorial

Comparing the list you may say wow....ever since you started getting paid to do this, you've been slacking. But the truth is, The characters in RAGS were vary shallow. Everybody operated pretty much the same way. So it was closer to a game of pokemon with porn, where as illustrated by the funtions list of Ren'py you see Mindcraft - roles, you have unstable states that dramatically change the outcome of encounters, and you have a custom built UI, that is so much less of an eyesore than RAGS. A perfect example of the shallowness of the RAGS version is when comparing the image count for each character. Sister who had the most images of anyone in the game came in at a whopping 92 images in RAGS. In Ren'py Mom has 417 images. 

The same can be said for the locations themselves. The school was just a place to either work if you met the requirements, or train your skills, and chase after characters, where in Ren'Py it will be a huge part of the game, at least for the first year of the game, and the mechanics of the school reflect that. Even the school jobs feel and act differently from each other, where as in RAGS, they were just ranks, that paid more, and required higher stats to gain.

So in turn, I think though there are a lot less locations, and characters in Ren'py, it is a deeper, more enjoyable game. And once it reaches the feature list of the RAGS version, it will be a very impressive game.

But that's just my opinion :P