2017 in the rear-view (and announcement!) (Patreon)

Hi guys!  It's time for another year and reflection, and this post is going to be VERY LONG, so if you have important stuff to get to, come back to it later or just, y'know, skim it.  We've got our end of year review, our BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, and some closing end of year thoughts. 

This year has been absolutely dong-shatteringly amazing, and it's thanks to all of you, patrons new and old, who have made it possible.  The amazing year, that is, not the dong-shattering.  You know who you are.

YEAR REVIEW:

This is the first full year of ToA development - starting from the prototype that was a few months old when the year began.  At that time, I had said 2017 was going to be a great year for ToA, and I think that's borne out. 

ToA characters introduced this year:

Gadgeteer, Urka the Orc, Trudy the Adventurer, Ogre, Drow Beastmistress, Spider Queen, Kylira the Elf, Golem, Ghost, Pucas (Bunnies), Angel, Naga, Lord of the Mountain, and last but certainly not least, the Brothel Madame!

We've got the world map up and running, a lot of highly requested quality of life features like manual saves, text skipping and autoplay, a separate inventory screen, CG view, bestiary, and the preload option.  We bought a sound library towards the end of the year, and we've already got some good use out of it.  Can't underestimate the power of good cum sounds, eh?  Also, at one point, I Flooded the World with Centaurs, so that was good.

And for the sketch factory: Traveling Salesman Problem, Consummate, Drinks for Free, Used Parts, First Contact, Game Over (Kobolds), Doing It For the Car, Wax Poetic, Cockfucker, Eater, Quetzal Goddess, Erect, Bark Like a Dog, Bad POV, Puppy and Kitty, Futa Pro

We started 2017 with 397 patrons - and we're ending it with 1430.  That's, uh, that's 1000 new patrons.  Hi guys!  For those of you wondering why we have our weird per-update schedule, it's because this was originally a Patreon for Majalis' art and stories, and is now a weird hybrid with that and ToA.  We'll figure it out together eventually.

Our Discord server has particularly ballooned up, and that's a ton of fun if anyone is interested in joining.  There's a burgeoning pro-Swedish uprising that I will with great sadness soon need to crush with an iron fist, but aside from that, it's a drama-free little community.

Picarto's been pretty chill, but we have started doing regular request streams for Dragon+ patrons, and those have been fun and resulted in some really great new work from Alis.  We'll be announcing a streaming schedule soon, for people who want to see us make-a-the-thing.

We hit our six, seventh, eighth, and almost ninth goal milestones, which is craaaaaaaaaaazy.  Again, thank you all so much for believing in us and in ToA - we won't let you down.

The surveys have amazing response rates every month, and we get a huge amount of helpful feedback, encouragement, and shoopuf-related responses.  In the last few months we've tried to improve the surveys, particularly the feature survey, to give a better indication of what we'll work on as a result of the winners, and we hope those changes have been for the better. 

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:

Many of you have noticed an uptick in the speed of development - for the last two months, I (Maj) have been ramping down off of my full time job, and as of the start of the new year will be more or less full-time on writing erotica and working on ToA, at a roughly 20/80 split based on the last survey.  I'll still possibly be doing some contract work on the side until we hit the next goal milestone, but we're nearly there (97% as of this post)!

With the new time that I have, I've been going through the process of oiling the machine (not what I'm used to oiling, but so be it!).  While I have been simply doing more ToA stuff over the last two months (with more new content, new implemented features, tweaks, and bug fixes than I previously could manage), I've also been setting up tooling and automation to make development faster and cleaner, as well as generally cleaning up some of the outstanding bugs.

There's still more of that to do - I'll be setting up more testing environments and building out more automated tests over the next month as well.  Aside from that, I'm also getting more rigorous with our project management - some of you may have seen the roadmap we laid out in November, which we've since updated and we'll post early in the New Year.  

I'll also be making more posts on here diving into stuff we're building out and what we have planned.  Since we're going to be working on combat again soon, that'll likely be posts about the future of sex combat in general, topping/dominating in particular, how combat is planned to change and what to look forward to.

Aside from all that, I'll also be continuing work on my existing serialized stories, like Raquel and Jewel, which I know a lot of you have been waiting for - sorry story updates were so sparse this year.  It wouldn't be possible to do all of this if I was still working full time, so again, thank you.

Alis has been improving her workflow as well, and now that we have more time to work together, things have been going smoothly - she's built up a buffer for things like patron voted content, so we have more time to branch out into other ToA-related art and asset creation. 

Now that we're about to hit our biggest goal milestone yet, we'll be taking a look at the existing ones to figure out what big things we should be planning for next (we're currently 63% towards buying the moon, so uh, we might need to revisit that one).  As an example, in the new year, we plan to start hitting up contractors for work - so if anyone knows anyone we should be talking to, send us a message and let us know! 

FINAL THOUGHTS (2018, woo!):

The nature of this kind of development is that we're building the plane in mid-flight - some see this as an insurmountable hurdle to game development, and while it does have its drawbacks (that we're well aware of), like necessary rework and scaffolding artifacts, it can be done.  Too many see a challenge or a roadblock as a wall.  Thank you all for supporting us as we get the wings on.

So as we go into the new year, we're anticipating our biggest challenges and we're preparing for them.  We feel more confident going into this year than the previous, and we hope you all enjoy the result.

(and yes, we're mostly talking about all of the combat changes we have planned; it's a work in progress, and we've bumped it up to the top of our roadmap of the major system buildouts :D)

The last weekly of the year is up right now on the Dropbox, and the last monthly of 2017 will be up tomorrow along with the v0.1.27.0 changelog, in 2018.

We made it.  For anyone who was struggling this year, may 2018 be your finest hour.  We'll do our best to make sure it is for us as creators.

Happy New Year!  \o/

Love,

Majalis