2020 in the rear-view (Patreon)

Finally, it's over. 

This year has completely sucked for us, what with us being stuck inside since March (literally, we have not left our apartment building, and not left our apartment itself for much of anything other than taking down the trash or taking in deliveries), but ToA, on the other hand, has been going really well! We're proud of the progress we've made, even as we lament this year's passing. That is, we lament that the year passed, not its imminent demise, which we celebrate.

But that's enough griping: let's dig into the year end review! Check out those swanky gifs above for a visual overview, and read down below for all that sweet, sweet text.

So first, some stats.

YEAR-END REVIEW:

Like last year, we were light on adding new characters this year, and there are once again two new characters, the Catgirl and Tentacle Witch. 

We started 2020 with 3960 patrons, and we're ending it with 4820. Whether you're a new patron, an old patron , or a returnign patron, thank you so much for supporting us in this... trying year.

We've added over 50 new pieces of art and animation, which makes sense, since at the end of last year we decided to guarantee a new piece of art and/or animation in each weekly. So there's been extremely steady progress on that front, and now every character has some unique art, AND we've completed idle animations for every character, and now that the Naga expansion is done and the Wasp is soon to follow, we've also completed all of the first pass encounter expansions, which is why the survey has now started adding new scenarios, of which we've done the first three, all of which were really enjoyable to make and seemed to be really well received. Many characters now have a sex animation, if not two or three, and things are really starting to fill out on that front, too. In fact, with the survey results from this last month, we're doing the generic oral animations, which will be the first generic art to receive animations, meaning a lot of the game is gonna start moving! That also has the nice side benefit of meaning that Hiro's customization options are appearing in more and more art. In fact, we've also made sure art reflects whether or not Hiro is wearing a cage, and we've added a bunch of new cum variants to sex art as well.

The new big thing: we've completed all the non-placeholder UIs! With that and the idle animations and various other things completed, we entered the game into its Beta phase, the last one prior to release.

Helena's still up to her old shenanigans. Never change, Helena. But please do, actually, the penis stealing has got to stop.

FINAL THOUGHTS (and then, the year is finally, mercifully over):

With the Evoker incentive reached, that includes the Evoker character/class! For those who don't already know, the Evoker was one of our earliest OCs, and will play very different from Hiro in ToA, with demonic contracts in place of a food clock. They likely won't have nearly as much unique art/animations as Hiro, but they'll still have some of their own.

Now that we're in Beta, we're in the final stretch approaching release. We posted the Beta roadmap a few months back, and we're now starting to see those roadmap elements fall into our task lists, so we'll start seeing the last legs of the journey soon. Of course, that won't be the end of ToA, but the start of a new journey! We'll see how far we get in 2021!

We're hoping to introduce the remaining story-critical characters this year so that we can potentially finish up both modes of ToA, but if we only get one, we'll consider that a win. We really want, on the one hand, to have a strong rogue-lite style gameplay, and on the other, to have a really intricate branching story with many outcomes. What we've done thus far is the foundations of that, so we're excited to see it all come together.

But, again, thank you so much for supporting us and ToA. We're glad you made it through this year, and we hope it wasn't too bad, and we hope to see you in the new year! Wait, watch out, it's a harp-- *glurk*!

Happy New Year!

Majalis