2023 in the rear-view (Patreon)

Get it?

This has been an excellent year for ToA, and it's tee-ing up the thrilling conclusion of the ToA saga if all goes well. While we did get a ton done this year, and with the AI nearly ready that'll be another big thing ready for prime time, we didn't get as much movement on story mode as we were hoping. We're going to be finalizing world map stuff early in 2024, and that'll allow us to build out the rest of the story mode map more conveniently, so hopefully we'll see story mode completed this coming year and make the Evoker playable.

And now, once again, the stats.

YEAR-END REVIEW:

Once again, we added over 50 new pieces of art and animations, with a new one each week. Hopefully you've noticed an increase in quality and variation as well, with new art pieces and animations having a lot more love put into them. Hiro could still use a few more generic animations for combat and scenarios, and we'll be adding those in the coming year, but other than that, we're pretty happy about the state of things. Hiro's hair can now also be silver, and, oh yeah, we've got individualized cocks for a bunch of the characters now, and we'll be finishing that up. This year we snuck in a new character right at the end as well - the Kitsune, a lovely new beastman to have some fun with~.

We've just about got every character their own talking and battle track, and now we're going through the encounters and doing sound design. The last piece of the original royalty-free music has almost been entirely replaced - once the Demon King gets her battle track, it'll finally sunset. Oh, speaking of sound design - one of the plans for 2024 is going to be sounds synced to animation, so hopefully we'll be able to sort that out as well. And we're hoping to start getting some non-dialogue voice work done, as well.

We've added companion pregnancy (eggnancy coming soon!), daytime background displays on the new animated backgrounds, including on the main menu, lubrication mechanics, darkness/surprise/bioluminescence, inventory access in encounters, inventory sorting, learning character's names, battle rescues, individualized phalluses, lockpicks and locked chests, spanking, new scaling weapon enchants, story mode encounter selection, There have been some major improvements to the combat system, and early in 2024 we'll be improving companions and foraging as well.

Game performance, particularly on Android, has seen major performance improvements this year, thanks to Dern, our contract programmer. There's also been a lot of minor and major fixes thanks to him, and thanks to the tooling that he's built out this year, which is also making it easier to develop ToA and to test and fix things as they pop up. A lot of his work is unseen, but has a major impact.

Oh, you can change your audio device and the game will pick it up now - that's been on the backlog for a long while, and it mostly just bothered me, but now it's all good.

Once again, we can't thank you enough for your support and enthusiasm about ToA, and we hope you love it as much as we do. Happy New Year!

Majalis