2021, here we come! (Patreon)

Happy holiday, everyone! This is Agang.

2020 is finally about to end. It has been a tough year and it is also a very meaningful year to us --- It is our first year in making adult games. Thank you, patrons and supporters, we could never go this far without your support.

We began this journey in late 2019, back then we were just rookies that knew nothing about making a game. I wrote broken English, my renders were rough, and the whole game system was obscure. For our kind fans who began to support us since VIRTUES v0.1, words cannot express our thankfulness. Thank you for tolerating that rough game and accompanying us on this journey for this entire year. Now VIRTUES looks like a totally different game from v0.1. I hope we didn’t let you down. My rendering skill improves every update, I make much fewer grammar mistakes now, and we will keep improving ourselves in 2021 and repay all of our supporters with more and more good works.

Now it’s time to do an outlook for the incoming year! I would like to briefly (or... not that briefly...) talk about our plan and about what we have done so far besides developing VIRTUES.

Basically, there are three major things we are going to do in 2021:

1. New game: Eden City

Note that: We haven’t started to design the UI yet, so please just ignore the rough UI and HUD you see in the screenshots.

This project was initiated in 2019 and you can find some designs and sketches on our patreon. It was called Project: Noah and now it has got an official name: EDEN CITY.

To be honest, the development of this game has not been plain sailing. In the beginning, our goal was simple -- we wanted to make a VIRTUES-like game with 2D arts. That was reasonable, right? We got enough experience from making VIRTUES and it would be best if we could use the experience in this new project. However, we soon found out that our plan was not practicable at all.

VIRTUES is completely a visual novel. It has a map, people can decide their daily schedules, but still, it is completely a visual novel. People are not really ‘playing’ it but more like ‘watching’ it. We are using all those scenes, renders, and plots as the replacements of the gameplay that a normal game is supposed to have. For every update of such a visual novel, the more renders we make, the better update it is likely to be. So here comes a problem, due to the high efficiency of 3D rendering, I am able to produce enough renders for every 2-month update of VIRTUES and provide a fleshed-out gaming experience for our players, but can we achieve the same updating speed in Eden City, a game with hand-drawing 2D arts?

No, we can’t. As a well-known fact, 2D drawing will take much more time than 3D rendering. If we insist to make Eden City a completely visual novel like VIRTUES, we will have to extend the updating cycle from 2 months to maybe 4, or the contents of every update will be only half as many as VIRTUES has. Both are unacceptable.

Thus we decided to change the plan. As a 2D game on Patreon, Eden City should not only be a visual novel but also with outstanding gameplay. In order to do that, we changed the game engine from Renpy to Godot since Renpy was only designed to make visual novels. 

In Eden City, you may find some similarities between it and VIRTUES, for example, they are all harem games with rich plots and they all allow you to decide your daily schedule. However, Eden City has much more abundant gameplay than VIRTUES, such as combat, strategy, etc. The combat system that we are testing right now is just so exciting. I bet you have never seen such an interesting fast-paced combat system in any adult game before. This game will go to Steam after it is finished because I am confident that it will still be a fun game even after we mosaic or remove the adult scenes.

More information about gameplay and about the story will be revealed in the future.

Also, don’t freak out and assume that Eden City is going to be a difficult or grindy game. It won’t. It will have a similar pace as VIRTUES. It won’t be difficult nor grindy and you won’t need a walkthrough to play this game. I can promise that.

2. New game: 'VIRTUES 2'

We will finish the development of VIRTUES in 2021 and we will bring you ‘VIRTUES 2’, a brand new 3D rendering visual novel, with better graphics, a much more extendable story, more choices of girls, and better cultivating experience than VIRTUES. This game will use Godot engine too. Right now I have finished 30% of the scripts and renders for its first playable version.

More information about gameplay and about the story will be revealed in the future.

Note that ‘VIRTUES 2’ is just a code name. The story of this game actually has no connection with the story of VIRTUES. We just haven’t decided its official name yet.

3. Finishing VIRTUES

As I mentioned above, we will finish the development of VIRTUES in 2021. Well, it won’t be in the near future. There are still many ideas in my mind that I would like to make them out and implement into the game. I mean, just take a look at v10 mid-update report and you will see that the story of VIRTUES is still far from the end. 

But still, we will try our best to finish the game in 2021. You have got almost every girl in your harem and I don’t really intend to add more main girls just to prolong the development. 

There will be multiple endings, that’s for sure.

Right now we are developing the three games at the same time and we will keep doing that until we finish VIRTUES. I may be very inactive on Discord because I am just too busy, sorry about that. Please @me or dm if you wish to talk with me. We will release the first playable version of Eden City or VIRTUES 2 once they are done. We don’t have an actual schedule yet.

Again, thanks for all your support and your accompanying during this tough year. I wish you have a happy holiday. The next year may be tougher, or maybe better, who knows. Please stay with us and witness more of our growth!