Special $5 tier reward & A letter to our patrons (Patreon)

Hi, guys,
this is Agang, please take these apology wallpapers for the delay of v9. And... eh, the rest of this post might be a bit lengthy. I just want to say sorry and share something about our current situation, the challenges we are facing, and what we are going to do about them.

First, I must say sorry to everyone about the buggy v9 update. We reprogrammed the save system and the dialog system in the last update cycle, but they didn’t go as stable as we thought. We have made 4 patches in the last few days to solve a dozen bugs that could potentially affect your gaming experience. Now the game should be stable.

And now we should talk about the delay issue, which seems to be growing more frequent with each update of PHOENIXES. Every time before release I receive numerous urging messages from people who hold great expectations for our work, and each delay announcement would shatter those expectations. I sincerely apologize for this, and I feel the need to tell you more about our work.

We set this two-month update cycle for ourselves since the VIRTUES age. During the 16 updates of VIRTUES, we only delayed twice and we took great pride in our timeliness. However, things changed after we started the development of PHOENIXES. Completing an update within a two-month timeframe started to become a struggle. And it is becoming a bigger and bigger struggle with each update.

One objective fact is that the workload required for each PHOENIXES update is several times that of a VIRTUES update. PHOENIXES has much more intricate and detailed graphics, which means each PHOENIXES image would consume significantly more time to create than a VIRTUES image. Moreover, the average text volume for each plot in PHOENIXES is nearly five times that of VIRTUES. Not to mention the complexity of PHOENIXES' game systems – crafting a game system from scratch demands much more time and energy for maintenance, iteration, and debugging compared to using Renpy.

I was surprised at v9’s delay, because everything seemed to be proceeding according to plan. There were no unexpected issues, no insurmountable bugs, and the update wasn’t even a particularly ambitious one – we didn’t attempt to add an excessive number of new plots or something. Yet, in the end, we still missed the deadline.

Now I could only come up with one sad explanation, that our current workload has reached the limit of what a two-month update cycle can handle. As our workload grows even heavier in the future (which seems unavoidable, for example, there will be more and more harem scenes in future updates, but harem scenes are much more complicated than normal scenes because there are more girls involved, so they need more time to be polished) perhaps soon completing an update within 2 months may become a rare occurrence.

However, we are not going to extend the update cycle or reduce the update volume at all. No matter how tough it may get, we are just gonna stick to the two-month update cycle, and we’ll always do our best to bring you higher-quality content within the limited time we have. I believe our patrons aren’t backing us just to see us leisurely ‘enjoy the development’ when they could easily play the game through pirated ways. To repay your support, we have to squeeze in more time for development as hard as we can. 

Meanwhile, I hope for your understanding. We are just a small team of two, and there has been no slack during the development. The v9 update was the biggest update of PHOENIXES, yet I still received comments from people joking or even complaining about the lack of new content, and that made me sad. I really don’t have the ability to create so much high-quality lewd content that can entertain people for hours within only two months. All I can do is deliver limited but better and lewder content with each update, along with an improved gaming experience.

Right now I think there’s a big issue that needs to be solved in the next update cycle – I can’t accurately estimate how long it will take us to finish an update. I often provide a timeframe for the release date, but even when we don’t have a delay, we usually end up releasing the update just before the deadline. I think this is pretty bad. Over time we might lose your trust.

There are several reasons causing this problem, and one of the biggest is a peculiar habit of mine. Usually, when I’m writing scripts and working on renders, for example, let’s say there are 15 new events that I’m planning to add to the game. Instead of completing them one by one in sequence, I tend to evenly progress each of them at 5%, then 10%, 15%, until eventually I'll be finishing almost all of them simultaneously. The advantage of this strategy is that I don’t have to spend hours figuring out how to continue a plot when my inspiration runs dry. Instead, I shift to working on another event, and by the time I come back to the initial one after a few days, I probably already have an idea about how to progress it. I believe this strategy is conducive to time management, kind of like tackling easier questions first during an exam and leaving the complex ones for later.

However, the problem of this strategy is that I would leave the most challenging parts of all new plots until the late period of an update cycle (around the time when I post the final peek.) Many people hope that we can provide an accurate release date around that time, but I can’t really do that because by that time I’d be still dealing with the most challenging parts of all the new events. I can’t predict how long it will take to complete them, or else they wouldn’t be considered the “most challenging parts.” And after I finish those tasks, we still have debugging and translation work to do before we can release the update.

But even though I don’t have an accurate answer about the release date, I often give you guys an overly optimistic estimate and a very tight deadline. The reason is that I want to force ourselves to finish the job by making a pressured promise.
This kind of “forcing” has been quite effective over the past few years. However, now with the workload increasing, the pressure is gradually losing its effectiveness. After all, we only have limited time and energy. Many things can’t be done simply by “forcing” ourselves.

So starting the v10 update cycle, I will not provide a specific release date again because I don't want to give you false expectations anymore. Instead, after posting the final peek, I will give progress updates every 2-3 days in our Discord server’s dev report channel. I hope this will both maintain the necessary pressure on us and alleviate people’s anxiety about waiting for updates. Let’s see if it will work well.