IMPORTANT STUFF & BIOASSHARD REVISION UPDATE (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

We hope you’re having fun with the new release! This is the post I mentioned in the Release Post, with things I wanted to say or rather we want to say.

I hope you take the time to read it all as it’s quite important stuff. So, let’s get to it!

First let me tell you, we’re working on a Revision, and will be out in a few days (if you want to know exactly, read the post until the end and you’ll find out xD). And good news: looks like I’ve been able to spot and reproduce the doors hard-lock problem (thanks to Adenan for that! <3).

Now it’s time to talk about the long time it took to get this release done. I’m pretty sure you already realized but it's been more than a year to get a new version out (and we even said we wanted to get new versions out faster…).

It’s more than obvious that some things are really hard to do and take lots of time, but the last time we took so much time to get a release done, was for the first one, because I was programming ALL the basic systems from scratch. I didn’t expect any other update to take this long, especially because we’re talking about the Arena here, it means no story, no dialogues, no sequences (except for the two short ones for the Boss, but that’s nothing like a story sequence could be).

I know the time from 0.0.3 to 0.1.X was a long one too, but this one was expected because A LOT was redone, like basically everything if you count fixing bugs on the systems that remained. But for this one, it was only two main tasks (that obviously derived in a lot more). The thing is that we ran into problems during the development for this version, but the main one I didn’t want to talk about because, even if we mentioned many times, we like to be totally sincere, I considered talking about this like putting excuses.

Basically, the main facts that made this new version to take this long, have been 3 -among others-. Being the health problems, that took us out for around a month, the lack of an external modeler/animator and finally the worst one, my PC. And that’s the one I didn’t want to mention, because, this is a recurrent one. I mean, how many times did I blame problems on my PC for slowing me down during development? Yeah, but the thing is I never manage to get rid of them.

It seems like it hates the summer. The moment it starts being hotter around here, it starts freezing and restarting while using UE, but sometimes it even happens while doing nothing, just windows loaded. It can happen like 3-4 times per day, making me lose progress even if I try to save as many times as possible, but because it happens randomly, it usually gets me while I was in the middle of doing something and couldn’t save it just yet. I tried using programs to control the temperature to be able to guess when it’s going to happen, but to no result. There’s no noticeable increasing to confirm it’s going to happen. Also tried forcing the GPU fans at max all the time, but same result. Tried changing the port the GPU is connected in the motherboard, and at first, I thought it was that, because it stopped happening, but after a couple months, all the same again. I don’t know if it’s the GPU or maybe the motherboard, the thing is I can’t afford changing any of those (especially the GPU, since their prices are crazy high these days). I’m not putting excuses and still this won’t stop me from working on the projects, that’s for sure, but just wanted to let you know, I needed to get this out, because I sometimes feel the need to get the pc and throw it over the window (especially when I lose huge amounts of not-saved-work).

Then we had this search of a good modeler/animator. It was a total waste of time, and it was more than it deserved especially for the result, where we had to end up doing it all ourselves. I expected at least a bit of better luck on it, but I guess I was wrong. Found no one, got no answers when we tried reaching out to people and only got a couple offers with a total lack of professionalism, asking us to just have faith with no proof of any work done at all (that thing called a portfolio) lol. But we got our lesson learned, it’ll probably take us more time -obviously- but we won’t look for any external help, we’ll make everything ourselves. If we hadn’t wasted our time looking for a modeler/animator and take that time to just make the models and animations ourselves we would have gained at least a couple months, making the release of this version closer to what we had in mind at first.

Because yeah, for this release, after analyzing the necessary time taken for remaking the enemy entity from scratch, we expected/wanted to have this release out in December… close to the real one, right? ☹ This, again, is the main reason we won’t give release dates (not even time-frames) until we’re totally sure we can be up to it.

So, with the long development times being so clear, we’ve been thinking about some changes, and here I’ll let you know about them.

But first, I need to make something as clear as possible, because I’m sure the majority of you already know, but there seem to be people out there with the wrong impression.

Got these messages during the time we’ve been working non-stop on this new version:

“Waiting for update to main game. Fills the feed with custom art unrelated to said game. Very annoying”

“Way too slow of a development cycle, the regular updates are not for the game. And thus it kind of feels like i am wasting time supporting.”

“Main game” “said game” “art unrelated” – If you read our pages on Patreon and SS, you can clearly see, there’s no place where it says we’re just making Bioasshard. So, there’s no “said game” as well, as there’s no “main game” even if Bioasshard is where we’re focusing the most right now. We’re doing other projects as well (hell, we even started doing Punished Mai, and its story it’s not over yet, but it’s funny how the people that write these messages are never talking about that one but Bio xD). We want to make a lot more projects than just Bioasshard, and I think we still have a lot to offer to everyone, so I hope you can save some love for those other projects as well and don’t use it all on just Bioasshard <3.

“Way too slow of a development cycle” – Obviously you’re not forced in any way to support us at all, but hell, if you did, you should of notice the part in bold where it says we’re slow, very slow. And this is not because we’re lazy or just take more time than needed to make something easy, but totally opposite, working on making games is a hell of a slow task (I can’t show you this in any other way than just encouraging you to try for yourself xD) and we want to make them the better we can, I don’t see the point in making wasteless releases with no important or necessary content on it.

I hope this is clearer now than ever: We’re not just the creators/makers of Bioasshard but of other projects as well and we’re slow, because what we’re making takes time (not taking the problems mentioned above into account for this xD).

Now on to the changes, the first one is related to Bioasshard. Our main target is to get the Arena finished, so we can finally focus on making the game. As mentioned, we want to make more projects, so we don’t want to spend all our life making Bioasshard. This means, that some stuff we planned to add for the Arena, won’t be happening, because they’ll be going directly to the game. For example, the other requested Bosses (and the NPCs) will make their way directly to the game (mainly because, as stated, the Arena’s purpose is to test NEW mechanics, so adding more Bosses won’t be a new thing). This will make the Arena to finish sooner than expected and will also bring the game to life sooner as well (which I think it’s the best since we prefer a game with its story and all instead of just levels to test out stuff, right?).

Another change goes to the Fantasy Cards and how we give them away. In the near future we’ll be giving more info on this, but is basically to avoid people being left out of some of them just because the requirements aren’t met when a release is done (but they could be a bit after it) and stuff like that. Don’t worry we’ll make it as easy as possible.

And now the last but most important change. I guess you know we have another Patreon, dedicated to our “artistic side” xD, that art was at first published all in the same Patreon, but decided to separate it, to have it all better organized, but then, due to Patreon… “rules” we had to take other ways to give out the content, and we created the SS. And here we post all our content together again. So, to make it simple, we decided to do this:

1. We’re going to close our other Patreon (Waifustream) and unify everything again, so all our content is only on one place (or rather two: Patreon and SS)
2. We’re going to open a new Patreon (yeah, we just can’t use the other existing one because it won’t allow setting the option I’m about to talk of) just for project releases that instead of charging every month it will only charge on project releases. This is for the people that think we don’t deserve to eat if we don’t make a release (jk XD). So, if you feel like you don’t want to be supporting us every month for whatever reason but still want to support us in some way, maybe that Patreon is the way to go for you. But keep in mind one thing, we’re not saying it’s only for Bioasshard releases but project releases. Project releases are Bioasshard releases, but are also CG Sets releases (like the Nico Quitting one), OIU project releases (like The Case of C and T, Bioasshard Secret Files -Failed Experiment- etc.). So, keep that in mind if you decide you want to support on the other Patreon expecting to only be charged on Bioasshard releases. This said, we also have some auto-imposed rules like never making more than one release over a month and almost never make releases on consecutive months (unless necessary which I can’t think of any reason that would make it necessary, but just to be safe I want to mention it).

Aaand that’s all we wanted to say. We, by any means, said any of this in bad mood or anything like that, on the contrary, we’re very happy and motivated for what’s to come, so, we hope you are too (I mean, the first part was just me crying out loud to let you know my problems XD and then the changes aren’t anything that affect you in any bad way, so, no reason to not like them, right?)

And that’d be it, hope you have a good time enjoying the new release and… oh wait! I almost forgot! 

The Revision 1 is coming out on 4-2-22. Yeah, this Saturday.

See you there!

-Meguido