Poll Result, Release Update, and Some Thoughts on the Future (Patreon)

Hello all,

The recent poll has finished, and the three winners this time were the abbey orc occupation scene from the last release, the newest Cliohna x Rowan scene, and the Alexia whipping scene. These will be added to the CG list for next month as usual.

Work is well underway as usual, and the release should be out on Saturday as planned.

Moving on, I've been feeling pretty burned out lately, and while I haven't let this affect the game, it hasn't been great for me personally. I've been making this game for over three years now while working a full time job, and sometimes it gets a bit much. With the comparatively high cost and continual slow growth of SoC, it looks very unlikely that I will be able to quit my job any time soon, and so there are two things I have been considering to make things easier for me. I stress considering because neither of these have been decided, both are just options at this point.

Moving to Bi-Monthly Releases

We've been doing monthly releases on time now for a while, and it hasn't made much difference. I'd like to think that they do, but when I look around our industry and see some much bigger names putting out releases consistently late, every 3-6 months, it seems more likely people care more about the content than consistency.

One of the criticisms the game gets is that releases tend to seem small / inconsequential, but that is because it takes a lot of work to write, edit, and code around twenty thousand words in just under four weeks. If we did move to bi-monthly releases, it would make things easier not only for me, but also for the rest of the staff. We'd still commission the same amount of work every month, you'd just get one double sized release bi-monthly, as opposed to the current release schedule.

Selling the Game

Another thing I could do is sell the game on steam, which hopefully would help with funding. However as long as it is available for free, this is a non-starter. We had planned to make a unity version and sell that, however when we looked into it, it seemed like an expensive, time consuming task that wasn't really worth it.

Therefore to sell the game, we'd have to discontinue the free version, otherwise people would have no reason to purchase it. I'm not a huge fan of this idea, but it is one option for the future. (EDIT: some people seem to be misunderstanding this one - there'd still be a backer version every month, there just wouldn't be free releases anymore)

That's it for today, I'll continue to ponder on what to do going forward. As I said, I may do both those things, I may do neither, I just wanted to be transparent with you all because you support me, and I feel there's too much obfuscation, and sometimes downright dishonesty in game dev. Whatever happens though, I'll still be here chugging along just as I always have been, so don't worry. :)