A Very Important Inner Circle Update! (Patreon)

We've got some big news, and I don't want you to get a false impression, so please read this entire post. This is one of those points where your feedback is highly valuable, and I encourage you to ask questions and discuss!

Right now, we have no other source of income than from Patreon, and it's creating a problem. We're cutting our teeth on something both advanced and unique, and every decision we make is inherently risky. That risk is basically being pushed entirely to you guys, which isn’t good. We're also doing a ton of world-building, writing, concept designs, and all this meta stuff on top of our technology overhaul that's obviously become a drag for a lot of people. And all the while we’re significantly understaffed for a project of this scale. 

As necessary as it currently is, I don't want patrons to feel obligated to continue supporting every month when there's not new playable content. The solution however is difficult because MATM has a long way to go before it will see retailers, meaning if we continue down this path we will continue to rely on you guys for a long time to come.

We've therefore come up with a plan that should alleviate all of these problems and more.

The goal is to take part of the team and get a very fun and accessible side project built in Unity with a much smaller scope than MATM to you and to retailers ASAP. As it so happens, we currently have the golden opportunity to do this, as Steam has opened its doors to adult content. We all know that the adult game world is fickle, and that these doors of opportunity often close, meaning we have to make this move now. This in no way means we’ll sacrifice quality – it just means we’ll be very busy!

The game will take place in MATM's world, and act as an introduction to MATM's setting, the theme, the denizens of New Babylon, and even some of the characters. It will require MUCH less overhead development time, and what you'll see in this update is from only two weeks spent on pre-visualization.

This will do the following:

• Allow us to get a stream of playable content to you much sooner
• Provide us the funds to grow our team further, without making you feel like you're being held hostage while we thrash away at not fun but necessary stuff on our main project
• Give us time to build assets for MATM, and for TK and APL to finish the tech transition / rigging technology we need for MATM
• Allow us to push forward with MATM's world-building, enemy and character concepts, and setting, all while we work on this new project.

WHAT IS THE NEW GAME?

The game will be called Pure Onyx: A New Babylon Tale. It will be an arcade style beat 'em up game (Final Fight, Streets of Rage, etc.) developed in Unity. It will be fully animated, with animated in-game H content, and with the messy finishers you’ve come to expect from us. The game will take place during part of the story of MATM that you don’t get to see from Malise and Neon’s perspective. You'll play as Onyx while she traverses the mean streets of New Babylon, fighting enemies including the Splicer gang, the Syndicate, biomonsters, and more. 

The game will contain approximately 5 full, varied levels, and if the reception is good we will consider expanding it in a variety of ways. 

HOW WILL WE DO THIS?

We're drawing this bitch by hand! Sort of. 

We'll be using a combination of 3D and film techniques we've learned over the course of working on MATM to support what will be a mostly 2D game (check out the action in the game Dragon’s Crown, then think about what it would look like as an arcade-style Ghost in the Shell / Akira inspired game). The characters will resemble an anime version of the old art style of MATM, just more professionally done and much less awkward >_>. The goal is to use a style that has less back-end overhead and doesn’t require additional complex 3D models for characters. This game will have a much smaller scope than MATM, and thus will require fewer assets in the long term, making brute force techniques like hand-drawing more practical.

As it turns out, Mr. Kittyhawk is proficient with Unity and C#, and since this genre is so well-defined he already has many of the core mechanics and systems functioning. Limbo will likely be joining us full time as soon as possible. He and I will be drawing the characters, and I’ll be using Spine to animate them (you can see an example of my first efforts in the teaser video). We will be using our 3D character models where applicable for assisting us in posing and shading. Ubercharge will assist with rendering 3D elements that we can use in the level design compositing process.

As far as Patreon goes, the current structure will likely remain the same, you’ll just be treated to content for both games. We’ll continue to update you on our MATM progress as usual. I’m separating that content out from this update for this week since this is a lot to digest, so you’ll see another IC update in a couple of days.

WHO’S GOING TO DO THIS?

All of us will likely contribute, but the core team will be myself, Limbo, Mr. Kittyhawk, and Ubercharge. AltairPL will continue his work on MATM’s URGE engine full time, and TK will continue his work on the Maya transition for MATM. I’ll obviously still be working on MATM as well, as will Ubercharge, but our primary goal is to get playable content to you and secure additional funding as soon as possible via Pure Onyx.

HOW LONG WILL THIS TAKE?

We’ll have a stream of playable content ready for you much sooner than it will take to get the next major version of MATM ready. Give us a couple weeks to get our boots on the ground and develop a rhythm. This has already come together a lot faster than we were hoping! We were originally planning on working on this behind the scenes for a while to assess the situation, but I decided against it since this is on your dime, and you should know about the process as soon as possible. 

SHOW US THE GOODS

Here’s a bunch of stuff we’ve developed from the past two weeks of pre-visualization. The overall theme is in line with what we’ve been up to, but the style will resemble 80s/90s anime, including some of the trashy aspects like color palette and seeing it on old CRT screens in VHS.  We’ve been heavily referencing the original Ghost in the Shell anime and works by Shirow Masamune. 

Onyx Styling

Here’s how the Onyx sprite will likely be drawn. We were considering giving her entirely hard shading to be more in line with the retro anime theme, but figured a concession was in order since soft shading simply looks way more polished for hentai. 

• Onyx Sprite (sorry for the missing nips :D)
• Onyx Test Scene

Onyx Poses

Limbo has started on some sketches for Onyx’s poses. We’ll need to draw her sprite a bunch of times to create the base poses, which will then be broken down into layers and animated with Spine. 

· Onyx Test Pose Sheet

Enemy Sketches

Limbo has also been creating some sketches for basic Splicer enemies. I’ve already created a test rig in Spine and have a basic idle animation working for one that MW is working with in-engine. You’ll see a lot of sketches at this level of detail for a little while until we get combat feeling good (of course you’ll be asked to help provide feedback on that as soon as we’re ready :D).  

• Enemy Sketches
• Enemy Scene Sketches

Video Artwork

The above video is the closest thing I’ll be showing today to what we expect the finished artwork to look like. The environment artwork will be constructed in 3D, at which point we will do multiple render passes to assist us in painting the final artwork. We will likely need a few more weeks to experiment before we can get some vertical slice images of the final look. Details impractical to create in 3D will be painted by hand.  We’ll likely be using this scene as the title screen by the way :D. 

· Video Artwork High Res

Original Style and Lighting Mock-ups

Here are the original mock-ups I made for visual styling. We were originally considering a black and white game, and while more stylish I don’t think it’d work well for hentai. We were also originally considering using full perspective, but decided the classic beat-em-up camera angle is better for retaining the feel of the genre.

· Original Style and Lighting Mock-ups

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That’s about it for now. We’ll show off some in-engine footage as soon as we get some animations in place, since right now it looks really goofy with everyone sliding around. 

Obviously, I don’t expect everyone to be thrilled with this whole idea (especially those of you who may not like the game genre or Onyx), but from a practical and financial standpoint I feel knocking out a project like this is the best course of action to give us time to round out the back-end stuff with MATM, as well as springboard us into a position to work on it at a more satisfying pace.  Ultimately, this is what we should have begun with all along.  

Anyways, like I said above I figured I'd give you all a day or two to digest this before we do our MATM IC update.  For now, discuss!