Agents of Heels v0.26 – The Good, The Bad and the Important News (Patreon)

Hello and hey-hey out there. Here we are again for a check in and a heads up. We’ve got some news to share, more than just the usual status update at that, so let’s get cracking with it shall we? We’re cutting this one up into 3 parts, Good, Bad and Important, but contrary to that order let’s hit you with the bad first, because it’s short and a bit stingy but after that we’ve got a brighter outlook for you.

The Bad News

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The bad news is this: It’s June 28th and we’re not finished yet. There’s 2 more days in the month and that’s still not enough for us to toe up to the line, so it’s clear now that Agents of Heels won’t be finished in June either. That’s it, that’s the bad news. It sucks, but it’s the obvious state of affairs at this point, right? Well, how about we palette cleanse that with some better news.

The Good News

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We’re finally in a place we can more confidently pin a timeframe on things. Late next week in fact. We’re aiming to be spending this weekend and next Tuesday-Wednesday on the last of the heavy lifting (Monday is a busy day for us already) then getting through the post-work and engine do-ups this time next week so we’re up and out Saturday-Sunday 8th-9th, maybe a day sooner or later depending on how the testing and image clean up goes. We’re sorry that it can’t be June, we are, but we’re also ready to get our excitement on for a release date again and also to be hitting the handover for Noemi by the eve of Monday after too. So that is good news!

The Important News

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This is an aside to the current status of the games, but we’ve made an important decision all the same and we think it’s worth keep y’all in the loop for. It’s been no secret around here that we’ve been dragging on releases a lot more than we like. We ‘ve tried to and believe we have struck a balance between keeping y’all informed about Unshi’s issues as is only right when you’re our supporting patrons, while also keeping some of his privacy intact. Point is, it’s been hard for him to get dedicated time to set down to get work done…

… And as Discord followers on will know as of last weekend, there are more and more issues getting in the way even when we do get time in front of the PC. Like such:

That’s one of our rendering PC’s hard drives failing on us. Between that, long wait times on scene save and loads, longer rendering times than before even as our content gets more visually demanding… It’s hampering us as much or more than Unshi’s time constraints that are thankfully getting better. We’ve decided it’s time we’ve got to do something about this.

For those that don’t know, we’re still using pretty much the same hardware Unshi started with back in 2016-2017 when he started up this Patreon all on his own. We’ve been waiting for a chance to get some bigger cash injection investment via game sales as the chance to properly pull ourselves up to a new level of render-ability, but that’s another big talk for another day (and honestly, we’ve made the plans, we have evidence they’ll work out for us all, but we’ve not made the progress we wanted on it yet this year without releases so that’s a big part of this decision).

We can’t wait on that anymore. We’ve agreed we need to get a new rendering PC and get out from under this obstruction rather than let it hand on us and slow us down any more than it has been. Time we make better leaps! Thing is, even at our peak performance on Patreon, all our monthly income has been on keep up with our fixed costs and monthly expenses, meaning we’ve got very little in longterm investment funds on hand to do this, hence we’ve not pulled the trigger until now.

In order to move forward, we’ve decided Unshi will take out a personal loan from family in order to get his hands on an intermediate PC over the summer. One that will hold up and not be giving us the issues of age, but not the kind we want to ultimately have, that’s supercharged and capable of doing a big Little Toscana orgy scene that’s packed with people and have no trouble (not saying we’ll use it to make that exact scene, but we sure would love to be able to someday if we do want it!).

So that’s our important news in a nutshell. The TL;DR version is we’re extending ourselves some in order to finally upgrade our hardware, at least enough to negate the wear and tears of aged machines we’re still jerry rigging to get by right now. We don’t like the idea of debts, but this is the least-worse option to get out of the hole we’re in, with hopes of it being a blip in the rearview before long. Since it’s a mild but real risk to undertake, plus it’ll mean some time in switch-over set up (after AoH’s release, duh), we’re informing you of what’s going on.

Side Note: There have been some truly lovely fans on our Discord who have already made offers themselves to contribute to things like monitors and such. Seriously, thank you for that, it means a lot to us, but we want to make it clear now that we don’t want to push this burden onto already very patient and supportive fans. We’ll get back to proper version releases soon, earn our game money, pay off this small loan and in future buy all we need to make the super stuffs y’all want from us and we want from us too. We will. Thank you again, but this is our hill to climb.

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And so that’s the current state of play. We’re sorry for June fans, but we’ll make sure the Daring get there links, next week in fact as we’ve got our date set at last and off we go! It’s so close we can taste it now, how about you? We’ll keep y’all informed on the PC issue in the future as we have things to say on it, here and / or via Discord, but other than that… Get your talc power ready because we’ll be suiting up in (former) Agent leather sooner than we realize! Until then…

Be all good news yourselves and beWilder!