Big News + Upcoming Plans & Changes (Patreon)

The take-away message from this announcement: Don't worry, Paraphore 1.0.0 is coming along. I want people to be able to play the dev version without bumping into massive spoilers, which means I'm doing a lot of work behind the scenes right now and only uploading specific non-spoilery parts of new scenes. Yesterday I added medium-sized Som and Rox scenes, but left out most of the plot surrounding them, so you'll only see the sexy parts for now~

Now, onto the big news...

THE BIG NEWS:

(There's a tl;dr if you scroll down)

When we aren't working on Paraphore 1.0.0, Fallow and I have been pouring our time into our secret new game. Like I said in the last progress update, the first two or three months of development on this project were slow and experimental because the game hadn't taken shape yet, so we could still fuck around and spend a lot of time thinking about what we wanted it to become. Then, in the last month or two, after we got our direction and game skeleton settled nicely, we began pumping it full of art and content.

What ended up happening in the middle of that art-and-content period was that there was a good chunk of scenes and assets in the game, and yet it was still totally unplayable, since everything was unpolished and buggy and super roughed-out. It was basically still just the skeleton, but filled with scenes that played like our initial test scenes. It just really wasn't a fun game, and we were feeling demotivated. So, we recently took a half-month to exterminate all the bugs and polish it up as much as we could.

But then we thought... why are we just sitting on a basically shippable early alpha? :3

tl;dr:

Last Thursday we secretly released our secret project, Semiphore, to our dev donors. It was supposed to be a super cool sneaky exciting thing, but no one actually found it...

So fuck that, we just posted Semiphore 0.0.1 to our website ten minutes ago!

Play Semiphore here! <3

KNOWN BUGS:

- If you're crashing or getting softlocked on the anal stress test scene, try holding space to skip through it.

And before you say OMG ITS FUCKIN GARBAGE I FINISHED IT IN 20 MINUTES, please make sure you're comparing it to Paraphore 0.0.1.

If you still think it's garbage, please tell us why you think so! The goal of this early alpha release (beyond finally having something to show you guys for all our hidden efforts) is to get some feedback and see if we're even barking up the right tree with this game's design in the first place.

Also heads up, right now Semiphore has zero kinky scenes (a big contrast to Para 0.0.1, which had some of the kinkiest scenes in the game available from day one) but this is just kinda the way things ended up for now. With that said, the theme of this game is experimentation and exploration. It may take some time, but eventually Semi's cute vanilla characters will start to dabble in weirder, grosser, and more violenter things~! <3 And no, I didn't intentionally design it this way to lure people in with 0.0.1 and then slowly corrupt them over time... I swear! 3:

end of tl;dr

After one more week of polish and feedback from you guys, Semiphore 0.0.1 will go public to the rest of the internet on Inkbunny, e621, and FurAffinity on January 4th. Free Semiphore versions will be released publicly every 1-2 months on those sites, too. We'll also be releasing a semi-polished weekly version of Semiphore for $1 and near-daily dev versions for $9 on Patreon. More on both of those below.

We're doing something a little different with the dev version for this game, compared to Paraphore's dev version. Paraphore's dev version allowed you to cheat in a bunch of items, fill your journal instantly, and teleport everywhere. You'll find a "dev menu" area in Semiphore which will include teleports and some other basic testing stuff that was locked behind a paywall in Paraphore. Semiphore's teleports and tests area will be accessible from all versions, including public ones.

Instead of a dev menu, Semiphore's $9 tier on Patreon will reward you with roughly daily releases of the game as we build it, and these dev builds will also include debug hotkeys that make teleporting, saving, and loading your files slightly easier (and slightly more dangerous, since you can use these hotkeys anywhere, even mid-scene) and some hotkeys will reveal the hidden systems behind the game~! We also plan to include some cheats, like turning collision off pr speeding up walk speed.

Let us know how you feel about this change. We think it matches the feel and theme of Semiphore pretty well, since it takes place inside an unfinished game in canon. The "dev menu" area with all the teleports and basic tests fits right in~

DISCORD SERVER CHANGES:

Taking effect in one week, on January 4th.

- New members (white names) will not be able to enter #extreme and #extreme-rp until they have a role, which takes a few days and requires them to ask for one. This should hopefully preserve the depravity of those channels, in case Semiphore draws in a ton of new vanilla folks.

- We're going to introduce a V.I.P. channel for Patreon donors. (See more on that below.) We didn't do this before because we wanted to prevent elitism, but if the Discord gets flooded with new people, it'll be handy to have a quiet place already established for donors to ask questions or ping us directly without our discussions getting lost in the flood. If Semiphore flops horrifically and the Discord gets zero new traffic, we'll probably rework this reward tier to prevent the unnecessary splitting of traffic between channels.

PATREON CHANGES:

On January 4th, we plan to update our Patreon to this new tier system:

$1

- Get the final Paraphore release one week early.

- Get weekly Semiphore releases. (Semiphore updates publicly for free every 1-2 months.)

$9

- Get Paraphore and Semiphore dev versions.

- Details for each:

Paraphore Dev Version:

- Updated whenever significant progress is made.

- Teleports: Start your fave scene at the click of like three or four buttons! Most WIP content and new scenes is under the New Scenes button.

- Tests: Funny little tests and unused effects/features.

- Quick-access minigames: Includes the pet game, caves, and blackjack.

- Cheats: Give yourself 999 of every item, unlock all journal entries, all skins (except the Patreon ones) and all places.

Semiphore Dev Version:

- Updated almost every day. Keep a peeper on our progress!

- Cheats: Turn off collision, view hidden system layers, gain access to unstable but handy hotkeys like save, load, and teleport back to dev hub.

$18

- Access to the V.I.P. channel on the Discord server, and a special role!

- We'll be posting special sneak peeks of art and sketches in this channel, even before we put it in the dev version.

- Other than that, it's mostly just a little spot for the cool kids to hang out~

$30

- Unlock the super special semi-animated Zeit and Trickster UI skins when you enter your player name

- Receive a .7z with full resolution character art, .psds, and some sketches (will include Semiphore art soon)

- Kitt gives you a super smooch

$100

- Get a little Semiphore-style sprite of your OC by Kittery put in the dev area, and your name in the credits.

- Kitt gives you an ULTRA HYPER SUPERNOVA smooch!!!

$250

- Get your very own pixel butt jiggle animation profile pic by Kittery~

- KITT GIVES YOU A MULTIVERSE-EXPLODING QUASAR-CRUSHING UBERSMOOCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(These last two roles are just for really generous people who want to donate. Of course we don't think a sprite or a profile pic are worth hundreds of dollars. ;; We just want to be able to give you something, at least!)

Comprehensive Patreon changelog:

- Simplified the early release system:

> No more week early ($4) and 3 days early ($1) versions. Instead, the $1 tier just gives you weekly updates of Semiphore through a special link on our website.

> Semiphore will still update for free every 1-2 months on Inkbunny, e621, etc!

- Removing poll vote bonuses from all tiers. They're kinda unfair, and we can't apply them to statistics polls: for example, if we want to know how many people are playing on PC vs mobile, we need those numbers to remain unchanged. Plus, let's face it, we've been pretty irregular about putting up polls, mostly just because sometimes we already know what we need to do next. It's greasy to offer people a reward they rarely even get to use.

- Reworked the "get your own custom scene in Paraphore" tier rewards, since we're trying to finish it, and that'll never happen if people just keep buying more scenes...

> If you've already paid for a scene, PM Kittery or FallowWing and give us your Patreon email, we'll hook you up.

> Yes we will be removing the quantity caps, too. Any number of people will be able to sign up for the tiers that used to offer custom scenes.

- Removed the $4 tier

> Side effect of reworking poll vote bonuses and reworking the early release system. Having two early release tiers didn't make sense anymore.

PARAPHORE 1.0.0 AND ONWARD:

Upon and after the release of Paraphore 1.0.0 (exact release date still to be decided) we plan to do several things:

- The $30 tier UI skins, Zeit and Trickster, will be removed from the $30 tier and made unlockable in-game

- The dev version can still be unlocked up-front with the $9 tier, but in Paraphore 1.0.0 it will also be unlocked if you beat every ending

- We will probably release Paraphore's source code at some point after 1.0.0.

- We might do a 1.0.1 Paraphore patch with some bugfixes or retcons, but after 1.0.0, no more custom Patreon scenes may be claimed, and we aren't planning any big content patches.

THANK YOU ALL VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please let us know what you think of all this in the comments, PMs, DMs, or the #phore_talk channel in the Discord server!!!!