Hello, I'm Abelius! (Patreon)

Hello people, I’m Abelius.

Many of you already know me as the one-man-army that put together (most of) LOK Rebirth.

Now, for both veterans and newcomers, I present myself again as the Deputy Animator for the reboot that will raise standards to a new level.

My role will consist of acting as a gateway between Compound (BG artist) and Gizmo (coder), animate the scenery, and help Archie (Lead Animator) when character rigging is done.

I guess at this point I don’t need to explain how ambitious this project has become, as you have access to the streams and public announcements. We’re now six main developers (up from two) and several invaluable collaborators in various areas. There’s considerable potential with this workforce.

That said, I think a further explanation about this drastic scope change is needed. From me specifically as the previous spokesperson. So brace yourselves for a wall of text... ^_^

I guess that having seen so many posts coming from me in the past, you had the impression I was the de facto “boss” for this game, right? Well, not exactly. Kuja is, and always has been, the spiritual leader and founder of this project.

He wanted a new LOK game badly and reached out to the community in search of technical expertise. He found me (as animator) and another guy (as coder). Then, after six months, the coder presented a demo that didn’t meet the expectations we had, so I decided to force my hand and take over animation, coding and writing.

At this point, I should make an aside and explain that I never saw this work as a hobby, even when starting back then. I had my sights solidly set on making h-games for a living, so I preferred to be a jerk to that person and sack him than putting my name on a not-so-great demo.

I already had enough experience with Unity and several of its most well known third-party plugins to put together an engine for the sidescroller you’re already familiar with. I worked my ass off for a full month and the outcome was good enough to pike the interest of you people and support grew to unexpected levels, encouraging me to maintain the same pace.

In short: I never intended to take so much responsibility for the development of this game. But I planted the seed for me being locked into a workflow that involved 12-hour shifts for almost every day of the week. And I could manage to live with that for a full year.

At some points, I considered delegating tasks over, like animation to Kuja, as you may remember. But again I was impatient and I didn’t let him take time to properly learn Spine at my (amateur) level, even when some months I didn’t ask him to draw new assets to implement.

We also briefly hired Vlad as a writer on my initiative... only for me to fire him months later. Again, I expected way too much from him in a very short time.

And about coding… not possible, as my use of plugins would make very hard to find someone willing and/or knowledgeable about that exact high-level visual scripting approach.

Then the time came that I needed to fix my personal life and that required a lot of involvement, in addition to devoting myself to an already complex project in which I was a one-man-band. And of course, the result has been very poor progress for the past year.

I should clarify that I was never going to drop it for good but, understandably, many of you started to question if this game was going to become another failure… and then Kuja stepped in.

You see... LOK Rebirth was always his dream, and he couldn’t bear to watch progress degrading and people asking him direct questions for which he had no answers, over and over again. So this summer he firmly encouraged me to resign from my position, to start over with a new team.

I won’t lie: it was a big shocker. I put all my eggs on LOKR and this obviously affects me and my family. But… days later I realized three things:

1st: Life is Change.

2nd: I brought this upon myself, disappointing you people.

3rd: LOK Rebirth wasn’t *my* project to start with.

And those realizations made me feel better, even… relieved, LOL! You see, now I have less work to do, so the stress isn’t killing me for the first time in years.

Of course, I’m also earning much less, but now that means I’m moving my ass to make my (actual) project a reality before my finances go to hell, which would mean abandoning my dream of giving interactive smut to the masses and find a 9-6 job in the IT industry again.

So, you’ll keep seeing me around here, contributing to LOK Rebirth, of course! I have high hopes for the game, now that more specialized people are involved and I’m not responsible for slowing down the whole thing. Vlad and Kuja are both more passionate about LOK that I would ever be, to be honest, and they share the same dream.

As for that project I’m talking about… well, it goes off the scope of this post to explain in detail, and I promised Vlad not to make shameless publicity. So, if you’re interested in what will come out of my mind in the next months, please go to my page…:

www.patreon.com/abelius

...and push the “Follow” button after the tier levels. You’ll get notified of every news post I make, regarding my personal work.

I don’t have much more to add, except that I’ll also do my best for LOK Rebirth to flourish in its new iteration, and thank you, people, for your patience and support.