IMPORTANT: What is going on with Panthea project (Patreon)

Long post, but pretty important

Many words about the issue we have

Many of you probably noticed that something isn't right with the project and specifically with the number of new scenes per month. Well, the thing is we do not produce enough content / arts per month. Our Art team just can't do it. The amount they can is not enough  to load our animator's team with enough work for two persons, so I had to reduce the number of full-time animators on the project to one person because of that.

Many possible and real reasons for that - real life-issues, lockdowns, burnout, coronavirus & hype around it, political 'brave new world' shifts (tbh I have no idea where it heading, assuming now we hear talks about lockdowns for sake of climate change), winter, hard changes going for act2 (when everything needs to be drawn from the scratch), whatever. What is important in the project's perspective is that our Arts team cannot deliver assets in time and cannot do it regularly - this is the biggest and probably the only essential issue we experience right now. We have 2.5 full-time artists on the project and pToon-T leading the Arts team. 

Thanks to pToon-T previously, the quality of our graphics on the project was pushed up to an amazing (my personal opinion) level. But the downside is that if pToon-T doesn't produce / involved enough into producing arts, everything goes down the drain. At the current level of graphics quality, it is almost impossible to hire a new artist without big involvement from pToon-T's side (guiding, teaching, fixing), and he can't provide that involvement at the required amount at the moment. 

So we have what we have. I don't see how to fix it at the current stage unless I find a very skilled artist, who likes this game's lore, can catch up with the style and for some reason still doesn't have a job.

In order to at least negate this partially we are doing extra assets for scenes, to make more diverse animations & scenes with multiple routes - you probably noticed that already. For example, the Hair Pull scene will have access for both types of <have to delete this word> and few endings as well.

So what's next?

I don't know. I keep doing my part like I always did, but it gets really hard to manage the project because I cannot just set up the pool & planning for scenes and comics we need and expect those to be done according to my task description and in time. Though pToon-T and I keep working on story scripts (and we had already written many pages of them for the next version of the game), as well as finishing scene arts we had in progress for some time. Fuck, our animator is doing such a great job, that I'm thinking of possibilities to collaborate with some other artists to give their scenes a life just to see more of his stuff done (I have to admit I'm still the biggest fan of our artists and animators and I'd love to see more of their works myself)

Why am I telling this?

Well, I always tried to be open with you guys and I think you deserve to know what's going on. I don't plan to abandon the project - I really like it and there's a lot of stories still untold. Tons of stories are untold! For now, we will keep moving at a slower pace (more or less the same we had the last couple of months) and see if we can change anything for the better.

Everything we declared as scenes in progress/work in progress will be delivered, though it might take more time.

P.S. I'm thinking to animate a few outdated scenes, that we never put to work, for the sake to add extra content, but I guess I'll need to make a separate pool for ideas like that, so I can get your opinion about it.