Holiday Update (Patreon)

Hello everyone, I hope you are enjoying the holidays!

We are finishing up the animation for the title screen and continuing the writing for the main Vampire Sisters (Luna, Pandora, and Sistine)

As for the New Year, I have organized goals and plans for the project, hoping to get many things completed in the following months. I'd like to also give a bit of a recap thank everyone for the amazing progress we had made this year.

2022 Recap

- The Foundation of the game and project, known as Mischief Manor. Established our Discord and Patreon in June of 2022.

- Research of other similar games and the knowledge and help of others who have guided us to understanding of the type of game we wanted to create. References, and I mean tons of reference art for both 2D and animated scenes to utilize for many different poses, expressions and character designs to pull inspiration from. Playing many different well known Eroge Games for inspiration and ideas.

- Extensive planning for characters, story and pacing, along with multiple scrapped ideas to attempt to create a visual novel game, with open world aspects. Adjusting our scope to meet within a time frame which is achievable for a solo dev and an assistant to meet. This was the biggest obstacle to solve, and fortunately we've gotten so far within the 6 months of development and the other 6+ months of planning and theorizing. 

- Organization of the project, with proper tools and documenting our progress bi-weekly to date our progress with the project and check on how well things are going.

- The Main and finalized character designs, along with Towa, Maya, Origami, Nao and the Master completed. Along with 11 additional characters who have been designed but not finalized, plus many other characters who are still important but are still in early design phases.

- Art, just so much art, Main Menus, Characters, CGs, Sprites, Background Art, an Area Map with Icons, Textboxes, emoticons, the list just goes on. 

- Story Concept, Theme and Premise designed and conception a plethora of situations, themes, parodies and so on. A collection of hundreds of ideas ready to be used and brought to life in the main story.

- Animation, obtaining the skill set and tools to create Live 2D animations, from splicing art, rigging, weight-painting with 2D bones to make characters come to life.

- Over 300 3D assets, with textures along with two major in-game locations completed. Learning how to use Substance Painter/Designer and creating great assets with Blender's tools.

- Coding the Engine and utilizing these tools to achieve a working walking simulator, with an extensive dialog system and other dating-sim functionality. Creation of Menu systems to the fluidity of movement and camera functions; all these concepts iterated to bring a game full of quality of life features and polish.

- Collection of royalty free BGM and SFX for the game, through many websites and hundreds of songs being considered for the theme and emotion of the world.

(and probably more that I'm forgetting about)

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We'd also like to thank our friends and supporters for being amazing for allowing this project to take its first steps forward. We appreciate every single one of you for your generosity and hope that we will be able to continue doing this full time, because this project is fueled by your support. You are allowing my passion and dedication of this game to become a reality. I hope that in 2023 we can see some serious progress with the early demo's release, and the continual release of content from there on out. 

Although my plans may be ambitious, I do plan on trying to release as many characters, scenes, story arcs as I can fit into this project. I dreamt of releasing a high quality game with a plethora of characters and scenes, but in reality, it was too ambitious for a first project. Despite that, I still move forward, and with the power of wonderful supporters like yourselves, maybe it can be possible. And of course, I don't plan on stopping after completing this project, I have, many, many ideas for other games in the future, and even considering other mediums such as VR and 3D models for more interactive game play, but I don't want to get too ahead of myself just yet.

Thank you again for all your support my friends. I will see you in the New Year with a clear mind and my heart on my sleeve, looking forward to a better future. See you then. Have a Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

- Miz 

(ps, check out the public post for our current goals with the project for the upcoming months, also will be posting some WIP art for Vampire+ Supporters)