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Hey, psst, yes you! Can you keep a secret? If so, very good! Listen up. Feline Fantasies is almost done, as y'all may know. Esix is in the works. Her art has been completed, her dialogue has been written, her boss battle has been worked on! Did y'all know that you actually have to fight her with fully animated attacks? :3c

Anyway, that's not why I am making this post! We're currently touching up on the mini-games on Northern a bit, before we go over to the implementation of Esix and her subsequent battle and NSFW scenes. Easy peasy, right? It's basically one feline and one mini-game!

Yet, knowing that Feline Fantasies is almost done, I felt a longing that something has been missing. You see, ever since I got this idea wayyyy back in 2016, Ruby Island was going to be one out of four islands in total! The idea was to create different kind of felines on the islands to appeal to a larger audience.

I started with small and feral not only because I liked them, but also because Ruby Island was supposed to be more like a tutorial island to get the player used to the game and its mechanics. Small and cute felines would be complimentary to the more simplistic game-play.

Besides this, I needed to kickstart the game. When I got this idea, I had no team. I didn't have a coder, nor an artist, nor any other writers to help me along. I knew I was going to fund the game out of my own pocket and hope that it would perform well. Here stems my decision to go with felines that already existed. Players would recognize the familiar faces and be excited they'd get a chance to have sex with characters they already bonded with.

I hoped that that would generate enough support for the game to be developed further. Because, you know, creating original characters when you're not an artist yourself tends to be very expensive and it's a major risk if you don't know if your audience is going to like them or not. I eliminated costs and this risk by playing it safe with the idea to add original characters on the second island: Sapphire Island.

When I finally managed to find a coder and an artist to help me along, I was super ecstatic. My coder and partner in crime at that time, Tir, advised me to start with half an island first and see how people would react to it. At this point, I was very ignorant about how much time and effort went into game-creating. I agreed with him, but I did add a twist: each island was going to have six characters originally, with the final island consisting of a boss battle.

So, the very first idea was six feral feline characters on Ruby Island, which were already pre-established, six original monster girl feline characters on Sapphire Island and six big feral sized original cats on Topaz Island, followed with a single boss on Opal Island.

However, I was of the opinion that only three characters wasn't enough for a first release. More equals better, right? So I scrapped the idea of six characters on Ruby Island in total and added three more to make a total of six you could find on Southern Ruby Island alone. Here, development started to take shape of the very first release of the game.

It took way longer than I had expected. A year of development time in total, with a lot of costs that I had to carry all by myself. 

And the first release of the game was received pretty poorly. 

When I launched this Patreon in June / July in 2017, I initially didn't make more than $50 a month, for around six months in total. At this point, it was pretty clear to me that I had severely underestimated how difficult it was to create a game. 

When I came to this conclusion, I decided to accept my losses. Three out of four Islands were scrapped, and I discussed with my coder what the best course of action was. We decided to listen to the general constructive criticism of the people who gave our game a shot in the first place. We added different expressions to the existing felines to make them more appealing, we created secondary NSFW scenes for more content after you unlocked them and even added the option to play as a female. The advantages of all of this was that most of this was easy to make with low costs. I wrote the scenes myself with the help of another very good writer, Vehlek, who did all the F/F scenes. We could use all the existing art because they were the solo felines.

The second release of the game did much better and people started to warm up to it. I started to gain some more support and it was enough to kickstart the creation of Northern Ruby Island. At this point, I was still spending more than what I was receiving, but I knew that the game had potential and needed more time in the oven.

After Flash died, the game seemed as good as dead. Northern was never truly finished as my original coder decided to quit the project and only a demo was ever uploaded to e621.

However, it was at this time that my current partner in crime, Side B, decided to help me out. He was a big fan of the game and offered to help me bring the game back to life on the Unity Engine. From here, my original artist, Pilitan, rejoined the team as well. In the years that had passed, she had grown considerably as an artist. The Unity development really showed me what this game could achieve and I doubled down on my expenses to recreate all the art POV style with a human truly penetrating the felines.

This, unfortunately, made it so that both the extra scenes I wrote for the original six felines and the F/F scenes had to be scrapped. The art wouldn't match the scenes they depicted. I can give y'all an example with Fia's extra scene (besides her anal scene) you could find after getting the ruby on Southern Ruby Island. It was a fiery paw or maw job. The dex entry states that Litten's fur is coated in an oily substance that can easily catch on fire. So I made this a kink where she would either put her paws on fire and control it magically to give a paw job or she would turn herself completely on fire and then give a maw job. 

You can see the issue here, possibly. I would have to get art sets of two very specific scenes, for both her paws and maw. The costs accompanied with this are so large that if I was going to do that for all twelve felines that I could just declare bankruptcy immediately. Never mind if we added a female human you could play as well.

So, Feline Fantasies sailed along nicely to the game you know as it is currently. Am I proud of it? Yes, definitely! It has become a very high quality game that still stuns me whenever I open it and play it. I think: ''I really created this? It looks so nice!'' It's all thanks to the amazing support I got from everybody who helped me along! 

However, looking back at it, I also see that I made a lot of decisions I would do differently if I could do it all over again. The biggest thing for me would be complete original characters which would focus more on their personality. There would have been less characters than there are now, but they would have more dialogue. They would be kind of akin to Puck.

Would the game have been as successful as it is right now? Maybe not. But I would be lying if I didn't say it bothers me a little that all of the characters in Feline Fantasies don't belong to me. I didn't come up with their designs. I just gave them personalities and ran with it. 

That is, until now, at least. Esix won't be the only feline which will be added in the final update. 

I want y'all to meet the bane of your existence, my completely original Feline Fantasies character that threw everything into disarray. The Curse of the Cat-astrophe's embodiment herself, Nova! :3

I will reveal more details about her in the upcoming weeks. For now, enjoy this sketch! If y'all can, please keep her a secret for now. Next week I will have more sketches of her! Until then, stay safe!

~TAD