Exile of Aphrodisia Unity Engine Remake/Rerelease (Patreon)

Since the start of May or so we've been working on remaking The Exile of Aphrodisia with the intent of putting it up on Steam (and also Itch.io.). Since we haven't posted anything here a bit, we thought we'd share a little bit of what we've been up to.

The remake is a rewrite of the Exile of Aphrodisia game we began back in 2017, this time in the Unity engine instead of an Electron app (essentially a tool that lets developers create a web app that runs on a desktop environment). The core gameplay will be the same; most of the old content will be ported over to the new Steam release with a few adjustments, a few new graphics, and possibly a few few features to address the years of feedback we've had on the game like making it easier to know what the possible outcomes on an encounter may be.

This is very much still a work in progress, so the screenshots in this are not indicative of that the released game will be like.

Our reason for doing this is several-fold:

1) The technology behind the original game has grown quite out of a date in a way we don't anticipate with a Unity-engine release. A number of players have already been reporting that Windows 10 isn't running the old game at all anymore. In theory it will be much easier for us to maintain this newer project down the line, fix bugs, add in small new features as we see fit, and more.

2) Our current feature list for Transformation Tycoon has been winding down for some time now and we anticipate being able to release it in a 1.0 state by the end of the year. The next project we've been discussing is a sequel (or possibly a prequel) set in the Exile of Aphrodisia universe that will have more of a traditional RPG, player-character-focused experience game than anything we've done so far. Having this remake of the Exile of Aphrodisia on Steam will help build interest in that future project.

3) Electron did not support any mobile device while Unity engine does, meaning it should become possible for us to distribute Exile for Android devices, if we choose to pursue that route.

This does mean that the old/Electron version of Exile will be officially discontinued and will no longer receive new content (after one final bugfix / typo release that is also planned to have two new long-pending encounters.)

Since Exile is also our most mature game with thousands of pages of writing, the Steam release will probably be a paid product with a price tag somewhere around $10. However, we are currently planning to distribute Steam or Itch.io keys to any patrons who have a lifetime pledge beyond some amount (possibly around $15 or so, a little higher than the Steam price tag as being a patron comes with other perks.)

It is possible that some existing encounters will be removed or reworked. Some art we aren't happy with will be replaced, and we are currently planning on making the dwarf and succubus player transformations trigger from the starting player forms instead of being the awkward one-off follow-up player transformation from the old version of the game. Some encounters written by writers not part of the core writing team (essentially April/Duhad and myself, Eileen/Judoo) may be removed if we can't contact the author for permission to use them. And last but not least, it's likely we'll have a few new player character transformations never seen before.

Feel free to ask any questions you have about all this. We'll post more on this in the upcoming few weeks as the remake achieves feature parity with the old version and we start to refine it to a point where we're happy with it.

Stay tuned!