ACADEMY34 is now more than just a parody (Patreon)

In the last couple of years we expanded far beyond we ever imagined our team would. Our community is now four times the size it was just a few years ago, and even considering all of the difficulties we faced as a team, we never stopped our grind even for a day. We've been working from an underground bunkers, we've been sleeping at roadside cafes on the Ukrainian-Polish border, we've been moving far away from our homes, and yet we remained adamant - we must cook. And cook we did. 

ACADEMY34 right now might still be a subpar in many regards: Our interface is clunky and outdated, our level design leaves to be desired, some stories don't live up to newer ones in terms of quality, but we are rapidly gaining speed at which we updating every single one of those elements. Just in the past twelve months we entirely remade the Academy building, every subject now has its own classroom, backgrounds are far more professional and fleshed out as they should be, there is tons of new space to put even more characters in. It is not even close to what we currently have in the game.

Don't believe us? Just take a look.

Every single one of those locations are made from the ground up to fit with our new aesthetic that we picked for our game. We spent months and months making sure, that this time we nail it, and, in our opinion, we did pretty good.

We are preparing to start implementing new locations in the near future, but it will take a lot of work. Due to the fact how RenPy uses triggers for every location-unique event, all of those triggers would have to be rewritten, since now it's not a single class, but couple of completely different ones. The same goes for every other event, that is tied to certain places around the campus, and we have a lot of those. Because of that, we will be implementing new locations in "waves", updating the game bit by bit. We would have to sacrifice some time we would've otherwise dedicated to creating new routes, but it is something that must be done.

Though, this is not even the reason why we are making this post. There is something else that we must discuss:

Our game is growing far beyond our original scope of a small parody game. Right now we're hitting a point, where our existence would be hard to ignore by the original owners of all those characters you meet in our game. Even though we believe that our work is transformative enough and shows them from a unique perspective to be counted as a parody-product, we're afraid that the fair use is simply not respected enough for it to save us if we go any further. 

This is why we are going to update every single one of non-original characters. We will change their names and alter their appearance, but only slightly. You will still be able to easily recognize who is this character inspired by, and on top of that, we will add an option to manually change character names to your liking. 

We hope you understand our reasoning behind those changes. In our mind, it's better to be safe than sorry. Having a game with familiar characters, even though slightly different is better, than having nothing at all.

We want to thank all of you for your incredible support and we hope that those changes won't affect your overall enjoyment from our game. We will do our best to compensate this by continuously supporting this project up until it has so much content, it is physically not possible to finish it in a single life span (life span being of an average unvaccinated child). 

We love you all.