Milestone Update - The Mundane but Vital Proposition of "Sustainment" (Patreon)

The Mundane but Vital Proposition of "Sustainment"

Ista Vilseriol folks.

I’ve thought long and hard about how this article should be presented — perhaps too long, as my mind has started to lose focus and wonder if I should even bother with it at all… but that level of abandonment really isn't an option. As usual, I need to stop thinking now and simply present my proposition as I’ve always been doing; frankly and honestly, even if it becomes a long ass article.

Brass tax: this is a discussion about our next milestone and as you can see on the sidebar, our next milestone has been set to $6000 a month to “proceed production at the quality of SILENCE THE PEDANT for all up coming games". For those of you wondering what exactly that means, I hear you. It’s a rather unclear and intangible goal so let me further explain (though I say this hoping that the images posted above should do most of the explaining).

There once was a day in the past where I was incredibly proud of the quality of backgrounds in milestone two: a. In fact I still remember where I was standing and what I was doing when most, if not all of the backgrounds came in like it was yesterday (some of them involved ramen). I couldn’t wait to show everyone how we stretched our resources to make something completely original without using any store bought assets at such a high polish. 

Boy... look at how far we've come. 

The images above shows a kind of special leap I never thought we would be able to reach. It's a tiny part of the game but it's something we can show you that's quite tangible. We are giving birth to something that dwarfs the jump in quality from ms1 to ms2a and all this has been possible because of our patrons.  I’m incredibly proud to show you some of the images and world building we have been working on.

Here’s the catch though.

We've hit a sort of plateau now in terms of diminishing returns. Our next major milestone needs to be much much higher, (perhaps in the 10k's) enough to start employing more people that deserve to get paid well in order to make feasible. This is currently not practical. On the flip side, we’re at the minimum limit to pay for this kind of quality. It’s not apparent in the samples above, but ms1 and 2a were made for 720P while we are currently working at around 3K for all background images now. Some of them are super wide (meaning they are up to 250% the width of an average background) for point and click and they have 4-7 layers of parallax. This level of detail is absolutely imperative at 1080P because of our camera system that allows for super zooming that in StP, the player has full control over in various scenes.  

So what does this all mean? 

 I as the director feel that we at AiD now need to focus on sustaining the current level of quality and ensure a workflow that everyone involved in our production can be happy with. This includes the payment process for our incredible background studio. You just won’t find studios that will work on full-on high fantasy titles that caters to indie/doujin groups at this level; they just don’t exist (trust me, we looked very very hard). Side story: The studio was not expecting this level of demand in quality. Most of the first drafts came in were mediocre at best but we persisted that we should aim to create something that we could all be proud of presenting to the world. They took our proposal very seriously and we’ve gotten nothing but fantastic art ever since. 

But this level is not cheap. I believe $6K a month should be that sweet spot where we wouldnt have to worry too much about eating (insert cheap food you identify with here) everyday to pay for more backgrounds and other art assets needed like UI to dress up our our future games.

So yeah. It's not a glamourous milestone like hiring a bunch of voice actors or paying for famous musicians or getting an anime done but I feel this is our most realistic and sustainable goal right now. Our current situation (seeing we still have a lot to do for StP as well) doesn’t give us too much comfort currently, especially when I think of ms2b and ms3 because, man… this kind of leap reminds me of the phrase, "digging their own grave" or "shooting themselves in the foot", but the allure of making something beautiful is too powerful to ignore. I say this from the bottom of my heart.

There really is no turning back.

Thanks for reading such a long ass post everyone!

-Munisix

PS. What is “Ista” you say? Well you’ll just have to stick around for the “vilserio” introduction manga, coming to an AiD Patreon near you…!