The Past and the Future of Customs (Patreon)

Hello patrons. Today I’d like to discuss one of the most important changes planned for the future of this project, as well as one of our most outlying pieces of Patreon obligations - the customs. The short version is, we will not be offering the custom versions for future projects, as the amount of work needed to fulfil those has quickly proven to be far greater than anticipated. Additionally, although this probably isn’t a surprise at this point, we will not be able to create the Rarity and Celestia customs we once promised. I will explain in more detail, but that will require learning a bit of history behind the project.

The idea of customized versions of our scenarios has always been a troubled one. On one hand, even once we increased the number of slots we hoped we could make up to 100, we would still receive a lot of questions about the possibility for additional slots. At the same time though, even creating 50 different customs (as was the case with Fluttershy 2) has proven to be a huge burden on the production efforts. Huge and, more importantly, asymmetrical. It was a lot of effort on the side of audio production, with the VA having to record at least 50 x 3 new lines (assuming a single take) and the audio engineer having to actually compile those 50 new versions. All of this while the rest of the staff didn’t really have anything to do that would help the efforts.

We managed it once, and right after that there were voices from within the project about canning the whole idea altogether. There wasn’t a clear consensus about it though, so by sheer inertia we moved along with offering customs in the following two scenarios. This was, in hindsight, a mistake. But we did intend to deliver on the things we committed to, especially since people had paid for it. Going into Celestia and Rarity scenarios then, we had every intention of creating those personalized versions.

Those versions were never produced and, unfortunately, will never be produced.

So what happened then?

Let’s start with Rarity. Chronologically, it was meant to be the second scenario made, slotting in between two Fluttershy ones. Instead, it was released some 2 years after the Picnic under a Yellow Wing. The reason for that is twin fold. First, the audio engineer. The person initially putting the Rarity scenario together was our original audio engineer. He was able to complete compiling the main scenario together in about 90%. And then he was gone. To say that he simply disappeared overnight would not be an over exaggeration. We didn’t really know what to do about that, naturally. We considered switching focus to Celestia (which had already begun pre-production at that point, with a second audio engineer) and see if, maybe, he would show up again. He didn’t, of course, and neither did the progress on the Rarity scenario. Meaning that we now had to start from scratch.

The second reason was the VA situation. We’ve had tremendous issues recording the initial voice lines and were faced with many delays before any audio engineering work even took place. Some of those delays were outside of VA’s control, such as a literal hurricane. Others were not. Suffice to say though, after some significant effort and time we were able to procure the lines necessary for the base scenario, only for the thing mentioned in the paragraph above to happen. Combining those two, we were now staring at over 3 years of delay between starting the procurement of Rarity lines and starting the work on customs. And in that time, the VA that provided the lines originally was no longer able to record new lines in that voice. We’ve lost our Rarity, after losing the person putting her lines together.

We considered trying to emulate that voice with another VA, but the general consensus was that it would sound too unnatural and would not be up to the quality we wished our scenarios to have. So, at least for the time being, we decided to move forward on creating the next full scenario.

That was Celestia. A much simpler, but a much more painful affair, personally speaking. We’ve had no issues with VA this time around, although we did run into some issues with shipment of the recording equipment cross-borders (binaural microphone). We got the lines in, we put them together. We even had the time and opportunity to include some additional voices in the script. It all seemed to be looking up for a change, and we figured that the project might have finally been able to navigate the rough waters.

And then it collapsed. We lost the second audio engineer, in an affair so convoluted that it made several other people drift away from the project as well. This time around we had no plan C and nobody was next in line to pick up the task of mixing the audio together. So even though we’ve begun recording the lines needed for the customs, we were once again left without anyone to put said customs together. More crucially though, we were now also missing the files needed to assemble the scenarios again, with the custom voice lines. Meaning that, right after the failure of the previous customs, we were left unable to create the new ones as well.

After we realized we wouldn’t be able to complete the custom scenarios we looked into the possibility of issuing refunds for those who had the customs tiers selected. But by then enough time had passed that the Patreon system made it impossible. Manual refunds were also considered, but they ran into the issue of United States’ tax laws, a can of worms best left unopened.

In the end, we never managed to figure out a potential solution to those problems, and soon the project itself began to dissolve. By the time the new team had coalesced, they didn’t have the ability nor a good reason to try and resurrect the old customs. That is because, ultimately, it was never their responsibility. They have restarted the project with the goal of seeing more scenarios being done and more characters explored. Meanwhile, the undoing of the custom versions was our mistake, as it was the old team which has committed itself into something that it never delivered. A mistake for which, at this point, I can do nothing but apologize.

AssaultTurtle