I finally have a firm date set that I can guarantee the Alpha release will be ready for. It's more than I  need to finish up, but it gives me some breathing room if things were to go completely sideways, plus it's just kind of a fun date to release a game like this. So the official date for the alpha release of A Family Venture will be February 14th, Valentines Day! That's 10 days away. so start the countdown.

While 10 days is longer than I know most of you were hoping for, hopefully having a date set will help to alleviate your pre-release anxiety.  Hopefully it will give me enough time to work out more of the bugs and give you a better product from day 1. 

I know the period of time from the last release until now has been a trial for those who have loyally been supporting the game, and I'm sorry for that. My life has taken some unexpected and difficult turns since I first started making this game. For too long I just kept hoping things would go back to normal, but now I'm just trying to adjust to my new normal. I'm trying to reevaluate how I do everything in my life, not just game development, but how I can be a more efficient and better person overall. Strenif and I have made a plan for the content of the next release and how we can realistically put it together in a much quicker time frame. I really hope this is just the low point for AFV, and things will just keep getting better from here. 

I'm really encouraged about the amount of support that was transferred from my shuttered Patreon account to here on SS, and while it's still a ways away from where it was when I had both pages, it's still better than I expected. It shows that there's still excitement out there for AFV, and it really encourages me to keep going and to renew my efforts. I still love A Family Venture, and I still love game development! This is more than a hobby, and much more fun than a job. I'm just going to keep pushing forward in hopes that someday I'll be able to give this thing the time it deserves.

Thank you all who support the game or have supported in the past! I wish I had a better way to show you all my gratitude than a release date that's waaay overdue. But right now, I'm going to buckle down and polish this thing off, and then I'll see you all in 10 days! Have a great week!

Hey all. Hope your week is going good! I know there's just one thing that is interesting you all now, so I'll get right into it.
 
I think I'm just days away from finishing up, but by days, I don't mean like a couple days from now, I mean actual work days. As always, it depends on my schedule and even unforeseen things during coding. just as an example. I had some good days of work in this week, enough time that I would have thought that I would be finished now, but for a coding error that took me over three days to find. I had a few events that were not triggering in the right order, but seemed to be triggering in a random order, and the fix was as simple as replacing an "if" with an "elif" but trying to figure that out took for freaking ever! So, unfortunately stuff like that happens, it's frustrating, it's time consuming, and it's unexpected and with how big the script is getting, it's actually getting harder to keep stuff like that from happening.
 
It's going to be a challenge to work on the game the next few days, but the end of my week should open up and hopefully (fingers crossed) that will be enough to get this thing polished up and out the door.

Thanks to all of you for your support! I'm sorry for the length of time it's taken to get this one out, We've got plans in motion to get the following updates out much quicker.  I hope you all have a great week!

Here's a little preview for everyone to help hold you all off.

Surprise, I'm alive! 
Sorry for going dark there for a while. I was really hoping to finish the update before the Holidays because I knew I wouldn't get much done until they were over, and unfortunately I was right about that. The last of our family visitors finally left us on Saturday, so today I'm back in the saddle.
 
There's been some words said, and justifiably so, about the length of time it's taken to get this update out and I just want to say a few words myself about all that. I've given plenty of explanations to try and justify the wait on this update, things like the increase in our animation quality, the ever increasing complexity of our code, full time job, family and personal life issues, etc...  The other reason I don't take enough responsibility for is that sometimes I just kind of suck. Meaning there are times when I know I should be working on AFV and I'm not, and I'm not talking about the time I spend with my family,  but more like time spent playing a porn game myself, or wasting time playing with my 3d printer, or just lounging around doing nothing because I'm tired and don't have the emotional energy to be doing what I know I should be doing. I know I always say "we're trying our hardest and giving this all of our extra free time" and most of the time that's true, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes I'm alone in my office at night wasting hours clicking past page after page on pornhub looking for the perfect video to rub one out to. This is something I feel guilty about, and something I'm trying to improve upon. 

I know there's a perception that game devs want to string along their supporters and try to milk them for everything they can while giving them the smallest amount of content possible, but I just want to reiterate that there's no kind of scheme like that going on with me. If this were only about money, the best possible business model for me would be to put out reliable content as quickly as I could. That would bring in far more money than I'm making now. And it's not like I only have a few ideas left with AFV, we've got enough ideas that could keep this game going for decades even if we did a sizable monthly update, and I'm excited as hell to finish my first version of the new game I've been working on behind the scenes. I just want you all to understand that long time periods between updates don't benefit me at all.

I promise you that if we ever reach the point where I can do this full time, our relationship will completely change. You will all go from being patrons of my hobby to being my full-time employers.  You will be able to hold me to account for my hours worked each week, and I'll set and keep game release deadlines but until we reach that point, Strenif and I are making plans to make smaller more manageable updates that will come out more frequently. Hopefully this will be helpful to bring more players to support the game and get us closer to full time game developing. 

The update is really close. I'm deep in coding work, trying to make all the new storylines play well together and play well with past content. trying to work out conflicts in the code and identify conflicts in the story. It won't be long until it's all put together and into your hands.  

I apologize for sucking sometimes, and I'll keep trying to be better at managing my time and getting out new content as quickly as I can. 

I really appreciate everyone who supports AFV, and anybody's who's supported us in the past. I realize supporting us is putting trust in us and I re-commit to try my best to be worthy of that trust. Thank you all and I hope you have a great week!