2023-01-23 Bitter Endings, Hopeful Beginnings

So there isn't a whole lot for me to say here. Life has taken off, what remains a very passionate project is something I just can't keep up with. I had a dream once of making this game full time but other opportunities took center stage and financially it just never made sense for me to quit my job and work solely on the game. Add to that mix a couple years of pandemic nonsense and conflicting responsibilities and things slid.

So it's with tremendous disappointment that I won't be able to continue this game in the same manner that I once did.

Originally this game/story was a joint effort by myself and compatriots, DataDog, Fecalmancer and Xanatos. As the team dwindled down to just myself, I continued to drive forward as strongly as I could learning all the skills I would need to bring this game to fruition. It was a fun learning experience and seeing the characters in my head come to life in Daz and to see other share in that love was a wonderful experience.

But the world stops turning for no one and as it turned out from under me I had to make the choice. Let the game die and enjoy what was came from its short life, or try like hell to find a way to carry on.

As you all know, especially those on Discord and F95Zone, I tried like hell to get others to help me with the game. I even offered up a 80% share of the proceeds from the game to any artist that wanted to step up and carry the bulk of the water.

When that failed, I even attempted to give up 100% of the proceeds if it just meant seeing the story go on, but again, no takers.

And so I continued to write, continued to build stories in my head for the characters and tried to keep pace with the changes in Renpy and Daz, but time to work on the game continued to elude me and I just never had the free time needed to revisit the world I had created and the beautiful women I had populated it with.

And then, a ray of hope. For all the time I worked on this game I did so in private. There were none in my social circles who know I had this little pet project on the side and that in the dark hours of the night I was nurturing these awesome sexual fantasies. It wasn't that there was any shame in what I was doing. Quite the opposite, there was a tremendous amount of pride in what I had managed to complete on my own. But I didn't want it to dominate the conversation or become 'the thing I was known for.' To reveal to others the work I was doing on the game would eclipse so much else just by the sheer nature of its lovely perversity.

And when I did finally speak of the project of passion that was rapidly fading in my rear-view mirror I was surprised to find a potential successor.

Meep has been a good friend for a long time now and I should have suspected that based on our past mutual interests she'd be interested in the game. After playing through it several times, we found ourselves locked in hours long conversations about the characters and the story that's written and the story that I wanted to write.

With each additional conversation her enthusiasm grew and she started asking the technical questions surrounding what it would take to make her own game. Almost half jokingly I asked if she wanted to take over my game. Her response, "Can I?!"

Suddenly my interest in the possibilities were renewed and I was excited once more about the prospect of building onto the game. And then...creative differences.

It would have been foolish to expect that any successor to the Doctor Amana game would fall lock step in behind me and let me drive the creative process while only doing a quarter of the work. And so for the last few months Meep and I have been trying to hammer out how we can make this work.

After several rounds of brain storming and honest communication I finally came to realize that if I try to stifle her enthusiasm with my unrelenting view of the story I'm going to snuff what passion she has for this project.

In the end I had to make a very tough call.

And so, after a year of trying to find someone capable to take over, I'm making the choice to step aside and let new blood breath life into this project and resuscitate the world of Doctor Amana.

It wasn't an easy decision, and honestly, I'm still trying to adapt to the new regime.

But this is Meep's time now and I'm going to give her my full support and see just where she takes this thing. And while her destination might not be the same as mine would have been, knowing her, it'll still go somewhere spectacular.

And so after today I'm surrendering to her the credentials to Patreon and Subscribestar. I've given her both of the computers I built to generate the art for the game and she's got access to all the 3rd party resources I was using, music, Renpy, etc.

She is also taking over as creative director. The story is hers now to do with as she pleases. I will continue to write the dialogue and construct the narrative on screen, but where these characters go and what they end up doing is ultimately in her hands.

I trust she is going to do a great job!

I'll still be around on Discord and F95Zone under my normal handles. Meep has her own for those. I just won't be posting on Patreon or Subscribestar after today.

These are her domains now.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this project through the years and thank you for loving these characters as much as I have.

I'm excited to see where Meep takes them and discover what shenanigans she has in store for them!

No doubt it'll be sexy good fun!

*Yes, the girls are unhappy with me too...

I know it's been awhile so I won't waste your time with a bunch of preamble. I'll start with the future of the game and then dig into the reasons and rationales.

ARTIST WANTED! If you or someone you know is a skilled Daz Artist and they want to take over the art for the Doctor Amana game in it's entirety, let me know! This includes a 50/50 split of all monies earned via Patreon. I'm even willing to pay out of pocket until the earnings reach an incentivizing amount.

PAY PER RELEASE I'm going to switch Patreon over to a pay per release model. This means that going forward you'll only be billed on months that an actual release posts. There will be a single $10 tier that will only bill whenever there is new content available. And by New Content I mean complete chapters, not playtests.

SUBSCRIBESTAR IS GETTING TURNED OFF This is a tough one because I know some of you prefer it, but the fact is they don't offer the control that Patreon does. Subscribestar is monthly billing, period. I can't follow a 'pay per release' model on Subscribestar because they offer no tools to do that. I can't even find a way to 'pause' a campaign on Subscribestar. It's kind of an all or nothing thing which sucks. Unless you just want me to leave it on and you can keep paying monthly but personally if I do that you'll be getting the short end of an already tiny stick.

NOW THE EXPLANATION My love and passion for this project and more specifically its characters has never waned. But change is necessary.

Between spending an entire month fighting off a case of covid and being promoted to Director of Informatics at work, life has been unruly at best. And while getting a bump at work is good, the pay increase has sealed the deal on me ever being a full time developer. There is just no way that this game is ever going to match my salary dollar for dollar.

But the game was never about the money anyway. It was just a nice dream to think one day I could wake up and all I had to do was make porn for 8 hours every day of the week.

Work on the game has never stopped though. When I'm on the road or working remote, I'm often happily spending my downtime writing episodes and concocting all kinds of plots for our lovely ladies. I stopped counting how many words are written for this game. And the code is all up to snuff and ready to handle all the previously planned customizations we've previously discussed. These are all things that I can an do work on frequently on the laptop.

The art however requires a lot more computing power than this thing can handle. And even if I did purchase a laptop that was able to run Daz, I would be hampered by the use of a single monitor, not to mention the looks, complaints and possible reprimand I would get for working on images of Cassie and Roger fucking while crammed between two other people on an air plane. (Working on porn in the terminal and lounge are equally frowned upon I presume.)

So doing the writing and the coding poses no challenge. It's the art. I just don't get enough time during the week to sit down a the beast and work in Daz. So I need an artist. Someone who can take up the slack on that end for an even split of the income. Or baring that, a paycheck coming straight out of my pocket.

Whatever it takes to get it done.

Now, if I can't find someone then I have a back up plan to scale down the art. Reduce the frame by frame dialogue into scene setting and sexy components and minimize the images per scene.

It's really the only other choice I have. You'll still get all of the highly detailed art you've come to expect, there will just be a lot less nuance built into it.

And of course one day I can always go back and update the art, but at least we'll have something to enjoy.

In any case, I'm going to continue work on the story while searching for an artist and developing an alternative artistic compromise.

Job postings will be going up and if you are anyone you know wants a crack at this, please reach out and we'll talk.

Salute and we'll talk soon.

-Roman

Download Links updated for v3.0.0-beta

https://subscribestar.adult/posts/456518 https://www.patreon.com/posts/10-20-30-links-49905024

Don't get too excited. It's the first two chapters of the game with no additional sex scenes.

This is just a beta test of the new 2-week production cycle. The Nanami chapter included took about 14 hours to produce. Chapters with sex scenes are expected to take a few days extra, but shouldn't flex the cycle too much.

Also, if you're going to be a dick and post this partial release up on the forums, at least take credit for it so that when I get a thread full of people bitching about the lack of content I can at least point to you and say 'That mother fucker did it!'

Cheers!

2021-10-30

Time to do this again, so let’s get to it.

Progress

Production is going good and things are still moving forward. The new production cycle is working very well but has been stalled by code refactoring.

On the downside, the new code caused a number of problems that seemed like they were going to require some ugly work arounds. But in the eleventh hour a single discovery was made that seemed to solve multiple issues at once!

You can read my rantings at the time of discovery here on the discord where I was bitching and having a eureka moment simultaneously.

Now that the string interpolation issue with my nested objects is solved I can now give players access to an unprecedented number of variables in the game. Names, nicknames, relationships, etc. And not just with the MC between non-MC characters as well.

This of course meant I needed to do a quick two day redesign of the planner feature so that players can easily access all of these variables, but all the hard stuff is now done.I have a little clean up to do on the back end and the new code and script converter are up to date and ready to work.

Improvements

Some invisible improvements were also made on the back end to simplify things. The number of custom classes used to manage the different aspects of the game were cut from 14 down to 4.

I consolidated a lot of functions and the new data structure used to manage all these player changeable variables is actually much simpler than what I built before and doesn’t require as much overhead to maintain.

We can now add characters and variables on the fly with out any need to recode or rebase. It’s honestly as simply as me opening a text file, adding a line with the variable name and the value and saving. When renpy starts it does the rest.

And if I need to change something about a character, I can just modify the file without having to push out any kind of corrective code. There is also a layer of protection built in where if I change a variable in the game, but a player has already modified the variable themselves, then my change will be ignored and player customization is prioritized. This way no matter what changes I make to the game, your personal changes will always be kept.

To Do

So to give you greater visibility into the production process I’m including a link to the Trello board I recently started using to track the production tasks.

This will open up the production process and allow you to see what is on the slate, what is done, what needs to be done. Etc. Feel free to check it out here:https://trello.com/b/WABLmsaI/doctor-amana-production-board

Once the tasks on the ‘Current Update’ list is complete, I can push out the first update and immediately start on the ‘Next Update’. Once the current list is done, the next update list should hopefully take less than 2 weeks to compete! So let’s make November awesome!

That’s it for now.

We’ll talk soon and as always, thanks for hanging in there!

Salute,

Roman

2021-10-28

Poll results are in and Sarah is next in the pipeline.

Development News to come soon!

*2021-10-14

Start Time: 10:30 EST (10:30 AM)

Estimated End Time: ~12:30EST (12:30 PM)

Content: Nanami Chapter 01 – Update

URL for Stream (And Recorded Streams): https://picarto.tv/doctoramana

All questions, comments and requests for Daz tips and tricks welcome!

Bring your questions or just come hang out!

Salute!