Post written by Houtamelo.

Update: Changes to our workflow

These changes will likely remain in effect until chapter 1 is finished.

There will be little focus on donations

When we started the project 2 years ago, our goal was to achieve most of our funding through the help of supporters in platforms like SubscribeStar. However, due to our own mistakes, the demo version did not manage to achieve sufficient funding for our main needs: team members' salary and commissioning assets.

In that period, the great majority of our funding was coming from my own pockets, but they ran out 2 months ago. This meant that I had to resort to freelancing and could no longer dedicate my full time to Spire.

As grin as that may sound, I did manage to get two good long-term clients, allowing me to earn ~1000 USD / month, while still keeping 20% of my time available for Spire.

This means that I have been able to: - Pay my bills - Commission voice acting(more on that later), audio, and art(from our secondary artist: Moisesf). - Pay Akanimyr (main artist) 300 USD/month, which is much higher than what he was previously getting (~75 USD), allowing him to make art at a higher pace.

The delay between progress/financial reports will increase to up to 60 days.

Since programming is slower, I have less to show each month, and I don't want to spoil all our new scenes, CGs, sprites, etc. Also, it takes quite a bit of time to gather all the information needed to make these reports, a higher delay means I have more time to work on other things, and I won't have to worry as much about these posts.

Results

  • Assets (scenes, CGs, sprites, sfxs, music, voice) are being produced at a much higher pace.
  • I no longer have to spend sanity points on marketing.
  • Programming is ~80% slower, because I only have a fifth of my previous time available. This does not worry me, as the project's bottleneck was always assets, I won't fall behind the other "departments". Also, most of the programming was already done, and porting the project to Godot takes a lot less time than making it from scratch.
  • The next build release will take up to 6 months, since I'm still about 25% in the porting process.

We now have voice actresses representing our protagonists

They already made plenty of voice work, we started with combat: pleasure/pain moans for the sexy and painful parts.

Godot was the chosen engine

Although I'm not fond of some design choices made by Godot, there isn't currently a better option, as Fyrox lacked some very important features for us (such as UI editing, bone-based animation rigging). It's not all bad though, I have to say that making games in Godot is quite faster than in Unity.

The project is now open source, with a AGPL-3.0 license

Available at GitHub. That is also our main repository, you may freely audit all my commits and check out the project's progress.

Please keep in mind that no license is provided for the assets (images, audio, etc). If you'd like to use those in your projects you will have to acquire a license from each asset's author (send me a message if you're having trouble finding them).

The Plan

When chapter 1 is finished, we will have a much more fleshed out game, with a lot of content. When that happens, I believe the game will be good enough to justify a serious marketing push, which we will use to acquire the funding we need. If that fails, I'll just keep funding it through freelancing, though I'd prefer putting all my efforts in Spire.