Post written by Houtamelo.

Financial Report

Since the last report, which was made on 09/23/2023, we received four payouts, for a total of US$ 661.00, after fees.

I started working on the port to Godot in November, 2023. We knew that completing the port would take at least 6 months, that is a long period, and I wanted to make sure the team would remain motivated during the process. With that goal in mind, I talked with Akanymir(our main Artist, the one who made most of what you see in the game). The result was that I committed to sending him a monthly “salary” of $300(more like an allowance, considering how low it is), most of that amount came from my personal funds, I was using the payouts from SubscribeStar to help afford it. The outcome has been good so far, Akanymir has put in a lot of work since then, I’m honestly astonished at how much he made so far. Since the demo v2, just in terms of combat, he made 6 new enemies, all with their full set of unique skills, I posted screenshots on our discord. I fully intend on including all of them in the first Godot release, which means it will have 10 enemies (compared to the 4 on the demo), not to mention the 4 old enemies all have new lewd skills as well (I showed those on the previous progress report).

A Problem on the horizon

Akanymir lives in Ukraine, not only that, but he’s also unfortunate enough to live in a city(Sumy) that’s on the border with Russia. He’s not only the project’s artist, he’s also a dear friend of mine. Because of this, my first goal is to reach an income that allows him to move to a safer city with his family, my ultimate goal is to get him out of Ukraine, but that is not realistic at the moment. Moving to a safer city is realistic, and he estimates it would cost $1500/month. I live in Brazil, even high-paying jobs in my country don’t pay that much (our minimum wage is $260/month), so I applied for remote jobs in 1st world countries, both in game development and programming in general, but I didn’t manage to even get a single interview. To make matters worse, Freelancing hasn’t been doing well in the last few months, I’m struggling to even keep up with the $300/month I committed to. I considered publishers, and they weren’t keen in investing on a team that is threatened by the ongoing war. I can’t blame them, but it doesn’t change the fact that we still have a very big unsolved problem.

Dungeon crawling rework

• No "straight" routes, the map will be procedurally generated like an actual dungeon, it will be a lot more open.
• Enemies will be represented by their actual icons (not just a "sword" icon), they will also be able to move around the map, just like the player.
• Ethel will also have her own exhaustion bar.
• Nema's clearing mist is no longer a toggle.

The player will be able to spend his turn doing one of the following:

Walk

• Takes one turn.
• +1 exhaustion for Ethel and Nema.
• Moves to selected adjacent tile.

Run

• Takes zero turns.
• +4 exhaustion for Ethel and Nema
• Moves to selected adjacent tile.
• Cannot be used more than once per turn.

Clear mist

• Takes one turn.
• +3 exhaustion for Nema.
• Clears mist in a 2-tile range centered on the player.
• The mist returns after 4 turns.

Scout

• Takes one turn.
• +3 exhaustion for Ethel.
• Scout tiles in a 3-tile range centered on the player, revealing their contents:
  • Seeing enemies in visible tiles doesn't require scouting, but scouting reveals the exact number of enemies and their formation.
  • If a tile has a trap, it will be revealed. (won't show which trap it is)
  • If a tile has an event, the interface will show if it's a negative, positive or neutral event. (probably by changing the icon)
  • If a tile has treasure, it will be revealed. (won't show what the treasure is)

PS: rest tiles don't require scouting, the icon will be shown as long as its in range of the player vision (thinking the vision should be 3 tiles)

Short Rest

• Takes one turn.
• -2 exhaustion for Ethel and Nema

Every turn

• Enemies will move, if they see the protagonists they will start chasing them, and will continue to do so as long as they are in vision. (probably 2 tiles of range)
• If the protagonists are in a tile with mist: their lust/temptation will increase.

Additional notes:

• When battle takes place, the mist in that tile will reflect the mist in battle.
• Time in-battle will be reflected in the world too: 15 seconds = 1 turn.

So if you start battle with no mist, it will take at most 60 seconds for soft mist to appear, then another 60 for it to become hard mist.

I'm also pondering if enemies on the map (outside battle) should also be able to move every 15 seconds. This could maybe even work as a reinforcement mechanic, if you take too long, other enemies might catch up to you and join battle.

Here are some samples from the current map generator algorithm:

The behavior is very customizable, my goal is to have different regions of the game be made on different patterns. Regions like the grove would have very open areas (as shown on screenshots 3 & 4, while the cavern will be a lot more claustrophobic (like screenshot 2)

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.

• Nema is voiced by AmeAfterDark
• Ethel is voiced by JackieFox

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.