Oh yeah, hell game.
So, it's been a while. When I first posted the 'hell game is on haitus' post I posted it only to the patreon since I mistakenly assumed most people would check that, and then after it became obvious that mostly people didn't it seemed like way too much time had passed to make a proper post here.
So, hell game is on hiatus, and at this point probably permanently shelved -- the usual problem of a first-time developer biting off way more than they can chew on a very ambitious project, that kind of thing. I've been working on smaller projects since then, and they've been a lot more managable. I'd still like to make something with a really big scope, but looking more realistically about the time and energy investments that would require mean that it really would have to be a full-time job, and the money for that doesn't seem to be there, so, oh well.
I have still been working on games -- I finished my latest big project early this year, 'the new hive'; that's the one I was posting out in these news updates and calling 'the twine game'. It's done now! It's a fairly involved porn game with ~280k words of text, featuring more than a dozen different characters and a handful of different character transformations. I'm now working on a currently-untitled werewolf detective porn game (you're not a werewolf who is a detective; you're detecting the werewolves) that's in the early stages of development; you can play the first public demo here, or subscribe to my patreon to see the most up-to-date version. Or just wait another month. Also given patreon's continually-eroding stance on porn maybe that patreon won't be around for too much longer; who knows. Things are pretty uncertain these days.
I'm sure many of us still want a game where we can create the character we want. And fuck those we want ... And of course demons and other strange creatures.
I hope that someday you will take the developments from the hellgame and do something similar but less ambitious.
And now a little about something else.
Many people continue to support your work, but I am sure that after the realization that you gave up doing what you showed people for the first time, it made many leave.
I also followed how you made the game "Hive" and as a result you cut out a huge piece of content from it, which disappointed me ...
Your new project is also sick with something. A bad card and an almost complete lack of understanding of what to do just destroys the desire to play it.
Most likely you will not care what I write because I am nobody. But read at least ...
P.S. I've seen too many games that have been abandoned or are in endless development, essentially standing in one place. And it pains me to look at this, especially when I supported such projects, after which the author either abandoned his work without giving what he promised or fed us breakfast that soon everything would be ready for years ...
I have not supported anyone with money for a long time, because I am simply afraid that they will go nowhere.
I've been meaning to say this for a while but never really... followed through for one reason or another. Hell game isn't finished, but what's there is already a spectacular foundation. Even as it is now, it's one of my favorite games -- and that's hard to do when it's basically a skeleton of what was planned.
So... what I propose is making the game open source. Get the code on github or something, get people engaging with the existing codebase. An open source hell game will grow and evolve without any input, and may over time solve the problems you were struggling to deal with.
I think that would be a good way to send off hell game, at any rate, if you don't think working on it alone will work out. People that hell game to grow can kinda be the change they want to see in the world, and you get free code, pretty much, if you ever end up using this codebase for something else.
@Remedy
i mean it get it, i understand that not getting the thing you expect to get is frustrating, but like... when people give me money they're paying for software development, not buying a subscription service, and actually for software development a rate of $250/m is so low that it's literally criminal. if you think you're getting ripped off, like, there's around 200,000 words of content in hell game, and around 275,000 words of content in 'the new hive', and at the incredibly bargain-basement rate of $15 per 1000 words, that's $7125, which is still more than i've made from patreon in total. actual writing jobs pay literally around ten times as much, as in $71,250 for both of these games. and that's just for the writing; programming is another highly-paid technical skill.
like, i get that there are other factors, which is why i don't have some game industry job writing for porn games or whatever, but any way you slice it i'm actually getting massively underpaid for what i'm posting here. i'm not asking for more money, just like, the acknowledgment that actually what i'm getting paid is pennies to the dollar in terms of what this kind of work is valued at.
also like, you hear things about, say, dark souls 2 where the entire plot was rewritten and about half the game was cut, and that's only been discovered through datamining -- developers needing to lop large parts out of their games to hit any deadline is a really common thing. i get that it stings more when you know the specifics of the cut content, but seeing things get cut, playing a bad early demo... that's just part of seeing the process of development live. things don't actually come together in that sense until really late in development.
@Lavacaroux
yeah, i've been thinking about it. i used to have a payment tier on the patreon that was like, "i'll go open source" but that seems less relevant now that i'm not even working on it. i mean, the code is an embarrassing mess but that's what everybody says. probably the part where it's weirdly-structured haskell will make anybody else working on it difficult anyway.
i might as well put it up somewhere. like, say, here: https://monsterware.dev/xax/hell-game
hope everybody enjoys reading what a mess the code is :V