Long post - 0.16 - future of the project

Hey guys,

I want to up date you all on what's going on, since I know I've been a bit unusually silent this month.

Just to put this at the start there will be a tiny delay for the 0.16 build. It will now be released on Monday instead of tomorrow as originally scheduled. If you pledged this month hoping for the build, do not worry. As always with any delay that overspills into next month, if you cancel your pledge you will still receive a copy of the build via messages.

That said, this month has been a bit of a bad month for me mentally. I'm not really sure why, but both my mood and energy levels have been extremely low. I have done work on the projects, but no where near the amount and standards I normally try to strive for. 

However I feel like the pendulum is slowly swinging back towards normality for me, so hopefully just a temporary blip in production and nothing too serious to worry about. 

The Solarion Project's Future:

At this point I've slowly been coming to the realisation that this project will likely not reach its goals we set out with. And my original plans for the size of the game will have to change to accommodate this.

Thinking it through I was put into 2 paths of travel; I either continue on with the full content I planned (5 progression levels, with 5 parts of main story and a crap tonne of side NPCs) and potentially spend the next 5 years or so developing it. Alternatively I slim down the amount of planned content and have the project completed at some point in 2023 (depending on the amount of content I cut.) 

I have decided on the latter.

In either plan the content will not include the harem / extend harem or the extra content scenes that was stated in the goals. As I said, we're still pretty far away from that, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

There are a multitude of reasons why this project won't see the super successful heights other projects reach, all of which fall on me from a game design perspective. I know we have some pretty die hard fans on the project, which is really awesome! But I don't think the game has that broader appeal, given the lack of specific fetishes and it being somewhat story & romance based. 

One thing is I definitely don't want to seem ungrateful to the people who have supported this project. It really does mean a lot to me, more than I can describe that you have allowed me to at least have a go at doing this in some full time capacity. 

And I don't want to come across as greedy either, I know some people will ask how I can't consider the current level of support successful and while it's true we do have a great deal of support, being completely honest balancing my finances every month to see how much artwork I can afford has been really difficult. 

I did really believe in this project, which is why I didn't immediately go into job hunting as soon I lost my previous job. I thought it would just need time. Unfortunately 18 months later and I'm still struggling to secure enough artwork and be able to live. 

Anyway, I know that sounds like a lot of doom and gloom! But I just wanted to lay out everything so we can all understand my position. 

Going forward I will be polling different ideas to both fans and patrons to gauge if there are little (or big) things we can do that will make a bit of an impact. To give a small snippet of an idea is that recently I moved my second project onto rpg maker, a move which was risky but actually received A LOT of positive feedback, and I wonder if that is something that could apply here. (Not saying it should be done - just an example.)

No more Q&A's:

Malaena's Q&A next month will unfortunately be the last Q&A, at least for a while. This is mainly to help with the financial constraint that the Q&As add. This is so I can focus on acquiring artwork for the main game. 

Though I really loved the Q&As and I know people enjoyed them, unfortunately the gain didn't make up for the cost. 

That said I don't want to leave Space Rangers without a reward, so Witchking has agreed to do a few sketches on the months without a build. I'm thinking of doing a series called "The Captain meets..." where our MC meets a few famous characters from other franchises (very much like the Lady Dimitrescu set) and Space Rangers can vote on a character out of a group. Witchking has offered to do this without charge, so a big thanks to him!

If you like the sound of that Space Rangers, or have a different idea, please let me know!

I'm sorry if this came across as a really negative post. I wanted to try and be realistic about the situation instead of plodding along pretending like everything would work out fine. Not all our plans come to perfect fruition and that's ok. The main thing is that we tried and gave it our best.

To all supporters past and present I thank you so much again for your belief and support of the project. I know based on this post the end result may not have as much content as we originally thought, but I will damn well make sure it's still a game you all enjoy!

If you have any thoughts please let me know here or on the discord.

Until next time,

 - Nergal