(Future Fragments) Change to release date |August-October 2020| + what we have left to do + what we're moving to Faye's Game + a lot of important info in general

Warning in advance; this is a long post. If you want the tl;dr, scroll to the bottom of the post, but we do recommend you read the full thing so you know exactly what's going on.

Over the last week or so, Triangulate, Frouge, and myself went back over what the game's got left to do, and unfortunately, things are taking longer than  we expected.

So to get it out of the way, we're going to push the game's release date to somewhere between August and October 2020.

We're doing this because we don't want to release the game incomplete to you all after all this time we've spent on it, but we're absolutely dedicated to getting it out in 2020, and we're most of the way there.

However, as noted before, there are a number of things left to do, so first i'm going to go over what we've got left, and then i'm going to go over what's taken us much longer than we thought.

-----------------------------

THINGS LEFT TO DO PURELY FOR ART/PROGRAMMING

FIRE LEVEL:

• Fire Boss mechanics reprogramming
• Fire Powerup Box
• Fire Level tiles partial rework
• New mechanic for Fire Level (decided, just needs to be programmed in)
• Fire Level Game Over CGs
• "Toxin Releasers" visuals for Fire Level end-path goal
• Parallax backgrounds for Fire Level
• "Outside World" tileset/BG for the very beginning of the game
• Golden Databank screens for Fire
• Add an environmental hazard or two to the Fire Level

 ICE LEVEL:

• Shield Celodst mechanics rework
• Ice Powerup Box
• Totem Pole environmental hazard
• New mechanic for Ice Level (decided, just needs to be programmed in)
• Ice Level Game Over CGs
• Ice Level sound effects replacement
• Ice Level unique NPC art
• "Crown Pieces/Force Field" for Ice Level end-path goal
• Parallax backgrounds for Ice Level
• Golden Databank screens for Ice

 ELECTRIC LEVEL:

• Electric Powerup Box
• Electric Level unique NPC art

 EARTH LEVEL:

• Earth Level unique NPC art
• Gold Databank broken parts (and all connected art)
• "The Last Earth Grunt" NPC for important events
• "Empowered Vines" for Earth Level end-path goal
• Golden Databank screens for Earth

THE END LEVEL:

• The End Powerup Box
• Background for Seeber's Lab

GLOBAL THINGS:

• Opening Cinematic cut into loops & voiced by The King
• Vie sprites in shadow for Fire/Ice levels
• Removal of the "you got a powerup" screen
• Re-checking all attacks and enemies for balance/visuals/audio etc. (BUGTESTING)
• Extra Vie facial expressions
• Extra Faye facial expressions
• Powerup randomization/placement system
• Ice Charge Shot replacement
• Add particle effects around Talia for when she's charging up an attack (elemental)
• End-level PoV animations and background/monitors for it
• Scroll up/down list of paths for megamap to highlight them
• Arousal Meter system
• "Red Text" System for the Glossary

-----------------------------

Now with all that said, there's still the major role of completing the script and getting it voice-acted, which I have been working on.

It's about 75% ready, but we need to obviously hire a lot of voice actors and get that recorded, which is going to cost a lot of time (and money, and we can only operate as fast as we have the money to afford in that area, which is what the extra few months will give us time for also).

There's also commissioning the remaining music tracks, and all new sound effects for Fire and Ice (as they were using generic, free-use SFX this whole time).

All of the above is something we're confident we can get done in 2020, though.

Which leads me to the next part of this post;

-----------------------------

WHAT WE'RE CUTTING OUT OR MOVING TO FAYE'S GAME

We've talked about this too, and realized that some features just aren't worth the time/effort to get into Future Fragments if it'll delay the game any further (or we just outright realized they were bad ideas period), and so we've instead decided to remove them outright or move them to Faye's game (the sequel to Future Fragments which we'll start working on after FF is done).

----------------------------- 

THINGS BEING WIPED ENTIRELY;

- Talia's Databank Responses

• We felt that these were an overall detriment to the game for three reasons;
• First, with the Values system, if the player picks say, to respond to all events with anger or hatred, it would be pretty weird if she responded to a Databank with positivity and optimism.
• Second, with the new ability to read Databanks wherever you want, and with the way the game's programmed, you're unable to trigger her responses if you're outside of that room, defeating the whole point of that collections system.
• Third, the responses, while helpful at first, would quickly turn into "hand-holding" the player through the plot, to the point of looking down on them/patronizing them, as if the player isn't smart enough to understand the plot or what they've just read.

- One Tier of True Endings

• Originally, the endings system checks your highest-point "main" Value in the Values system, then mixes it with the Sexuality value, and out of 4 possible amounts (below 0, 0-50, 50-200, or 200+) you'd get one of 4 very different variations for your Value-based ending.
• The problem was that endings that were below 0, way above normal (200+), and in the middle all made sense; however, having two "in the middle" (0-50 and 50-200) endings just made no sense. The endings kept ending up similar in writing which is what happens when you try to do a "down the middle" ending, and the point values were close enough that it may not really feel like something the player was "going for" or "expected to get" based on their actions too.
• So, we removed 1 ending per value, taking the total # of "true endings" down from 28 to 21, and as a result we feel the endings are a lot more "logical" for what you would be expected to get and very different from each other as well.

- Second way to win for Fire/Ice/Electric/Earth/The End bosses

• There was going to be a way that you could defeat these bosses by thinking outside of the box; for instance, you could use your Freeze Shot on the Electric Boss to super-cool its processors, allowing it to shut itself down by effectively overclocking it.
• We took this out because it would just be a lot more bugtesting and programming work to add in a feature that very, very few people would be likely to discover.
• This is a mechanic that we MIGHT bring over to Faye's game, but it hasn't been decided yet, so for now we're just leaving it as "deleted".

 - Cutscenes Viewer

• Unless some sort of miracle happens, we're likely going to cut the ability to re-watch cutscenes in their entirety just because of the huge amount of complexity it'd take to place Talia in the proper place, have the flags be triggered, reload the game up to where you need it to be, bugtest that, etc.
• We will still of course have a gallery where you can view all the animations, CGs, endings, etc. in the game, as that's a considerably less time-consuming effort.

----------------------------- 

THINGS BEING MOVED TO FAYE'S GAME;

- Secret Bosses

• One of the core reasons all of these things I'm about to mention are getting moved to Faye's game is not only to allow Future Fragments to come out sooner, but we also wanted to give Faye's game some extra added content to set it apart from Future Fragments (besides all the other stuff we already have laid out for it).
• We were originally going to have "secret bosses" in the game, one per level, where they would be sort of "mini-bosses" that you could fight to gain access to something important per level.
• We realized though that with Talia's limited offensive kit, making anymore bosses for the game without having them feel repetitive or derivative would be fairly difficult, while keeping to the standard we'd been sticking to of bosses having lots of attacks and abilities and all that, as Talia has to still be able to fight them and there's only so much she can do.
• However, with Faye's wide range of abilities, having high-intensity secret bosses for her would be no problem, so we felt it'd fit much better over there.

 - Visual Flashiness Upgrades

• We had plans to add a lot of high-flashiness things visually like flashy slashes, explosions, sparks, etc. to the game to give it an overall extra layer of polish visually.
• However, with how much work Triangulate already has art-wise, we decided to instead add this to Faye's game.
• This wasn't just because of Triangulate's workload though; we also realized that such flashiness doesn't fit Talia's game too well given that it's more of an "adventure" game than a balls-to-the-wall action game, whereas such flashiness would fit perfect with Faye's game where you'll be running around quickly and fighting lots of enemies.
• We will still of course be doing some lighting upgrades and a few important visual effects and such to make some things more clear for Talia's game.

 - Set Boosts

• This was something that we were going to do for Talia's game much earlier on where you would get specific boosts for equipping 3 specific powerups (notice how all the powerups are themed in sets of 3's?), but as development went on, we realized it just wouldn't fit the game well anymore.
• So, we've moved the concept to Faye's game, which works much better since in her game you won't be picking up powerups traditionally, you'll instead be getting boosts from enemies in a manner similar to say, Borderlands, with a skill tree and all of that stuff, so having specific sets of skills enabled would give you an entirely new, unique skill.

 This is just a preliminary list; as time goes on, if we feel we need to move more stuff to Faye's game we will. 

-----------------------------

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT THIS DELAY:

There's often a belief that people making games on Patreon are intentionally "milking", aka delaying their games indefinitely to get money as much as possible and that these people have no intention of ever actually finishing their game.

I'd like to address that with a few things to note;

We are currently dropping around $500 a month in pledges on Patreon. If this continues, obviously we won't have enough to sustain ourselves as this with our full time job, let alone having the funds to afford all the music, voicework, and SFX for the game that's remaining. So, we HAVE to get this game out ASAP.

Additionally, the income from releasing adult games on Steam and other platforms is exponentially higher than Patreon income, by a factor of at least 10x, if not higher, on average.

On top of that, we have many more games we want to make, not only Faye's game, but many games after that within the same universe as well.

So if we were really in this just to milk people and never release the game because we were solely focused on money, well, we'd be fools, because releasing a finished game and getting lots of profits off of Steam and other platforms AND continuing to make money off of your new game you're working on by having it on Patreon would make far, far more money than just "milking" your game forever.

That said, we're obviously not solely in this for money, or else we wouldn't be giving out rewards that last forever for one-time pledges or refunds no matter what for any reason.

We just want to make good games that people feel they paid a fair amount for.
But we don't want to take any longer to make it than need be, so that's why we're getting it out in 2020 no matter what.

-----------------------------

WHEN WILL DEMOS START UP AGAIN?

We'll be releasing v0.45 at the end of March/start of April.

As for what the demos will consist of going forward;

• Each demo will be the completed series of maps for a given level, with completed mechanics and boss and all of that good stuff.
• However, all cutscenes will be removed so as to not spoil the plot. (We'll have a version with all the cutscenes in for our bugtesting group to go over in detail, of course.)
• Each month's demo (we'll be back to monthly demos) will be releasing levels in reverse order.
• This means v0.45 will be The End, v0.46 will be Earth, v0.47 will be Electric, v0.48 will be Ice, and v0.49 will be Fire.
• By the point we've released those five, we should be at September, and should have had enough time to polish/bugtest the game to get it out the door by October's end at the latest.

-----------------------------

AND FINALLY, WHAT'S TAKEN LONGER THAN YOU THOUGHT TO GET DONE?

It's honestly a number of factors.

• Getting Steam setup and going back and forth with the staff on Steam has been a huge time-sink; not because the staff were hard to deal with (they've been great at answering questions), but because the Steam forms to get your game online with them are just insane. Hundreds of pages of documentation and rules to read through if you want to make sure your game gets on there, countless lists to go through and fill out, lots of visuals and documents you need to create and write up.
• The Fire and Ice levels have some considerable mechanical issues with them (i.e. they're boring) and so we went back over them to redo the mechanics for them; planning these out and testing them and so on took up longer than we thought, but the final result we think you'll be pretty happy with and it'll make those levels as fun to play as the Electric, Earth, and The End Levels were.
• The True Final Boss fight has easily taken the most time out of anything on this game so far for a singular thing; given that the fight is 5 phases long (don't worry, if you lose on it, you'll go back to the start of the first phase you haven't completed), compared to other bosses only getting 1 or 2 phases, with an interlude in the middle of it, loads of brand new art being made just for it, and over 20 minutes of music, it's been a hell of a ride making it, but we think the final result is going to be worth it. There's something really special about it that I can't even talk about yet because I don't want to spoil it, but I've been excited about it for a long time.
• Frouge has been doing an absolute mountain of bugfixes after the bugtesting team went through the game, which has kind of back-loaded a lot of the programming work but saved us a lot of headaches that would have arisen at game launch had this stuff not gotten caught and fixed and the game released with them.
• I've also additionally spent a lot of time implementing map fixes/features that a lot of the map editor backer-tier people have pointed out over time both to avoid softlocks and just for general gameplay flow improvement; it's been really helpful to have multiple people's eyes on stuff like that.

----------------------------- 

For those who came down here for the TL;DR;

• The game is releasing between August-October 2020 now
• Demos will resume at the end of March/start of April, and will run monthly until game completion
• The reason for the delay is that it's taking longer than we thought on all fronts (art/audio/writing/programming) and we don't want to release the game unfinished
• We're trimming some game features down though and moving others to Faye's game, the sequel to Future Fragments
• The delay isn't to "milk" the game, as you'll make far more money completing/releasing a game on platforms than making it run indefinitely, plus we just want to make a lot more games regardless of money tbh, we don't want to be working on FF forever

-----------------------------

So, with all of that said, we hope you understand why we're pushing the game to release later in 2020, and we do hope that you'll both stick with us and/or come visit the Discord if you've got any grievances you want to air with us or questions or concerns.

https://discord.gg/puXrfSm

As always, both now and in the past, and going forward too, we've appreciated all the support you've given us more than we can put into words. If it weren't for all of you, this game just simply wouldn't exist.

We hope that when the final game comes out later this year, it'll have been worth all of the time, support, and energy you've given us to get this done.

- The Future Fragments Team