In preparation for the announcement of our BBS reboot, we are aiming for a Patreon overhaul to celebrate. Please be aware that we will be shutting down this account as of next month, with new rewards and information available over on https://www.patreon.com/Jasonafex which will be our new portal for game news and demos!
The reason for this switch is that I want to make our games my main content rather then a side hobby, meaning I am confident enough in what we are producing now to put my name on the project directly and make it a breadwinner for our brand. We want to simplify down to one account for me, one account for kabier. We are willing to lose the donations currently received in the transition, as mentioned we are confident in what we're making that it's worth the investment.
All pledges will be automatically discontinued once we close this page. If you would like to continue to support our projects, please check out https://www.patreon.com/Jasonafex as it will be overhauled upon the reveal trailer!
Thankyou for your continued support and patience! As of today, our programmer for the Aylie project breached and terminated their own contract. Essentially taking all previous payments beyond the most recent and running with no usable code or build to speak of.
This is particularly frustrating for myself and Kabier as the programmer has declared bankruptcy, meaning getting our investment back is unlikely unless we take it to court. This programmer was not a member of the furry community and had little to no red flags beyond strong political opinions, wanting those opinions depicted in the game itself.
Finding reliable programmers has become highest priority as the positions we offer attract scammers, leaning on their lack of reputation to get away with it, to little to no fanfare.
As a result, we are shifting our attention strictly to programmers that already have a publicly visible history of completing games. Be it Nutaku, Itch.io or other distribution platforms. It is also ideal that they have their own Patreon or crowdfunding source, meaning the fleecing of game development has direct consequences on their own business opportunities.
Fortunately, so far we have a couple of potential developers that may be interested in a joint business venture. One has developed graphic novels for Nutaku (Meaning a potential Amorous sequel), and another doing NSFW beat 'em ups (Bare Backstreets Reboot). We are going to keep our team as small as feasibly possible to reduce the amount of bad actors crippling our development efforts. It may be some time before these developers are free from their current projects. In the mean time, we will be using our Patreon support to invest further into Zbrush, Toon Boom, Spine and other asset production software to alleviate staff positions and to allow myself and Kabier to cover as many bases as possible.
We do not want another development cycle such as Amorous that took as long as it did to update due to these types of individuals. We want to be able to be able to achieve reasonable update intervals with a steady, consistent content release schedule where supports can clearly see what their pledges are going into.
I personally, am extremely passionate about making furry games happen and am willing to take as many hits as necessary in order to achieve that goal.
We want Aylie to feel out of this world. To achieve this effect, we want him to look like real slime! Here is some progress of us trying to create a shader that looks convincing.
Experimenting with morphing Aylies face for more cartoony/cute blinking over traditional eyelid bones! I think the results give him a 'cat-like' expression when closed. Do you like it?
Experimenting with Zbrush's face shape slider feature! We aren't sure if we'll go with this, or bones to animate the faces of our characters. One big benefit of face shapes is that we can create brand new geometry with each expression. Notice the formation of wrinkles!
Kabs first attempt at a potential Aylie model for the game! We've already changed the dick color from blue to green to better match the concept of slime morphing properties.
To adjust to the current budget, we're developing a small single character NSFW date sim featuring our new character Aylie! Killer Kobolds will resume production when both our funding and staffing meets it's criteria.
Unlike Amorous, this prototype will be rendered completely in 3D! I know you guys are hungry for new furry content, a smaller scope will allow us to roll content out at a more manageable rate.
Stay tuned and check out our new development discord for frequent sneak peaks!
I've accumulated enough from our Killer Kobolds Patreon to pay a potential programmer $600 for the first month, however I'm not too confident about the build after that first month. We are taking a big risk focusing on online play, as networking experience isn't readily available. Currently our game is under budget.
So! I gathered it might be a good idea to do a smaller, safer game first to generate additional exposure and put better use to a small budget while we build it up. I think it's hurting a bit that KK is a SFW game and isn't really pushing to tackle new territory.
Based on the recent positive feedback in regards to Amorous and the crazy auction numbers for it's cast, would you guys be interested in a polished, single character experience? I would make it more of an interactive game then a graphic novel, mini-games and a more dynamic personality for the featured character. I was thinking about having it center around Aylie, a genderbending slime monster that you could shape via dialogue to be whatever you want.
I'm perfectly happy sticking with Killer Kobolds as a priority, just want to make sure I don't kill the Patreon entirely by biting off too much too early before we have the budget to run those kinds of risks. Let me know what you think below!
I've been putting ads for KK out on various game development platforms and there are a couple of very good leads for professionals interested in the position! These individuals have 10+ experience coding for Unity, and most importantly, have experience networking in Unity, which is a pretty niche field.
One of our potential hires is active with several other Patreon games, all of which are very successful and have been seen to completion. Many of these are adult themed too, meaning we have a great lead for some fun NSFW content in the future if this works out!
They are confident that coding KK won't be too hard due to their experience. As a result though, this Patreon will need to pay $600-$1,000 just towards the programming budget to be comparable to their other active projects.
We aim to dedicate 25% of our budget monthly to programming, meaning to hit $600, We'll need to hit $2,500 monthly! We may be able to get a demo build out in only a couple of months with proper staffing. If you have any friends that may be interested in this game, please spread the word so we can get funded!
Our date sim finally went gold! The full game including a nude patch is available for free on Steam. Instructions to patch the game to be uncensored are available Here
It's very exciting to be heading towards release! Our 'about' page has been updated to reflect the positive progression of our game.
Once we do hit Steam this Febuary, in conjunction with final polish fixes, The game will no longer need financial support as it will be considered feature complete. Instead, as of Febuary I may re-purpose the Patreon for our yet to be revealed 3D furry project, Killer Kobolds. Any income we receive over January - Febuary will continue to finance Amorous, until finally fully transitioning in March. If you would only like to support Amorous exclusively and not any other future projects, pledges will need to be cancelled before March!
I have high hopes that Killer Kobolds looks fun enough that you may want to stick around! I plan to do major revamps to high we handle Patreon and make it more inclusive, interactive and more transparent. The more funds we can receive, the better I can staff the game so we can avoid the pitfalls of delays.
To celebrate reaching the completion of all of our Datable characters, we have begun the application process to get a SFW version greenlit for steam. This means your save data will be synced with the Steam cloud, profile wallpapers, emotes, icons, achievements and a way better download system then what we currently provide! NSFW content can be then patched back in with a simple text file to re-unlock the juicy bits.
Steams approval process takes 30-40 days, so in the mean time we are going to work hard to make the absense of smut still an enjoyable experience and have content you can safely upload to youtube etc.
We've finally made it to a full roster! Here's our last dateable character Alex, written by suddenlytsumi ! 'Lex is by far our longest and most complicated dath path yet.
Our next update will address remaining bugs and dialogue inconsistencies in previous dates such as grammar and pacing, then the game can finally be considered 1.0! Meaning we are out of Alpha and into Beta (Feature-complete). Following updates will mostly add closure to each of the date paths with a 4th date wrapping up the respective stories.
Edging ever closer to a monthly update rotation! This month features the introverted Remy, written by suddenlytsumi ! Remy is by far our longest character date path yet. We're getting pretty close to 1.0 now. Only one character to go, followed by some post-date content and general polish.
Changelog: • Fixed the phone from not unlocking during prologue • Fixed a crash during player customization • Fixed "walking mouse"-issue by adding a proper proper mouse-lock to windows • Added versions to saves for later potential bugfixing • Added functionality to give more information following an unhandled exception • Fixed typos and grammars in the dates of Seth, Skye and Dustin • Fixed a NPC not leaving the screen during the date with Skye • Fixed an issue where spaces following bold/italic words would be trimmed off
Select 'Update and verify files' when launching your game to start the update. Unresolved issues
Amorous is finally back up to speed and is ready for monthly character releases! This was mainly attributed to conflicting direction ideals, leading to a complete reconstructing of staff and creating the engine all over again from scratch.
Main additions this update: • Dustin date path • Skye date path • Alternate between date paths on the fly via in-game android phone (Must be at home) • Improved Amorous website, removed dependencies on launcher • Minor end-game content (Revisit sex scenes, return to the club) • Multiple save states and the ability to auto-save your progress • Majority of visual and grammatical errors from 0.3 resolved • Better UI for customisation and progression ques • Drastic stability and optimisation improvements • Fleshed out audio, text and general settings
Planned patch-notes for 0.5 January release: • Zennith date path • Mercy date path • Make launcher more user friendly • Polish UI used for date contacts • Shooting range mini-game
Patreon doesn't allow me to upload MP4 or other compressed video formats to provide small sneak peaks at our workflow. If you would like fun Amorous news, follow JasonafexFA for tweets such as this!:
Our programmer is almost done polishing up our 0.4 update for public release. A result of this update is our custom-made script editor used to create the branching dialogue trees and create scenes/characters is pretty much feature complete.
This means we have the greenlight from our programmer to get an early start on 0.5 involving new dates Mercy and Zenith before 0.4 is even out! I am applying a lot of pressure on our team to release an update once every four weeks after the release of 0.4, always providing a new character. If we can keep that pace, Amorous should be completed in terms of our planned roster before the end of the year.
I apologise again for the delays it has taken to reach this point. We have taken precautions for our future projects to avoid similar bottle-necking issues.
If you have been pledging to Amorous recently and have yet to claim a high tier cameo slot reward, please let me know either here via note or on Patreon! There may be opportunities in the date paths of Zenith and Mercy for side character roles.
After a discussion with staff involved on the production of Amorous, we
have agreed to put a freeze on any supporting funds for the game until a
new update is released. We need to await for schedules to become more
free. The production of the game itself however will continue as per
normal, although the current pace may be a bit slow. No current or
future patrons will be charged until we are back on track.
No matter how long it may take, I'll do my best to see this game through
to completion. It cannot suffer the same fate as Morenatsu and other
projects. Luckily our game is still fairly young in it's production
lifespan, there is still potential for the game to be completed in
months rather then years.
Our sister game, Bare Backstreets suffered some update delays of it's own due to our recent move and it's soul programmer now having to return to college. Previously being able to work on the game full-time, is now restricted to weekends.
Game development is a cruel mistress, but I remain optimistic of their futures.
It's been some time since the last update, from all the things we heard you guys really enjoyed it and are probably itching to get some more Seth-booty!
A lot is going on in the back, we just released a prototype of Bare Backstreets (https://www.patreon.com/BBS) and are far underway porting the project to Unity 5.
Here are a few of the new features that you will see in v0.4:
- Real-time day/night cycle
- An actual use for the overworld, jump between locations and meet NPC's in their daily routine, also affected by above system!
- Completely revamped UI, including the phone and other interactables.
Right now we're hard at work getting all existing content hooked up to this, while our writers and artists work on the new content to be added. Things are finally starting to click together now that the game is taking shape!
The upside of having two programmers on the job is that one can spend a little bit of time on things on the side, as such: we're catching up with our promise to release to games we make on Mac and Linux.
On top of that, to thank our Patrons for their active support, we'll soon be granting all of them access to bleeding-edge builds of v0.4 as we build it up again, essentially giving them the choice to become our first player-based testers group! But more on that later.
For now, our eternal gratitude for your support and hope to see you drop by on our forums(https://forums.amorousgame.com)!
A depressing number of supporters have declined payment from charging multiple months in a row. We were undercut $1,200 this month, that is almost half of our funding.
Far more harm is being done faking support rather then simply not pledging. Our displayed funding is far higher then it actually is, Patreon can spend weeks delaying our payout while it tries to repeatedly collect it's balance and we can not properly make investment or budgeting to improve our game when it is so unreliable.
We've removed a few Patrons who have done this multiple months in a row, and will continue with this routine until we receive mainly real pledges.
Amorous v0.3 Release Notes
The long awaited Amorous v0.3 update is almost ready for release! There are a few important announcements to first get out of the way which we will list below.
Launcher
With the v0.3 update comes a new launcher which will be used from now on to release all future updates. The launcher allows us to push builds and have you only download the latest updates instead of downloading everything from scratch again every time. The launcher is also a more secure platform, no more issues with users getting malware from the download!
Pre-Release
Amorous v0.3 will first be available as a pre-release exclusive only to Patreon supporters. The pre-release will only last for a day after which it will be available to everyone. This is mostly so we can be sure the launcher works fine before throwing it out completely.
Patreon Supporters
To all Patreon supporters, in order to claim your pre-release, you have to sign-up for an account on our forums at https://forums.amorousgame.com/ and fill in your Patreon name and email in the personal details section at https://forums.amorousgame.com/account/personal-details. Then use the same account to login through the launcher. You will receive a banner on the site indicating your support and you will also gain future access to Patreon-only content such as early builds and rewards. Once you have the banner, which should take about a few minutes, you can start downloading the game!
Changelog v0.3
The following features are available in Amorous v0.3:
Introduced Jax' date
Introduced Seths date
Coby's sexscene is back
Sexscene now respect your customized character
Added possibility to save/load your game
Fixed hundreds of bugs, simply too many too name. This ranges from the infamous "layering"-bug in character customization, to Jax undressing during his dialogue in the club.
Forums
The Amorous forums is our primary means of communication, if you haven’t done so already sign-up for a free account at https://forums.amorousgame.com/. We give frequent updates on the status of development and it’s also a great place for discussions about the games we develop. Please note that these frequent updates are not made on FurAffinity or Patreon. We will at most only announce new releases on Patreon.
The launcher can be found at http://launcher.amorousgame.com/amorous/v1. Have fun!
We've had a very busy weak as features flesh out for this months update. Just Jax alone has 260 unique dialogue box entries for the conversation that can occur at the bar. Other characters you can encounter are planned to have similar complexity.
We hope to release our V0.2 update this weekend!
We're paying 50 bucks to see what the community can whip up for the title of our Beat 'em up game! Contest information can be found on FA:
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6416307/
We hope to update Amorous on the 20th, stay tuned!
Here's a brief look into the world of programming with Lennian! This is a long update post so be wary!
• Introduction •
To give a little insight in what we've done in the past month and a bit, we want to discuss two problems that kept us quite busy.
• Explanation •
An issue that came to light rather quickly when working on the first public release of Amorous, was the build size. When things are still in PNG format, size is OK. About 100MB for the Coby-sexscene (625 files), about 25MB all customization parts (325 files). All of these files are HD resolution or higher, for the utmost possible quality before Unity (our engine) crushes it down somewhat.
Consider the following: Most of our textures have an alpha channel, for making things partially transparent, this is also called a RGBA texture. That means that in uncompressed form, a texture takes up have width * height * 4 bytes of memory, in case of an HD texture that's 1920 * 1080 * 4 = 8294400 bytes, which comes down to about 7,9MB.
Unity allows us to select a compression for textures (uncompressed, DXT5 or worse which we won't even touch). Keeping the HD example above in mind, uncompressed would leave a texture in 7,9MB state. DXT5-compression would turn that into about 2MB, at the expense of some of the quality.
So why is this exactly an issue? Let's do the math:
(625 files * 2MB) + (325 files * 2MB) = 1250MB + 650MB= 1900MB
Or better said, just the textures from the customization and a single sexscene, bring the total build size to 1.9GB! With at least 10 sexscenes and all the location and NPC textures, the projected size would be near 13GB... Ouch, problem #1.
To counter this problem for the first build, we ran it through a 7z compression, which gets the whole build down to 100MB. Yet, it still requires 2GB of space when you want to play it, so this is still far from ideal.
As a lot of people noticed, the Coby-sexscene was really slow, or simply crashed on most machines. That's because at least 500 textures of 2MB each (or all of them in worst case), are loaded into the memory at once to perform a multilayered animation. That's 1GB of memory just to show you some sexy time, on top of what the game and your system is already using. Problem #2 was born...
• Fixing the problems •
Problem #1 had a lot to do with Problem #2. Sex-scenes exist out of 60 HD textures for each layer in the animation. If a sexscene with all customization accounted for has 8 layers, that would mean 60*8*2 = 960MB of space is used on your harddrive for installation, as well as memory when it's being shown.
We were wondering why Unity's build remained so big, whereas a simple 7z compression cuts down the size by about 90%. Upon investigating we found out that for a PC build, Unity does NOT compress its packages, with the excuse that PC's generally have more than enough space available (unlike mobile), and therefore don't have to suffer the slowdown caused by having to decompress at runtime.
This seems fair, but what blew our minds was that there is literally no way to overrule this, whereas this is default behavior when packaging for Web or Mobile. When you build for PC, you are stuck with uncompressed packages, final. Damn...
On top of that, we also found out that no matter how much of a texture is transparent, it does not affect the 2MB size. Given a lot of our textures have over 60% transparency, that's a lot of wasted space over literally nothing.
This meant we had to implement our own runtime decompression. We decided to start working on something for the sexscenes, as those are the cause for the massive increase in file-size as well as memory use.
• In conclusion •
After a few weeks of trying tenths of different compression methods, as well as throwing in some custom-made compression tricks, we are very proud to say we actually managed to drastically decrease file-size!
When packaging a sexscene into our custom package format, it's about the same size as they are in PNG format. So Coby's sexscene went from 1250MB to just 100MB!
But that's not all, because we are now using a custom image-format, we could also optimize the sexscene. By adding a small loading-screen before it (which in our defense is still a much shorter wait than how it currently works in the public release anyway), we also got memory usage down to about 200-300MB during the loading screen, but just 100MB after loading! Which makes the animation play as you would expect, without any stuttering.
• Last but not least •
On top of these breakthroughs on two of the most glaring issues we had in Amorous, we also worked on a toolset to make managing our extensive dialogues much easier. The Beat 'em Up was also not left untouched, we ran some Spine-test and implemented a few mechanics and are very happy with the results so far. So two games are being worked on simultaneously now.
Does the good news ever stop? No! We are aiming for a new public release somewhere after halfway through January 2015!
