July project account balance

I’ve been making steady progress throughout June. The remaining funds have dropped slowly (down to $5.8k from $7k a couple of months ago) but that shouldn’t pose a threat to reaching project completion. Big thanks to everybody that’s helped get us this far.

This month I want to find a colourist to finish and clean up the remaining backgrounds. I also want to try organising the Visit Surface screen into locations, so that I can make sure that players are always presented with an opportunity to get certain tomes. I’ll be adding more characters too. Once I get to the v0.80 series, I’ll start to focus on the mobile UI and certain improvements to the desktop UI.

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June project account balance

May’s over already and I have to admit, I haven’t been able to show much visible progress. A lot of the stuff surrounding angels turned out to be a bit of a dead end, but minion merging is looking like a good addition, so hopefully I’ll do better in June.

The big traffic surge from Offbeatr due to TiTS is over, and yet contributions are continuing to roll in steadily. The total funds remaining are a smidge lower than last month ($7k -> $6.2k), but it’s doing a lot better than I’d anticipated. Once again I just really want to thank everybody for their generosity.

Details below:

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May project account balance

As I said in the last update, all the excitement generated by Fenoxo’s Trials in Tainted Space Offbeatr has rustled up a lot of donations for Fleshcult, but I’m starting to see that tail off dramatically in the last couple of weeks (Though there’s a nice spike today as everybody checks in to watch the countdown). It’s renewed the sense that I can’t run development indefinitely, and that there’s an end date I need to hit. Looks like it’ll be in August. I’ve been saying July previously, but I haven’t made as much progress in April as I’d hoped.

Details below.

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April project account balance

Fenoxo’s success with Trials in Tainted Space has attracted a lot of traffic to OffBeatr, and in turn more traffic to Fleshcult. Thanks to the generosity of all the new users, donations have been doing even better than last month. This month the project account balance is largely unchanged, in spite of the fact I’ve been paying myself and contractors.

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March Project Account Balance

After the OffBeatr crowdfunding campaign ended, a lot of people still wanted to contribute but couldn’t, either because they didn’t have a credit card, or they had one but it didn’t get along with OB. I set up another method of donating, and promised that I’d do updates on how much extra money I collected and what I spent it on, for transparency’s sake.

Yesterday I received the OffBeatr payout (woot!), so now’s as good a time as any to do a breakdown of how much money the project has. I’ve decided to do these monthly because weekly is just too much bookkeeping.

Trigger warning: Contains accounting. All figures are in USD.

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Last call for survey responses

If you’re eligible for the fetish survey ($15 pledges and up during the OffBeatr campaign) or the name survey ($30 pledges and up during the OffBeatr campaign), you need to get your answers in within the next few days.

The initial batch of forms went out to your OffBeatr e-mail address on the 1st of February. There were about a dozen people who I missed out because their payment didn’t go through until later, so I sent another batch on the 14th of February. Lately I’ve been having crappy luck actually getting e-mails delivered, so if you still haven’t received one, let me know at jack@fleshcult.com

There won’t be much visible progress with the game this week. I’m working on an editing tool to allow writers to add new messages to the sex encounters, and give them control over when the messages are displayed. I’m hoping that by allowing text to be added to a character in a free-form way, I can get more lively, reactive NPCs than if we did it in a big spreadsheet where every character has the same blanks to fill in.

Release v0.50 – New Writer

I’d like to welcome the very talented Porpentine to the project! Her first contributions are the 28 new body part and building descriptions, and we’ll be seeing lots more of her work down the line.

You might know her as the author of Cyberqueen (Trigger Warning: All of them), from her Rock Paper Shotgun column, Live Free, Play Hard, or as one of the contributors to freeindiegam.es.

Other stuff in this release:

  • Renamed the Status page to Diary. Now it always shows what happened to you on that day, rather than reverting back to a stock description if you revisit it.
  • Internal changes to make sure old profiles can see any new concubine transformations I add.
  • Fixed some spurious error messages that were clogging the logs.

FAQ: How did I arrive at the figures for the stretch goals?

You might’ve noticed that the stretch goals are in tidy $3,000 increments. Rather than being an incredible fluke of the budgeting process, this does mean that they are in fact arbitrary numbers. While the features for each goal will cost less that the $3k increment, I will be spending every dollar that I raise working on the game, frequently on things that I haven’t listed in the crowdfunding pitch.

By under-promising in my goals, I have room to improvise new features and fix unforeseen problems during development. Trying to completely fill the budget with promised features means that I have to plan absolutely everything up front, which will lead to a worse game because I won’t be able to respond to feedback and interesting new ideas. Lair structures are an example of a feature that I didn’t have planned, but emerged as a really good way to solve a couple of different problems. In my planning I’ve padded things by doubling the budget, so if everything goes to plan I’ll be working 50% on the stated goals and 50% on unforeseen things.

With that said, what’s my best guess of how long it’ll really take me to do the “6 player skills, 3 opponent skills” stretch goal? I’m thinking about just posting my budget spreadsheet, but a back-of-the-envelope calculation is way easier to follow: After tax and OffBeatr’s cut, $3000 gross represents about 6-7 weeks of living expenses for me. That’s 42 days. 21 days with 2x padding.

I’ve listed 9 skills in total to design, code, write text for, test and balance. What happens if some of them turn out to be shitty and no fun? Well, I’ll throw them out and write new ones. From prototyping I know I can try out about 2 skill ideas in a day, so let’s say I throw out half and I’m producing one good skill per day on average.

The prototype has extremely repetitive text in the encounters. I only have between 1 and 3 variations on the skill messages. For the real product, I’d like to have at least 10. Let’s say that contracting writing for this costs an equivalent of half a day’s living expenses. Probably less, but I haven’t contracted any writing yet, so it pays to be conservative.

How long will I spend fixing bugs that are due to the new skill, and how long will it take me to balance it against the other skills? This is really hard to know, but I’m going to say half a day per skill.

This all adds up to 2 days per skill, so we have a total of 18 of the 42 days, working on the stated goal rather than miscellaneous stuff. Add 1 rest day per week on average and that’s 21 days.

It’s on!

I’m really excited to announce that the Fleshcult crowdfunding campaign is open. This is the moment of truth: it’s where I find out how many of you folks want to play the game and how badly. I could elaborate on the prototype a lot, but it all hinges on how long I can afford to work on it full time, so the outcome of this drive determines not just whether it’ll be completed, but also how rich, varied and polished I can make it.

I’m running the campaign on OffBeatr.com. It’s like KickStarter, but porn focused. Every OffBeatr project has to accrue a certain number of votes before it can collect pledged donations (the clock doesn’t start ticking until voting ends). So, if you’d like to help, go vote!

Crowdfunding

I’ve been pretty quiet the last couple of weeks because I’ve recently discovered that there are crowdfunding sites that cater to adult projects. (Sadly Kickstarter doesn’t want to deal with us)

I’ve been thinking about what I could do with Fleshcult given more capital and what I could provide as pledge rewards and stretch goals that people would really enjoy. Right now I’m thinking about pre-release access (of course!), the chance to name a succubus victim, and maybe a bundle of smutty eBooks from authors who I admire.

If you have anything you’d really like to see, don’t hesitate to let me know.

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