Progress Report #67 - 4-year challenge & my story (Patreon)

Hey lads!

I have some bad news... My SSD is dead. I didn't lose any game data, because of the habit of making a backup before turning off PC. But that still makes me unable to work until new SSD arrives (Tuesday-Wednesday), lose a lot of time (retrieving data & setting up new system), make me mad as hell (obviously) and lose other important stuff (although not UotW related). And then I'm absent Thursday-Tuesday, because I'm visiting my family-in-law across the country. So that's retarded as hell, but v0.27 might come out around June 23-26... Trust me, I'm really mad. Also, while going through the files, I got a little bit nostalgic to write more about this project, how it all started and so on. So if you are not interested in this rant, just skip it, because it won't have any progress info, it will be very personal and might be a bit lengthy/boring... Ok, so... Since I'm fighting with my PC and temporary don't really have anything better to do anyway... Here we go!

As some of you know, I'm 30 years old, I live in Poland, I worked on a few polish indie games, modded some games (mainly Bethesda's), so I have over 10 years of experience with that stuff already. I finished IT on university. I started working on this project in 2018 (sorry, tried searching, but didn't find anything useful of early project to show for 2018 screenshot). I gathered a small team from the people I knew in real, and we started working on this project in our free time, after work, and literally just for fun - none of us ever worked for a hentai project before, and it was more out of our curiosity rather than making a living out of it. It was all cool and fun, quite an experience to be honest. We all were even there, I wasn't a real boss back then. Problems arose once we decided to monetize the project after all, thus we started doing our research and that's when we found out how huge money some games on Patreon made. Then by majority of votes (long live democracy in team projects!) it was decided to release it still in 2018. Game wasn't ready, it was bugged, we didn't have anyone to test it for us, so despite creating Patreon page, we didn't want to advertise it anywhere. We just wanted some people to test it for us, give feedback and so on. Game in v0.01 only had Jane's flat & Kevin's Diner, and literally a few events. And that's when another calamity happened - after a few days someone pirated our game and uploaded it on pirate forums. The backlash of hatred was enormous to the point that forum stuff had to intervene and delete comments. We were attacked for poor graphics, copying ideas from other games, bugs and literally everything else. While I tried to fix and save the project, others were like "nah, fuck it, it's not worth that", so we disbanded shortly after the game release. We made $60 in the first month of the game release (thanks a lot for everyone who pledged back in the day despite all the problems, you gave me hope, really). So I was left all alone with this project and my pride didn't let me to just leave it like that. You know, it was still my creation, something like my child, so if I left it, I would feel butthurt for the rest of my life. That's why I quickly found another artist and I started fixing and improving the game. It didn't last long, because at the end of 2019 I had an accident (soon after getting married, yea, that's just my rotten luck) and lost majority of my insides, rendering me disabled and physically pretty useless (3 complex surgeries, 2 weeks in coma, 2 months in hospital, and like half a year to get my shit together). During this time project was on hiatus, majority of my patrons left, my artist left, I wasn't able to work anymore, and I had no clue what to do with my life. My mom & wife tried to get me some social money, but it didn't work out (polish law is really great). Not being able to use my PC for too long, and sometimes being forced to spend a few days in a row in my bed, nobody would hire me. Not to mention that dealing with my disability was a real nightmare. I still had some patrons who stayed (yet again, thank you all who didn't quit), so I decided to get my shit together, again I found another artist and revived this project, slowly working from time to time, whenever I could. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in the bed, watching TV and playing games, being burden to my wife and family. I really hate it when people take pity or look down on me, so please don't do that, since as you can, see despite all the stuff that happened to me, I'm doing fine. In hospital I befriended 2 older guys with similar issue as me, but both died, because they couldn't accept it. One simply lost his will to live, while the other one decided to try a very risky surgery to improve his quality of life and it failed. Rest in peace... My dad and I are pretty technical, so we started developing gadgets for my disability (I'm like a fucking batman or ironman right now), and that's one of the main reasons that i can live & work normally now, or even leave my flat. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that i wouldn't be able to take the pressure in a longer run. Also, with wife we had quite a big sum of money saved, so we bought a small flat in 2020 and renovated it around my disability. Pandemic in 2020-2021 was a really fucked up time not only for me (I whined many times that they cancelled my visits in hospitals and doctors made problems for me etc.), but for basically everyone in the world, so you know how it was. As the gadgets improved, I got better (both physically and mentally), I started putting more time and effort into this project, and I'm still trying really hard to further expand it, mostly all by myself. And now, in 2022, with around 200 patrons, I decided it's finally time to improve one of the worst aspects of the game - the art. How it will turn out? We will see. But I really believe in the people I hired this time, and as you can see on the screen above, it was a god damn long road to get here. I put my heart & soul into this project, so I'm not giving up, but moving forward!

Yeah, the project that I decided to try for fun and out of curiosity, in the end turned out to be a life saver and my only income. This project survived and you all can play it for free only thanks to that small bunch of people who decided to support me, and now even made the art upgrade possible, so I'm sorry if I'm overdoing it, but I'm really, really grateful!

And lastly, I know that we all have some fucked up situations and problems in our lives, but family, friends or even random people can really work miracles for us, so keep that in mind while you are really struggling in your life.

Thanks if you survived until the end! I really appreciate it! 

Btw. 2022 screenshot isn't from the game, although bathroom background is mostly finished, and that's more or less how character will look like.

Cheers!