SLARPG: General update December 2021 (Patreon)

Hi everyone! I'm doing this month's update a week early because of the holidays (i.e. Christmas, which is also my birthday), and also because of something I'll explain further down the post.

December progress

I quickly realized this month that family visiting for four days in the middle of December (and needing to clean the house in preparation) was distracting me, and my poor ADHD brain was unable to focus on the big brain big picture level design stuff I was trying to work on. I needed smaller tasks that would require less critical thinking. So instead, I shifted focus to my list of required polish tasks that were being saved for later! I have to do all of this stuff eventually, so why not knock some of it out now?

Since then, I've been checking a bunch of these smaller tasks off the list. Art assets and bits of dialogue that were missing here and there were now in place, and it's making the existing areas of the game feel much more complete. For instance, Claire and Jodie's house never had a proper interior in previous builds because you're never required to go there for the story, but that now exists. Mostly, though, I've been knocking out a bunch of character portraits! The vast majority of NPCs outside of the demo were still using placeholder mugshots (either closeups of their sprites or cropped concept sketches), so I'm going down the list and drawing everyone's faces now. Here are a couple random ones I can actually show off:

Pictured above: the wolf guy from a few updates ago named Rafael, and a bat girl named Sherry. (Naturally, both were designed by Anthony.) The month's not over yet, so I'll be working on more stuff like this for now!

Year in Review

Today marks another occasion, however, which is why I wanted to post on the 23rd. It's been exactly six years since I announced Super Lesbian Animal RPG to the world. Allow me to reflect a bit.

I did not, of course, expect it to take six years. It's been a long and winding road. The most obvious thing that happened is that the game's scope and our targeted level of polish grew after that original announcement. This is partially because of our own ambitions and our evolving skill as artists, but I was also just blindsided by how excited people were for what was originally supposed to be a simple revamp of my first RPG Maker game. People got invested in the characters immediately, and I didn't want to let them down. But life's also gotten in the way many, many times. Money troubles that repeatedly forced me to take on other work to pay the bills, which kept me from working on the game for weeks at a time. Anthony and I suddenly being given a month to move out of our last place right before Christmas in 2017. Burnout from feeling like the game would never get done. Family stuff. Various illnesses. You name it.

But man, in spite of all that, what a long way we've come.

Things have been looking up. 2021 has absolutely, without a doubt, been our best year for progress on the game by a wide margin. To put it into perspective: it took five years from the game's announcement for the first two acts (of five total) to reach Alpha. (And, in that time, we did also release a demo containing a big chunk of Act I.) In the single year since then, we completed all of Act III and most of Act IV, which has ended up being the largest act in the game. The amount of playable content has doubled in a little under a year, and what we've made in 2021 includes a lot of my favorite sequences in the game.

This is partially thanks to the fact that money's been way less tight this year, meaning I've been able to focus exclusively on the game instead of spending weeks at a time working on commissions or a paid article about the Archie Sonic lawsuits or whatever. It's also a matter of momentum on the project, and being able to build upon the groundwork from the first two acts. But at the start of this year, I also made a big change with my work habits. Previously, I had no fixed schedule. This meant that I could technically take off any day I wanted... but I'd always feel guilty for it, because every day COULD be a work day. This was a recipe for disaster, with periods where I'd try to work every day and not give myself any proper days off because I felt like I should still be getting more done, followed by inevitable periods of burnout. And so, this year, I put my foot down. I try my best to work Monday through Friday, but no matter how much progress I make, I give myself every weekend off to recharge guilt-free. And I think the results speak for themselves! Again, the amount of completed content has doubled in a little under a year. Self care, huh? Who knew.

Anyway, we're eternally grateful for the support this project has seen and continues to see. Because progress has been so smooth for so long now, I'm comfortable saying that we'll have a little news very soon. Only a little. Don't expect a surprise launch or a huge new trailer or anything! But it's good news.

In the meantime, happy holidays, everyone!