October 2019 Q&A Summary (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Last month we had a Q&A post on Patreon where patrons could ask a variety of questions to the team! We got great questions from both our discord and Patreon, and we wanted to summarize some of our favorites!

Q&A October 2019

Q:  When is their going to be a save feature if their is one already how do you save?

A:  Saving is already possible whenever you are in town. There is also an auto-save function that saves after every battle and every new dungeon floor. :)

Q:  Are there going to be any new characters in future updates?

A:  Yes! The Alchemist Najet will be arriving in the next update, and there is also the forthcoming Warrior/Berserker character and the NPC merchant.

Q:  Any kind of transformations related to body swapping or possession going to pop up on the game at some point?

A:  Thanks for the question! We haven't really thought about something like that. The main challenge is the extra artwork that would be required for something like that to be satisfying and enjoyable.

Q:  Is one of you guys are the team in general planning on taking a little vacation in the near future?

A:  As far as I know none of us are taking a vacation/break. Usually if we do go on trips or anything like that we get things completed beforehand.  Honestly the real vacation for us would be if we could purely work on developing adult games and rely upon the income from it, haha!

Q:  How does you guys hold up? If the project doesn't reach the goal anytime soon, is that gonna drag the progress down?

A:  Very good question that requires a bit of detail an explanation as to how we work with budget. So when this project first started we had a higher monthly budget to work with, and we also had set aside a budget to begin the initial work.  But one of the things we always do is make sure to scale to our budget.

What that means is, if our budget goes up or down we scale the amount of content by highest priority. For example, if we had a high budget past our main goal we would scale our game to have a few more scenes. On the other hand, if we have less of a budget, we decide to look at scenes we consider "optional" and scale them back or skip them. 

For reference, when Erolon was first being developed, our Patreon was at about $3000/month maybe a little less. So at the time we scaled the game appropriately to that amount. 

To answer the last part of your question on whether it will slow down, I would say no it won't slow down in terms of progress, there just may be less total content in the completed game. It's all relative to the current budget. 

The past month or so has been a bit slower because unfortunately I (Hydro) had a bit of a rough September in terms of personal things going on. My dog became very ill with a heart problem and so it was tougher to write when I was worrying about her breathing problems at night. She sadly had to be put down shortly after my birthday in September. Avante had also caught a bad stomach bug in the beginning of October that prevented him from working on the art for a couple weeks.

Combine that with the fact that we were introducing a new character which takes extra time anyway, and that's why the latest development build took a while to release. However, the progress is getting back on track!

Q:  How long in advance do you plan a game before announcing it?

A:  We like to plan games months ahead of time before announcing it, which is how most game developers do it anyway, haha! It's mainly so that we can transition from our current game to the next one without a long waiting period.

Q:  Have you "rough-drafted" that far into the future of Erolon's story so far or do you prefer(/situation requires) staying closer to "current" with your development?

A:  I'd say it's a mix of current and planned ahead content. Things like romance scenes for characters are planned out ahead of time.

Q:  What made you guys decide to develop Erolon? Why the fantasy RPG? Why the non-human races?

A:  We always wanted to make a fantasy RPG game with anthros for a long while. We're just big fans of anthro characters! We wanted to take a shot at building a fantasy world with different races and dynamics while also having the sexy stuff.

Q:  Is a team of three the magic number for you guys? Or are you planning on getting more Writers, Coders and Artists once you have enough of a budget? 

A:  Our current number works well because each of us is dedicated to doing one specific job, and doing it well. If we had a really high budget, the only thing we would likely do is hire people for things like background art, music, GUI icons, etc.

The biggest challenge with having multiple writers, multiple programmers, artists, etc. is that the organization and coordination has to be really, really on point and strict. The more team members you have and the more you have to organize, the higher the chance mistakes could be made during a certain process. So right now we like the current team of three.

Phew! We know it was a long read, but hopefully all of you enjoyed this Q&A summary! If you'd like to ask a question, feel free to post in the comments!