AnimeCon Adaptation Dev Anniversary '26 (Patreon)

!! IMAGE and TEXT HEAVY POST !!

We've finished our sixth year of game development, so why the hell isn't a release of the game out yet?! Six damn years?!

Well, at the end of dev year 1, our main character artist Zaph bailed on us without warning. Most of dev year 2 was spent trying out different artists to replace him! We eventually went with YeMcBear who we had originally hired as our background crowd artist, and then that meant dev year 3 was spent with her playing catch up as she redid all of the main character art.

There were pros and cons to this, because Zaphryon's designs (left Rebecca set) were more detailed and sexy, while YeMcBear's designs (right Rebecca set) lean more towards simple and cute:

However, Zaphryon had high prices, worked slowly, and was very unreliable—orders finished whenever he felt like finishing them, and couldn't fit within any kind of deadline. By comparison, YeMcBear set her prices so low that I had to talk her into raising them a bit, and she completed orders once a week, every week, like clockwork. While it would have seemed like we were getting simplified art by replacing Zaph with YeMcBear, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because of the second reason the game has been stuck in dev for so long. Animation! Here's the difference between using stills for a scene, and having an animation:

The combination of finally raising my basic pledge tier from $1 to $3, and my books beginning to publish almost tripled the budget I could allocate towards the game. So, after the first three years of dev I was able to increase the project scope and start hunting for animators. The more simplistic YeMcBear style designs turned out to be perfect for animation with Goorie and Bao—Zaph's stills looked good on their own, but we would never be able to animate them, and having only still images for the spicy scenes in an adult visual game can be... underwhelming!!

This meant that it wasn't until partway through dev year 4 that we were really making actual major strides, and it's somewhat like the current iteration of the game has only been in dev for two and a half years. That isn't to say those first few years of development were completely wasted—it instead means that backdrop illustrations and custom theme music tracks got a huge, massive headstart, since orders for those have been stacking up since the very beginning. Even Zaph's work wasn't a total loss, because using them as a reference for YeMcBear allowed her to catch up with a lot less explaining and piling references on her as to how everyone and their outfits, hairstyles, bodies and et cetera should look.

Here you can see our six years of development laid out:

Things got a little dicey there in dev year 2 as you can see, and with that October when our fourth artist replacement Dsconocido started to flake on us and Basem had all work paused? We came very close to giving up. YeMcBear saved the project however, and then we were able to find Goorie, and development has been going pretty amazing ever since.

So then, when can we expect a first release? When we have enough animations so that each chapter has some spicy scenes! Here is my quick and dirty tracking of who and where we have spicy animations for the early part of the game:

Each chapter represents a minor episodic release of the game, probably spread a month apart once we start launching. Readers might be confused here, because in the fiction Emily (blue) didn't do more in that first chapter than give Brian a hug, and there aren't any girls who should be represented by (orange!) Well, because of the nature of adult visual novels, there will be a lot more spice than in the book version. Starting off with an immediate chapter one "hook" where Emily gets intimate with Brian:

Likewise, since the early part of the story is pretty slow burn and there's not a lot of 'action,' we're including an additional route for Megan which will help us fill in some of the slower chapters there with extra spice. A fair fraction of our animation budget each year is set aside for early Emily scenes and Megan route scenes which were not in the original books!

As you can see from my crude checkmark chart back up there, we still have quite a few chapters that need 'reinforced' with additional spice so that they aren't dry nothingburgers for horny players upon release.

This will continue onward with us adding new routes to explore and spicy content to discover for Saturday, where we plan to add scenes with the Akari Darkmask girl, as well as several of the secret chapters characters (Melanie, Mary, Jordyn). Dev year before last, we invested quite a bit of our orders in setting up that secret chapter content with the Fetish 101 panel crashing, the cosplay contest, and the anime rave. This past year, we put just as much work into fleshing out backstory content for the main cast:

A younger Stephanie and her neighborhood friends, the destruction of the Sea of Cats. Teenage Kelly, and the cautionary tale of the Ravaged Cassettes. Brian and Emily's local hometown friends at Aunt Mattie's place, as well as scenes of a past AnimeCon they all attended. 'Flashback' chapters will reward players with unlockable content such as alternate hairstyles, or special costume scenes for the girls, such as bringing back Emily's Grimoire Saint or Kelly's sexy Jessie Terr to the current convention:

So, the dev year before last we focused mostly on new parts of the convention to explore, while this past dev year we focused on backstory and flashbacks:

This coming dev year we will return to focus heavily on new areas or events at the convention for players to discover. If areas are completely static, players will visit them once, and then have no reason to bother checking them again! Ideally, we instead want the convention to feel alive and able to always surprise players with new content. Exploration should be encouraged and rewarded!

Brian visiting one of the panel rooms early in the day could find a screening room packed with Shinobi Souls fans playing episodes of the anime on a projector. Visiting the same room closer to noon, he could instead stumble into the Cosplay Makeup panel run by Kelly's sister and her friends—and that could be the start of spicy route content with one or all of them.

That isn't to say we've only been piling up branch content or "non-canon" stuff that isn't from the books. When it came to animation orders, most of this dev year we focused on the friday night Truth or Dare game, because that deserves all the attention we can lavish upon it!

Okay, so in the book Brian didn't actually yank Kelly's top down during the massage and grope her tiddies, but it needed to be an option for players, and that's that.

Other than those highlights, a lot of the work this year was the routine creating new areas with backdrop illustrations, populating backdrops with background crowds so that no areas are conspicuously empty when they shouldn't be, and so on. Basem is several full years ahead of all of the other artists, so we occasionally have him forging way on ahead and working on Sunday content or minor new areas that aren't in the original story. Here's a detailed month by month breakdown of all of dev year six:

As always, you can find all of the current game asset content organized into pages here, and if you start from the top each of the pages are linked to one another so that you can click through listening to all of the lovely custom music TennesseeFlores has done for us and checking out all the illustrations and animation.

As you might imagine, placing nonstop back to back orders with four different regular artists each and every month means thirty to forty meetings every month, ranging from quick fifteen minute check progress, confirm, pay, place next order details with YeMcBear or Basem, to 2+ hour sessions debating music theory and intended sounds/vibes with Tenne or clarifying video references, negotiating case by case order pricing with Goorie or Bao.

I've so far been able to stay ahead of orders with my planning, it doesn't interrupt my writing sessions too much, and always getting new content in, making progress really makes my days and helps keep me from slipping back into the deathlike spiral of depresso!