The long needed project updates post. (Patreon)

Firstly I would like to apologize to anyone who feels cheated by my uploading recently. I am a bit frustrated as well. As I mentioned in one of my replies it's not really in my best interest to trick anyone or anything, that is not what's going on here. So I'd like to explain how a month like this and the previous month happens in proper post as was suggested to me. 

So I think there's a few problems I'm experiencing here. I think they are fairly normal problems, but first I'll need to describe a few things for context before I say what they are.

Usually... a month will begin with me planning to update everything. This is pretty normal for anyone who's been around. I'm a bit of a workaholic and have been doing it this way for about 6 years now. I usually have a pretty good idea about what I can and can't get done in reasonable time and will scale down, or scale back work, stuff when needed.

However I guess I've just been slowly growing complacent with the status of the Umichan VN games since I know I can make the Umichan games better than this, and it is now affecting my work. 

I originally decided to switch to VN games after Adobe Flash announced they would be ending support for Flash, thus killing the product and my ability to use it in the future to make games in the way I had been making them before. Since I had a patreon at the time, I wanted a quick way to continue to make games so I have something people can play each month.

That's when I found tyranobuilder. While it is decent overall, it's nothing like compared to what Flash could do, and my current VN games don't really hold a candle next to how UMCH was. UMCH is very fluid and can play large animations smoothly and has all kinds of minigames and such. Tyranobuilder can do exactly none of that. 

So while people enjoy the VN games I have been trying to figure out how to get the fluidity, the mingames and the scaling of the UMCH back into my current games. So here is problem #1 I feel my current games are less fun than they were before. 

As you know last month I tried to scale up Umichan Sorani to act least get a modern size and scaled game. But gifs in tyranobuilder are just laggy mess. The H scenes lost frames when trying to play for first time, The color palette of a gif is very limited. Tyranobuilder doesn't handle preloading well, or arguably at all. It has trouble implementing minigames.

After battling with tyranobuilder and realizing I can't really what the game like it deserves to be, I decided to revert it back to how it was. Also I now arrive at problem #2, I realized don't like what I am making and trying to escape from it, but can't since I'm still working in the game and trying to finish it.

I know a lot of people like the VN games but if you like those, then I'm sure you would like the games how they used to be even better. Like a lot better.

However still I want to finish up Umichan High Stakes, even though mentally, I think I checked out of it after finishing the main story. with Problems 1 and 2 it's really been a slog getting the other parts of this game going. Usually when I am in a slump (before i had a patreon) I'd just work on something else until I was in the right state of mind to work on it again.

But with patreon, you can't really do that. You need to grind it out and deliver that thing that people are expecting. I am failing that grind at the moment and I'm sorry for that. It's unfortunate for me so many people have no interest in the 3D game because the only remedy that has ever worked for me is working on other stuff. I've always worked on an aria game along side an umichan game and I think that game will be really amazing.

It's because Aria and Umichan are different, working on one refreshes my desire to work on the other. It's kind of like a symbiotic relationship. Also they share the same lore and characters so it's all the same to me in that particular sense. 

So recently I'd work on aria just a little bit and try to come back to umichan. Turns out a did that lot, even unconsciously because there is lot of aria stuff done this time around. I work on both almost always but usually try to bias towards Umichan. It just turns out that there is a lot of aria this time because that was just how much I needed to balance out the depression that have with Umichan right now. 

So it is not like I just sneakily decide to do one thing and just surprise everyone with what I've been doing. It's result of a psychological battle with myself. To me, Aria 3D is doing fine because it's the best I can make it with my current skill. Umichan is not the best I can do with my current skill because I am being limited by the tool I make it with.

Also since I work on multiple games here, and at times very different kinds of games games, and actually finish them, and not work on them for some unforeseeable amount of time, I always find myself in a Catch 22 situation.

I work on some other game for the reasons mentioned in this post, and people will leave. However also, I finish the game that people want, and they will still leave anyway when I start something else, because they like the old thing I am now done with. So it's frustrating coming to the end cycle of a game anyway on top of the current problems.

So that is where I'm at right now. Kinda struggling with this. But I will see where I'm at with it in about a week and make a post about where I'm at. If I don't then feel free to ask here here or on discord. You can ask me at any time because I do have trouble making posts like this. Plus this post took like 3 ~4 hours to write.

So after reading all this, if you feel I am set out to deceive you feel free to message me for a refund, otherwise I can't thank you enough for sticking around. And if you just want to dip for a bit, I can understand that also. Again, I got a lot of aria stuff done so the balance should be right and I'll see where I'm at with umichan in a week or so. I know my upcoming week will have relatives visiting so I'll have a bit of lost time there. 

on a side note, after competing high stakes, I've also been debating doing just simple collection galleries as I work my way into making the UMCH engine with construct 2 and 3. This is the tool I plan to use going forward. The collections will just take all the animations of a particular character or theme (both used and unused stuff) and put them all together into one gallery. From there I should also easily be able to drop them into umichan games where they fit with proper dialogue and stuff.

For example I noticed I have 8 different animation with Alma in the new style which was a bit surprising. I think 4 of them are not even used yet which is why I had them in the animation tier this month.