The Future of Dekarous' Machinations (Patreon)

Hey folks. This is a public post.

I am going to come clean here. The past few months have been pretty hard for the team. What was supposed to be a relatively small Domina update that would act as the story-focused transition between Hora and Ruby has taken over half a year to complete and it's still not out. We kinda shot ourselves on the foot with this one, because the update was so focused on the required CGs, it would simply either be pointless without them or at the very least would take away from the core playing experience. So, with the development part of the work done, we could do nothing but wait for the CGs to be completed. Unfortunately, as you are aware, this was a major problem. Shakie, our only CG artist, has faced some pretty brutal personal problems during this period, which made her unable to continue work at the same pace she used to. Even with her returning and rejoining the team last month, the work pace is still a lot slower than what it used to be, a lot slower than what is acceptable for our game development. This is simply not sustainable. We have tried to keep ourselves busy with other content while waiting, finding alternative ways to get art, working on Maple Hills or writing bonus Domina scenes with pre-existing CGs; but ultimately the feeling that we're not really advancing our goals and are basically making a fool out of our patrons is hard to shake off. Even when we get the update out, continuing at this pace for future content is simply not in the picture.

To be honest, the past month has been nothing but thoughts about closing down Patreon and abandoning game development for me.

We can boast one of the friendliest communities on the scene here and I am extremely proud for the people that have gathered around my projects for the past years. Believe it or not, reading nice comments, seeing the hype before an update or finding gameplay videos on random sites on the internet has been the main driving force for me during this time. Development problems and delays such as the one of the current year is making me feel like I am letting you guys down. It's not okay for me, the team or for you.

Going forward, if we are NOT to abandon game development, things need to change radically. We love Shakie and we still want to keep her on the team, but it's obviously not feasible to have her work as much as we'd like her to. She unfortunately lives on the other side of the world, so it's not as easy to get constant updates from her (whereas me and Cat meet up in real life constantly). The plan going forward would be to focus all future updates on less CGs, allowing us to pump out updates faster. We would also have Shakie work on Domina exclusively, leaving Maple Hills content for after Domina is fully completed (instead of having her work on both games at the same time like we have been). These changes should theoretically allow us to develop Domina, and later on MHC, at more reasonable timeframes.

However, the planned Domina 2 game would still be an issue. Maple Hills will be a large game, and will continue to receive support and updates for several years. We would like to release Domina 2 before 2050, so that means that at some point, Maple Hills and Domina 2 need to coexist. However, as said above, we would like to keep Shakie working on one game at a time. That leaves 2 options: get a different 2D artist for Domina 2... or develop Domina 2 as a 3D game in Unity.

Both me and Cat are learning both C# and Blender so that would definitely be in the cards in the future. This would also solve the problem of being so reliant on a third-party artist, allowing us to focus the development in-house, which would definitely speed things up. But only if it's something you guys would want to see; jumping from RPGMaker to Unity would change things dramatically for the established gameplay.

Your opinions will matter a lot on the future of our team, or whether that future will even exist. Please share them in the comments.

Thank you for your time.
-Dekarous