AHE Devlog #2 (Patreon)

   This marks our first full year of development! Not much has gotten done aside from steadily collecting art assets—but that's okay, because our game needs a ton of assets to give it a strong foundation. 

1) In Review.

April 2020:

May 2020:

June 2020:

July 2020:

August 2020:

September 2020:

October 2020:

November 2020:

December 2020:

January 2021:

February 2021:

March 2021:

   To sum up, in twelve months we have twelve character designs, thirteen character illustrations, six theme music tracks, thirty-three background illustrations, and twelve background crowd illustrations. Which brings us to our next point...

2) Budget.

   I allocate roughly 40% of my income to this project, which is about a thousand dollars a month. I would have honestly invested more, but when I had the money to spare we more or less reached a natural equilibrium with how fast each of our artists can create!

   In general, month-to-month:

• 1 character design, 2 illustrations from Zaph = $300 
• 2 background illustrations from Basem = $220
• 1 background crowd from Yee = $150

   Whoa there, you might say—that's a whole lotta budget unaccounted for!

   Well, yes and no. A large portion of our monthly stays flexible, because a number of commissions get extras tacked onto them. Zaph's commission price for a character design sheet, for instance, includes base nude + 2 outfits + 3 expressions. We often (and by 'often' I mean every single time to varying alarming degrees) run up additional costs for outfits, expressions, pose, gesture, held item, hair color, and accessory variations. For Basem, we regularly negotiate pricing on a case-by-case for background illustrations that we need  day and night variations for, and likewise I work with Yee to determine fair pricing based on the size and complexity of a crowd she creates for us.

   Not all of that flexible portion of budget is always spent, and what remains I funneled towards TennesseeFlores who's started working on composing music for us every other month or so.

    For most of our first year of dev, I kept creeping over the monthly $1000 set aside for the project, but in recent months I've been going 'under budget'. Not by choice, but because I'm  "self-employed" rather than registered as an LLC the tax burden for 2020 was quite a bit more heavy than expected, and also they put me on the line for paying 2021 estimated tax month-to-month now. So, I've scaled back orders for everyone except for Zaph—he slowed down quite a bit this year and he has a character design and three illustrations that we've already paid for to finish before I need to worry about sending him money again.

3) Release Delay.

   This one's a tough one to gauge, as some of our artists complete assets significantly under the projected time-frames and others keep falling behind. The original first release of the game was intended to coincide with Tekkoshocon, but then also—Tekkoshocon has been delayed all the way back to December, now. I do make occasional forays month-to-month in ren'py testing out sprites and game functionality, so we'll see come July if there's a barebones ready for release at that point.

   I'd hoped to make a great first impression with a whole lot of special illustrations and whatnot, and it's frustrating how little we seem to have despite an entire year of collecting assets. Right now I'm going to say it's very possible we'll push the first release back either to December to keep pace with Tekko or even as far as an entire year so that we have two years of assets under our belt before posting a release.

   That decision has more to do with what we don't have rather than what we have—we don't have a icons, item sprites, an overhead area map, or any user interface of any kind. In the beginning I had my eyes on hiring MikeWe and Sinpathy to tackle several of those aspects... but instead all of my money on hand continuously got eaten up by other game assets that seemed higher priority. Right now I'm still struggling to pay off my 2020 1040 and my 2021 1040ES vouchers, but as soon as I'm financially stable again we'll be exploring a lot of those crucial game aspects.

   That's all for now, I have a ton of formatting work to do for my writing projects today. If you didn't catch it last time here's a link to AHE Devlog #1, and I'll have more of these to come every month or so to make sure everyone's in the loop on what's going on.

( Devlog #1 | AnimeCon Harem Eroge | Devlog #3 )