AHE Devlog #3 (Patreon)

1) Starting Over

   Our character artist from April '20 to April '21 Zaphryon left the project. This is an enormous setback, as we're now going to be starting over from scratch with character designs and illustrations with a new artist. Other game projects have had this happen and simply had mismatched art styles in-game between the different artists they use, but I don't want to do that. We're currently now on the tail end of Mr. Rawrdenn's May commissions, and if we find his style suitable for the project we'll continue on hiring him.

   In the meantime the year's worth of assets we collected from Zaph will be used as concept art and references for new replacement character sprites and illustrations:

   In short, yeah it sucks. It really really sucks. Losing an artist this far into the project was always gonna be worst case scenario, but we're gonna make the most of it and keep moving on with progress. We still have our backgrounds and music. Hopefully this was just a big stepping stone that set us up great for a better artist.

2) Project Release Delay

   Probably obvious that there's no chance of us making the original June 22nd deadline, now. We'll be lucky if we even have a few sets of character sprites by then. As for setting a new release date... that's gonna be up in the air, I can't make any projections on when it might be until we've secured a character artist and know what their costs and completion times might be.

3) Patron Feedback

   What are your thoughts on the project going forward? What polls would you like to see or changes to the workflow on the guide page would you prefer? As we're temporarily robbed of our project momentum this may be our best opportunity to take time and consider what changes everyone would like to see to AHE.

( Devlog #2 | AnimeCon Harem Eroge | Devlog #4 )