Burps are definitely a planned feature. “Passing gas” as well. Probably by Alpha 1.0, even. Sweating can probably be done with particles, likely during the low stamina animation or trying to move with a high weight penalty, but it’ll probably be a little before it’s added. Messy eating probably isn’t too difficult for a basic implementation but don’t expect too much and it’ll be while most likely before that’s added.
All of these will be toggleable as usual for anyone who isn’t into it.
Hello again to everyone who’s still around. The title may sound a little like bad news, but I promise you, this is great news for the project and I’m sure you’ll be excited as well.
I would first like to apologize for my recent absence. As some of you may know, I have really severe depression and PTSD. Around last time I posted, I tried taking steps towards recovery, but it went wrong very quickly and I had a really severe panic attack that felt like I was having an actual heart attack and was about to die. I couldn’t eat at all for days after that and spent weeks barely able to eat due to worsened PTSD. Lost a lot of weight from that. I also had really severe hallucinations one night to the point that I had to take a sleeping pill and wait until I fell asleep with the lights on.
There was a badly timed drama on the forum when I was starting to recover and even though just interacting with anyone at the time triggered my PTSD and made me feel nauseous to the point of throwing up, it was a real chance at changing the forum for the better, so I decided to participate. Staff took their typical pro-AI stance as usual, unfortunately, so while there were some tiny wins there for artists’ rights, nothing of real importance happened. This isn’t a drama post, however, so please keep conversations about that to Site Feedback, not my project page.
Anyways, that really screwed over my mental health for even longer. I didn’t realize how bad it would get and just thinking of the forum at all gave me really bad anxiety and fear for quite a while after. It still isn’t quite gone but I can at least handle this.
It took me quite a while to recover but my weight is back up even higher than before and my depression has gone from considering suicide weekly back when I last posted to only sometimes feeling a little down and lonely. My PTSD has worsened in some ways and gotten better in others so overall it’s about the same.
I didn’t just spend that entire time sitting around doing nothing. Well, a lot of it was spent sitting around doing nothing. Can’t really recover mentally if you’re forcing yourself to work through really severe PTSD and depression after all. That’s how I ended up at that point.
However, I did get work done. Ironically, I would say this somehow ended up being even more productive than if I hadn’t had a severe panic attack.
I decided to pick up a side project as a bit of a break. Faehna is hell. I have a lot of experience in programming. I would bet $100 of my nonexistent money (I genuinely don’t even have $100 at the moment) that Faehna is the absolute most complex and painful project on this entire website. This is the sort of game you have a whole large team working on with a budget of millions of dollars. The fact that I am somehow over halfway to a small demo as a solo developer is an incredible achievement, honestly.
As I was saying, the side project. I’ve spent so long on Faehna at this point that programming a regular game with a reasonable amount of content honestly doesn’t even feel like I’m working. It’s incredibly easy. You don’t have to deal with a thousand different scenarios of users disconnecting from a server at inconvenient times or trying to synchronize data without allowing cheating every time you want anything done.
For this forum, this “side project” is huge. For me, it’s pretty much just a break.
Me and two other developers are working on what I will refer to as MGR. MGR is essentially a Stardew Valley type game where you inherit a farm and befriend monster girls who help you around your farm or generate resources such as milk. During this, you progress through both the main story and character stories for all of your monster girls. You get to fatten up all the monster girls, date them, marry them, and more. We’re pretty far in already and progress is going really quickly with everyone’s skills.
I’ve recruited both other developers to work with me on Faehna after the first release of MGR. From working with them, I can tell they will be a huge help to the game. They are both exceptionally skilled despite being new to game development.
I will be working primarily on MGR while I recover until its first release. Working on Faehna before I’ve fully recovered, especially without anyone supporting me, would probably lead to my condition getting worse again.
Upon MGR’s first release, I will shift to working on Faehna primarily and MGR as needed. After the first release, most of the content is writing and art, and I am not the writer for that game, so I will have lots of extra time for Faehna.
MGR’s first release is also when I am joined by the other two developers. I will be writing proper documentation for all of the code in Faehna and simplifying it to make it easier for my “programmer in training” to understand and learn how it all works. Even though I will be working on two projects, with an extra programmer to help out, it should be much easier and faster to get things done.
I do still have PTSD and writing these posts is honestly one of the worst parts of development for my mental health (probably won’t be eating for the rest of today and part of tomorrow because of this) so after MGR, one of my coworkers will probably start posting in my place. Not much will change there, just a different writer making these posts.
As I mentioned before, I am not doing too well financially. My Patreon is for all of my work, so if you want to support Faehna, MGR, and most importantly, my belly, please check out the link below. Membership went down quite a bit while I was recovering from that event. I’m aiming to at least get back up to $70 or $80, since money really gets tight for me below there, so please do consider it. Every donation counts for small creators.
Given how much of a grand undertaking this game is AimilsFat, I completely understand if this game takes a while, especially the news you mentioned in your recent post. I also believe the sheer potential alone, will draw in various folks to an extent.
The multiplayer aspect of this game, will definitely amplify the existing difficulty due to the real possibility of say, hackers, griefers n trolls, but thats a given with multiplayer games. Have you considered a singleplayer test playbuild for say patreon members or if need be, a public version so players can check for bugs on your behalf?
The game is generally balanced around groups of 2-5 players, up to 10. Most servers will likely be private (requires a single-use code from the server administrator to create an account) so unless you’re inviting someone who you think will be hacking or trolling, this isn’t a very big issue.
That doesn’t mean I won’t be adding code to prevent cheating, it just means that most people won’t have too much of an issue here even if there are bugs.
The game is open source. You can go and download it free. As in, right now, though the repository isn’t currently up to date and it isn’t properly playable and you’d have to learn how to build from source. It is freely available and always will be.
The only planned monetization so far is:
Patrons get an official hosted server with maintenance and tech support.
Patrons get the latest build one month early.
If you aren’t a patron, you still have the source code free so if you can’t afford it, you’re still free to compile the game at no additional cost.
It’s less of a “you have to pay for this” and more of an “if you have the money then you’ll go for the convenient option, but if you can’t afford it, you’re more willing to try the less convenient option” sort of situation. I am very poor so I can understand not wanting to spend money even if the game ends up being really well made.
Patrons get access to all DLC (technically mods).
Note: DLC will never paywall major features. DLC is planned to primarily be bonus regions with their own separate story, culture, characters, possibly races, and events. Most worlds will probably use default generation, meaning they aren’t in a region at all.
Note 2: A region is a large static map that is manually created and features lots of lore-relevant places and secrets, as well as the content mentioned above.
The first two regions are free and included in the base game by default. I won’t spoil too much about them, however.
DLC is also open source. The “inconvenient route” mentioned earlier still applies.
Donations, obviously.
Note: All of the above is subject to change, minus being open source. That will never change.
I’m not really a greedy person, though. I’ve always been poor so I don’t really care for being rich or any of that. Hypothetically, if revenue paid a reasonable salary (like a couple thousand or so), I would start stripping down all the monetization and only ask for donations since all I really need out of this is to pay the bills and be well fed.
This isn’t possible by the way. The game is multiplayer. You either code it to allow multiplayer or you code it to be exclusively singleplayer. This is a decision you make at the very beginning of development. Converting it to a singleplayer game would be very hard.
You can compare it to Minecraft. Even if you’re playing singleplayer in Minecraft, you’re actually running a separate server locally on your computer and connecting to it, it just isn’t open to the public.
Ah, I see I see, so in a sense it is like Minecraft, I never knew how single player really worked in minecraft. I’m also relieved about how the servers will function in regards to the server administrators code for creating accounts. While trolling isn’t an issue, hacking on the other hand, much more likely to occur but, not as big of an issue since unless this game REALLY took off like minecraft or angry birds did, not much to worry about imo.
As for the monetization, 100% understandable as developing a multiplayer fetish game, models alone will eat up a lot of time (seen this plague many game devs trying to add say bigger bellies, boobs, ect.) to their games. The early access for patrons is a good idea to iron out any obvious/easy to replicate bugs and the public one, where the more obscure, harder to find bugs are discovered. Best of luck AimilsFat!