Hey lads!

I've been writing this progress report for such a long time that I had to cut another half into the next progress report, or you would get the longest wall of text ever.

As the title suggests, I've hired more people, and I'm still not done yet! With this project, I'm merely trying to prove that by running a Patreon project, you don't need to milk people with fake projects that have "great potential" but charge you $20-40 to play the latest release on day 1, have no content updates every few months, make false promises, ignore feedback, avoid questions, and refuse to hire more people while shamelessly taking your money and scratching their balls. I want to prove that it's possible to make a great game with actual content, listen to feedback, talk with your fans, make the project transparent, and have the guts to deal with people without running away from uncomfortable questions, since I have nothing to hide (although I learned to ignore obvious trolls and people picking fights). Exactly a year ago, this project was earning around $1,000 (gross/brutto), while now it's earning around $5,000 (also gross/brutto), which wouldn't have been possible without hard work and investing in this project. But because it's still not enough to hire a full team, I had to take out a loan that I'll have to pay back in 12 months. I want to make this project the best in its genre, which is why with December's engine update, this project will also get a lot of features and improvements thanks to my new team working on it. No more me alone doing everything by myself, but now a carefully selected team of passionate members who will take a big load off my shoulders while doing their job better than me since I'm no writer, graphic artist, or animator. But I can do game design and programming, and finally, I'll be able to focus on those!

Anyway, the competition was fierce, and I've set the bar quite high this time, so the winners are really something, and I believe the quality increase of the game will be outstanding, especially since I won't be doing everything alone anymore!

Two writers, Bubba & Romstine, are currently learning Unity basics and how to use my custom dialogue tool. Previous writers had to write scenes in .doc files and send them over, and then I had to move them into the game, edit, polish, and then script everything. Now, they will be working directly with my tools, so I'll be mostly supervising them, and then scripting dialogues (it's really complicated, so I have to do it myself, mostly) plus some small edits and polishing until they fully learn how it all works. It will go slowly at first, but this way of writing is a real game-changer for the project. They already did two variants of the RLD Thugs scene in v36b and v36c.

Lefty Lai will stay as the background artist since I like his art, so redrawing it all with a different artist would be a total waste of money in my opinion. He will slowly continue adding new locations, so we have some space to add quests and expand character stories because, for example, it was hard to do anything meaningful for Marcus (policeman) without a police station in the game yet, etc.

LustFire is both an animator and a graphic artist, so he is in charge of making characters animatable and then animating all characters using Spine 2D (the majority of great 2D games use it). He worked on similar projects, so he already has experience with our style, and you could already see some of his works in action in previous progress reports (and if you didn't, I advise you to check those out!). I sucked as an animator, and he is much more skilled than me, while Spine 2D outclasses my animation tool as well, so I expect really great animations, art, and features (animating lesbians with my tool was impossible without workarounds, but it's easy in Spine) and much fewer glitches. I will need to hire a character artist for all the character additions like clothes, face variants, and so on, because it's too much for one person to handle, and I want him to focus on animations.

Aside from the new character artist, I will need someone to help me out with the UI, so I'll either ask one of my current artists or find one more just for the UI. I will also need a new composer because we parted ways with iamzeryth long time ago, but I'll wait for new locations first. There's also space for more moans, but they are fine, we have 3 variations already, so for now, I'm okay with those and won't look for any voice actress (maybe in the far future).

When I was an indie dev back in the day, before working on this project, the salary was stable and good, but being part of the team in some small indie studio in Poland, without any ambitious or famous titles, the satisfaction was nowhere near compared to running your own project and building everything from scratch yourself. All in all, you have no idea how great it feels to see your game being played by dozens of thousands of players and being able to assemble a small team who shares your passion. After all these years, with a rough start, trolls, and a lot of toxic comments, I'm not stopping! I know I'm creating something grand and huge, and I'll do my best to succeed at this! Don't believe me? Then come back in December, once we have something playable, or check out public progress reports along the way. Updates for the current Unaware in The City build will keep coming out on a monthly basis, as they used to. Just smaller in content and without new art files or animations.

I'm attaching a screen of an updated character model in a pose that will be easy to animate. The face is just a placeholder, though. And here's a little test of animating faces with Spine. Before, we had to draw multiple variations and swap them for each facial expression. Now, there's much less drawing, more animations possible to add, and smoother transitions.

In v36c, I've added some quality-of-life changes that allow you to skip parts of the daily routine, greatly reducing the number of clicks. This will ignore all events and scenes that could trigger along the way, but their benefits will remain (like taking a full shower or sleeping normally, etc.). The choice is yours.

Another small change is the virginity loss tracker. The first time Jane gets deflowered, it will be saved and can be seen by hovering over the virginity status in the stats window. It tracks the character's name (in dialogue), day, and event name (if it happened during an event). So if the NPC was called 'Man 1', it will display exactly that, because the whole process is automated. I was thinking about giving random NPCs some random names during events, but I guess it would be weird and confusing since only unique permanent NPCs should be named, while from Jane's perspective, she doesn't know their names (it's not some cyberpunk game).

I'll get into detail with the upcoming changes of the engine update in the next progress report because it will also be a long one.

Cheers!