SLARPG: General update June 2022

Super Lesbian Animal RPG has reached Alpha.

(Happy Pride, everyone!)

After seven long years of on-and-off work, the entire story is there. It exists outside of my head. Anthony and Bee have played the final act and the epilogue and seen the credits roll on the game we made together.

There's still a lot of work to be done. Polishing, bug fixing, adjustments based on testing feedback, some last bits of optional content that I had skipped over, placeholder art assets that need to be replaced, the bestiary. Not to mention all of the promotional work that needs to be done to try and make sure this game has a shot upon release. Trailers and whatnot. Store pages. For better or worse, there's more to making and selling a game than simply making it and selling it, and that work doesn't do itself. But we've rolled credits on the game I've spent most of my adult life working on.

This is a very surreal moment for me. (I'm about to ramble about this moment in my life, so scroll to the bottom if you're just here for the news.)

...

For a very long time, it felt like I'd never get here. Life would get in the way, forcing me to work on other things like art commissions for weeks at a time so I could pay my bills. I'd come back after periods like this, or weeks of burnout, and just stare at RPG Maker, not quite knowing what to do, how exactly to chip away at this massive marble slab. What had once been a simple revamp of a silly game I made as a teenager had grown into something different. Something bigger, more sincere, more dramatic, more refined. What was once a lower effort side project I had fled to after burning out hard on the extremely prematurely announced Andromi (shout out to anyone who remembers Andromi) had taken on a life of its own. People were excited to see what I would do with Melody, Allison, Claire, and later Jodie's story. The characters evolved significantly, as did their world, as did the gameplay. With that, the scope I thought the game needed in order to tell the story the right way grew as well. But for so long, I was stuck in Act II of V. Very little of the game was continuously playable. Scattered pieces existed, but they weren't connected. It wasn't A Game. It felt like I would never get out of that damn desert.

But I knew that I had to. This couldn't be another project I abandoned, especially not once this Patreon entered the mix in late 2016. And so I would lay there late at night, listening to the early WIP version of Bee's final boss theme, of a certain key piece of music from the epilogue, of other tracks from late in the game, and just imagine the climactic scenes and the ending. And I'd keep chipping away, knowing that eventually I'd get there, even if it didn't feel like it. This continued for years. Even as progress was made, as we released a demo, as I managed to find a healthy work pace, as more and more of the game became properly playable, those final scenes remained my carrot on a stick. They would exist someday, and that was the point of doing all of this in the first place. Someday they would be more than some scenes I envisioned like I was making an AMV for my own OCs in my head.

And now they exist. The story is all there, and other people have seen it. After spending a quarter of my life so far working towards this. It's strange. Good, but strange.

I don't want to overhype my own work here, of course. It's an RPG Maker game mostly made by one designer and a (kickass) composer, with creative contributions of varying levels from a few friends. I know my limitations as an artist, and I'm not out here trying to compete with the production values of Final Fantasy VII Remake, although I've constantly pushed myself further and further throughout this project and I'm extremely proud of what I ended up making. I don't think I'm some creative genius, or that what I'm experiencing is unique to me - any long artistic project is an emotional rollercoaster. But now I'm at the part where the ride is slowing down before its conclusion.

I feel a complex mix of emotions right now. It's like I've been holding a breath for seven years of my life, and I've finally exhaled. My brain had become so used to holding that breath that it doesn't know what to do. I'm ecstatic, I'm scared, I'm feeling the early onset of the post-project blues that I know damn well are gonna hit me like a truck when the game is actually out, I'm relieved, I'm proud. It's weird to not have these last scenes constantly over the horizon. Again, they've been hypothetical for most of my adult life at this point. They've been The Thing My Life Was Building Towards. I've thought about them every day. Now the act of making them is in the past, and they exist in concrete form. That's kind of incredible to me.

...

It's way too early to celebrate, though. I still have a bit of work left that I'd like to do before I start distributing the Alpha build to close friends and family for the first round of top secret playtesting. The Patreon Beta is also still a ways away - as I've said before, the Beta will be a version of the game that I would gladly turn around and release to the public if nobody found any major errors or issues.

I know this is frustrating, but I still can't share a release window. I know what we've been aiming for, and I think we're on track, but we're still living in uncertain times, and things like trailers and promotional material are still a big question mark for me. I don't want to give a release month and then have to announce one last delay. But the game is still coming out this year. There just isn't enough game left for it to take longer than six months, period.

And of course, I would like to thank everyone who's supported me all these years as I take entirely too long to make this game. Without that support, both emotional and financial, SLARPG would be a very different game. Being able to spend so long turning it into the game I thought it deserved to be has been a blessing, and I couldn't have done it on my own. There will, of course, be more time later to reminisce about the years spent working on this game about gay animals kissing and having emotions and hitting various funny little guys with melee weapons. For now, I've got a video game to finish.