будущее проекта туманно...
01 сент., 2023 13:12
The future of BA
Hi Guys, this is Grave. I haven't been here for a while and I can imagine that some of you might be angry with my disappearance, or that I promised stuff and never delivered. I'm pretty angry at myself too, to be honest. But I want to use this post to clear some things up, for better or worse. Please read towards the end, before coming to conclusions.
First of - as for the shit I promised before I disappeared. There was supposed to be a new update with two new quests (for Rose and Amia if I remember correctly) and some other stuff. And - as I said in my previous messages, before I went silent - this update is mostly done, the quests are more or less there, needs some work but it's like 80% finished at least. So that wasn't a lie. So why the update is not being released if it's finished, you ask? Unfortunately, there was a problem. And by that I mean - the problem is me.
But before I say more - let me take a step back to explain some stuff to those of you who were not here when it all started. So basically - I started working on this game when my life kind of collapsed. And when I mean my life collapsed, I don't mean I was sitting in the corner and moaning, I mean - some tragic stuff happened that would probably collapse everyone. It was 2019, I didn't had a job, the pandemic just started and it was looking like the world is ending, and I was trying to find any means to earn money.
I wanted to start making games, and started BA as a way to learn something. However, by a twist of luck, the game turned out to be a success, and started earning enough money for me to live off it, start paying off debts, etc.. It was working awesome and for first year or two I was into it 100%. I felt the game offers something new in the genre, I felt I made something of my own, players were (mostly) praising my direction, so I was giving it all, there was several updates a month and so on. It was fun for me, and I was happy writing the content for you. Everyone was happy.
But then, around 2021 things started to degrade. First of - I realized that working on this game has some costs. Basically - watching porn everyday fucked up my relations with women (who knew, right?). Second of - the game was a big secret, I didn't wanted anyone to know I was "doing porn", so I had to come up with lies and explanations to my friends and family. That also took a toll, and in the end made me less and less enthusiastic about the project. Thirdly - I never wanted to make porn, I wanted to make games, I wanted to make something I could be proud of, share with others, and BA had elements of it, but it just wasn't it... so depression started kicking in, hard. And with depression came addictions, mostly to weed, which I used heavily as a "creative lubricant" to write the quests and all.
Finally I hit a creative wall. I just couldn't write anything for the game. It was a full blockade. To save the project I decided that maybe taking more people into the team would help me find a purpose again and stabilize everything. Obviously, that would mean less money for me, but also more free time and less stress, so I figured out it's a good idea. I took Locodahmerio, and later Bobby Peru, both my good friends, both huge pervs, to help me develop the game. And at first it worked great - they were writing new content, going through porn, I was just helping them with a tone of the new stuff and releasing it to public. It was awesome.
However, new problems were on the horizon. This type of games are funded, as you probably know, by donations. To have donations you have to use one of the crowdfunding platforms to process the payments. BA was using three of them - Patreon, PayPal, and SubscribeStar. However, some "good soul" ratted me out to Patreon, that my game consists of "real porn" (even though there's hundreds game like that there) and they closed the game's account. That was a huge blow, but not the end of problems - later PayPal closed our account as well and freezed our assets. In a desperate move I opened a new Patreon account focused not on the game, but on myself, an "adult writer", hoping that maybe they will not close it this time. I was keeping low profile, not even mentioning the game in my posts - however this new account was closed in just 2 months, and this time they also freezed the assets.
Fast forward to today, and now the situation was as follows - Patreon is not working, PayPal is not working, the only money is coming through SubscribeStar, and the commision fees and other costs are eating big part of it (what you see on our profile is not the amount we get). This means the game was making less than third of what it was making before, and the team was now 3 people instead of 1. As you can imagine - that created a whole range of new problems.
Long story short - we're at today and I'm writing this post. I want to be honest with you - I don't know what's the future of BA. Maybe I will finally get myself together and publish new update. Maybe even more than one, and my thrill about the project, that I felt at the beginning, will come back. But maybe not. There's a fucking literal war next to me, people are dying, things are actually not looking very promising... Than again - I just started therapy, trying to not smoke weed, even started taking some fucking depression meds. Basically - I dunno what the future will bring, and I don't want this post to promise anything.
So.. that's the story. I'm sorry it's not more thrilling, but... that's life. I want to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being with me for that long despite all this shite. If you decide to withdraw your SubscribeStar payments, that's fine, I understand, I am surprised so many of you stayed that long anyway. If not, then I'm grateful, and I promise that those money will not go into waste.
To sum it all up - I am not sure when the update will be out, but I'm really not doing it because I'm a bad guy, I just hit a heavy depressive episode. I'm deeply sorry that I didn't delivered on my promises.
Grave
