Weekly Update

Well, it has been and week and not a highly productive one for me. Still I have put the first of the Kitaxxa scenes into the game and I am debugging it right now.

There probably won't be a release for a few weeks at least. The Kitaxxa scenes are more for the middle of the game and not the beginning. The artists are mostly working on the critical scenes first, not taking it it game order.

I will be working on things in game order now though for a while and you may see a lot of placeholder images in the next release, but hopefully you will start to get a better idea of what part 2 of the game is like.

BGrisset has just started to work on some of the Cerise images that are used in the early part of Part 2 so you will be seeing some excellent images soon I am sure.

This week I will leave you with one of my favourite pieces of architecture which you will see a little of in Part 2. It is the main Audience Hall for the Court of the Crimson Empress. (This first scenes or Part 2 are in the smaller private hall.)

Weekly Update

It has been a quiet week for us this week. Release 1.4 seems to be reasonably sound from the lack of comments which is not bad considering there has been over 400 downloads.

MedialFiles gives us total download numbers and Release 1.2.3 has had over 11,000 downloads which is pretty amazing I think.

There were some great suggestions in the survey. The card images are all rendered at twice the resolution you see them on the screen, so I am sure we can have some way of looking at those in full resolution as someone suggested.
The first Kitaxxa set of images is now complete and I am putting them into the game, reworking some of the code as I go.

A large part of Part 2 is about winning friends and allegiances through seducing them and having them fall for you basically. With Kitaxxa though, you do have to be careful not to get her too excited or you may need medical attention ...

New Release

You can download the new release here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/hb6lhol5hzf467g/ROCE-R1.4.0-all.zip
Caution, this is a large download for only a relatively small amount of new content. Most of the work is in the new spell system which is not really triggered until later in the game.
If you get to a screen where you cannot work out what to do, click on the tent.
This update concludes the introductory material for Part 2. After this you get to start playing card games again.

Survey Results

 Thankyou to everyone who responded to our survey. There was a lot of great information in there.

Congratulations respondent # 102 (of 115) for winning the draw. Your sponsor's site login details are in your EAZ inbox.

The basic statistics from the responses are below.

There were some great suggestions and I will be working through them as well.

There was a great suggestion about translations in exchange for access to the deluxe edition and we will look at that when the game is getting close to done. Translating too soon will be a maintenance nightmare I feel.

I will be looking at the alternate dark path closely. I think the animations are a given. The dark path will depend on what we can earn through comic sales and other revenue streams as we will not use the crowd funding money for that (and it is already fully committed).

For the dark path, we will need to work out if we can do something meaningful and interesting with the money we raise before we do it.

Summary

Would you buy a deluxe version of Redemption of the Crimson Empress or just stick with the free version?

I will just play the free version	17	15%
I will play the free version and if I like it will buy the deluxe version.	65	58%
I will buy the deluxe version.	21	19%
I will pirate the deluxe version.	3	3%
I will pirate the deluxe version and if it is really good, I will buy it.	7	6%

What would be a fair price for the deluxe version?

$5	10	9%
$10	32	29%
$15	38	34%
$20	20	18%
$30	2	2%
I would not buy it.	9	8%

What feature would you most like to see in the deluxe version?

Animated Scenes	53	46%
An alternate darker path through the story (where Bailey goes to the dark side)	55	48%
Other	6	5%

What would be your second choice for features in the deluxe version?

Animated Scenes	55	51%
An alternate darker path through the game	37	34%
Other	16	15%

Comic plus bonus access to deluxe material/version

No thanks	64	56%
I would pay $10 for that.	38	33%
I would pay $20 for that.	12	11%

Preferred Language

English	95	84%
Deutsch	5	4%
Français	4	4%
Polski	2	2%
русский	1	1%
Español	2	2%
Italiano	2	2%
Other	2	2%

Weekly Update

Well, it has been another busy week. I have given out Release 1.4 to a small set of people to look at and if there are no major problems I will make it generally available next weekend.

Release 1.4 finishes off the intro to Part 2 and you get to see one of the main navigation points. It also adds the spell system (in game helpers) although you won't be able to use them until later in the game unless you have the debug version.

The survey has gone really well and we have well over 100 responses. Thankyou to everyone who responded and we will be selecting the lucky winner in the next day or two.

Our artists are currently working on the most important scenes, but as we get through those, we can start working through things in game order a bit more. Initially I wanted to focus our resources on on what was most important, not what came first.

One of the survey respondents wanted to know how we were going and where we are up to, so I will try to give you some basic statistics as we know them now:

There are 64 image sequences in Part 2 of the game. Of those about 12 are either complete or well underway. It is hard to pin down exactly because we are doing some of them in parallel as it is more efficient that way. Sequences will have a minimum of 4 images each with some being 20 or 30, but don't expect a lot of those.

An April 2014 beta of the complete game is what we are aiming for and that is still looking good as a goal.

Outside of the art work, the code skeleton is in place and I am working back through it, putting in a simplified framework that I have developed for handling events. This should make it easier for to writers to take work with the game dialog as well.

Here is a sneak peek at Spells screen I mentioned above. You will not get all the spells at once, so you won't see the screen quite this full until you are well into the game.

That's it for today. Coming soon will be the announcement of the winner of the contest and Release 1.4.

Should I rise to the bait!

For the most part, I have loved reading through the survey answers. Almost everyone has been really supportive and I do encourage you to be honest, but I could not let this one go past without clarifying some things:

Deluxe edition is a mistake that will lose you money. People funded you to make the free version of the game; telling them they have to pay to get the 'real' game is an extended middle finger and just going to get your game pirated heavily. You guys seriously want to try and police the entire Internet to get links taken down after release (spoliers: you'll fail)?

If you insist on this route, wait 6 months after initial full release to launch the deluxe edition. It'll be less of a "FUCK YOU" to the people who funded you, and people who want more may be more willing to pay.

Seriously, you don't get a gallery without paying? You guys serious?

1.  The deluxe version may lose us money, but we are SELF funding the extra bits. It is OUR money. We are NOT using the money from the crowd funding to pay for those extra bits.
2. While I have not made it widely known perhaps, the people who donated money have already been informed that they will get the deluxe version for free. These people saved the project and we are certainly not going to insult them by hitting them up for extra cash.
3. I fully expect it to get pirated to some degree. As much as you hope that does not happen, we know that it will. Research shows though that it can be helpful in the long run. If it is worth pirating, a lot of people will decide it is worth paying for. Ultimately, if people want to pirate from us, that is their problem.
   
   We practice what we preach. The art work we make is based on building blocks purchased from small artists through online stores. We have paid for everything that we have used. If we did not make it ourselves or it was not freeware, we paid for it.
4. I have never considered a gallery core functionality. I was not even going to do one until a couple of people asked. There is no DRM on our game and you can easily browse to the folder where the scenes are kept.
5. The standard version is the 'real' game. As we have been working on the game, we have seen an opportunity to do something more, to go beyond what we promised. It will cost US more in time and resources, but the comic will cover some of that and the rest is based on people buying the game at the end. Also, it makes sense for us to do the extra content while we are working on scenes, while the inspiration is there and not go back after.

Our goal has always been to be open and honest, and to treat people as we would like to be treated ourselves.

Everyone on the team, commissioned or volunteer has gone way beyond what was expected of them. They are passionate about what they do. They thrive on your praise. It keeps them motivated. Not being able to work on something this month because they can't yet afford the required resources or have to use something that does not really fit as a replacement instead, is demotivating.

I hope that clears up things. If any of you still think we are wrong to do what we are doing, then we will have to agree to disagree.

I apologise to the anonymous survey respondent for using your words without attribution or permission. You left no contact details.

Redemption of the Crimson Empress - The Survey

Ok, so this sounds boring, but answer this survey and you could join our 77 Offbeatr contributors, getting access to the supporter's web site and RotCE Premium when it comes out.

Ok, Ok, I am getting ahead of myself aren't I? I did mention in the last post that we are looking at two versions.

RotCE Standard: This is basically what we promised in our crowd funding.

RotCE Premium: We are looking to pull in some of the features from our extension goals as well as other goodies and get them done in parallel with the standard game.

We have yet to nail down all the differences, but for Premium expect double or triple the images for each sex scene from what was in Part 1 with some animations thrown in. Standard will be like Part 1.

You can have a say in what is Premium. Help us work out how much and what kind of things we can put into the Premium version: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/19VvVbIymUHdaxFVUfm_w20B8gAnZyrBEzvGuOArsdSY/viewform

Enter you EroticArtZone user name (free registration if you don't have one) to have a chance to win access to the supporters web site. (One entry per person please.) Entries close 3rd November 2013.

Why do this and why now?

We can do it now for a reasonable cost. It is much easier to add additional images into the scenes while we are in there than coming back later.

We are having fun doing it, but if we keep doing extra scenes the way we have been, we will run out of funds before we finish. We either have to stop or find a way of paying for it.

We also have more than one game in us and we are hoping to put some funds together to get us started on the next one when the time comes.