Progress report
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This post has been a long time coming. It's probably one of, if not the most important post in the history of this project.
Our team has five people:
I write the game's story, dialogues and events, model scenes, render them, and combine it all into working events.
Another person translates these posts and all text in the game.
Our designer edits the images and turns them into what you see in the game.
Our programmer works on the engine, keeps the server going, builds working versions of the updates, and provides technical support by fixing the bugs as they crop up.
We also have one more person who tests new builds, finds bugs in the old versions, and talks to the players in social media and reddit.
As you might have noticed, the number of our supporters on patreon has been going down in the last months and at this point it has reached a critical level. The money have dried down to the point where not only we earn less than we could if we worked in our respective fields, at this point we can barely pay our rent. And thanks to the war, some of us had to migrate to other countries, which increased our expenses, further exacerbating the problem.
So the question is what do we do now? We all have the bills to pay, we need an income. No one wants to abandon the project, especially after all the effort we've put in it.
The last couple of months we've been working on releasing the game on steam. We're pretty close and if the things go well we should release Glamour in steam this month. Once the game is bought, the future updates of the steam version will be free. That being said, the updates in the steam version will be behind the patreon version.
We don't want to leave patreon and this step is something we have to do to keep the game afloat. If the steam release is successful, we can worry about balancing both platforms in the future.
If the financial situation doesn't improve, we will have no choice but to seek other employments to stay alive.
We're still working on 0.58, but the progress is understandably slower than usual. Most of the images are already rendered, and we're planning to release it before the end of the month.
If the steam release is successful, then we'll be able to keep working on the game and maybe even increase our productivity. If not, the project will have to be frozen.
P.S.: Personally, now that I got to work on my passion project, I would rather not go back to an office job. That being said, I can't keep working on Glamour all by myself, it's far too much work. The project has been designed around a team from the ground up, it's not something that can be done by one person.
So, plan B. If Glamour stops being profitable enough to support our team, I'll work solo on something new. I have some ideas and might show it to you if Glamour meets its untimely demise. The graphical style, setting, gameplay, and many other aspects of the new project will be drastically different from Glamour.
