Hello everyone. Lone_Wanderer here and this is a bit of a different post. One to talk about what happened and what is happening behind the scenes. It is going to be a bit of a lengthy one and will have both pretty bad and good news. Let's start off first about where we are right now.

Status Quo

Identity always has been more of a hobby project for everybody involved; however most of us have invested far more time into the project than we earn each month. We hope to offset this labour with game sales later, however wishful that may be. So, while we have had periods where lots more stuff got added, the tempo would usually be slow... as a result of a writing and planning bottleneck. I will get more to that later, but last year has been quite slow due to lots of personal issues from both my side and Blue Bishop's.

Despite my status as a writer, not much writing in the game is actually originally by me, but recently I had been writing on day six to continue the plot. I got about a third done with it, before something happened.

Recent developments

Last year was probably the worst year I ever had in my entire life. I couldn't really focus much on the development of this game; however I still tried to communicate and guide the rest of the team. Last year was also the time when Blue Bishop was introduced to our team. The terms were simple really: work as equals on the plot. He was free to do whatever he wanted, so long as it aligned with the core themes that we had spent quite a lot of time talking about.

However, despite communicating quite a bit at the start with Blue Bishop about the makings of the plot, the background and also the writing itself, he had not only enjoyed quite a bit of freedom with his writing (due to my personal happenings), but also expected this to continue this way.

I had relegated my labour to planning and editing his works, putting out bits of feedback about the progression of the plot but also certain key points. They got ignored; while at first I figured it may have been just a creative dispute and didn't want to raise any conflicts, things didn't actually improve over time. I was faced with one ultimatum and absolute after another; feedback was either getting ignored or even outright dismissed, with a full confidence that his vision and ideas always had to stay unchanged and unchallenged.

And that was happening all the while he was insisting that he didn't actually have the entire plot laid out and wanted it to develop as we wrote it. And he was trying to convince me not to get any lore written about the game's scenario.

While I am a firm believer in the capability of a single person to come up with the best thing anybody has ever seen, the problem here was the communication. And I will admit that communicating with me wasn't perfect either, since I had months last year where I didn't initiate any communications with him. I had also written less design documents as the last year went on to really communicate my plans for the plot or the natures of the otherworld.

But while I was trying to catch up on the communications and actively talk with him about the plot over this last half year, things just started to escalate despite my best attempts.

Where would the game have gone? It would have most likely continued to be a surface level plot, more similar to plots from Resident Evil or other "monster" games where the scariest thing about a creature is its looks and the plot would have been left resolved with just the characters finding their peace... or not. But the nature of the otherworld or the supernatural would have been left not only unresolved but also unexplored.

My core plans which I had communicated to the rest of the team quite early and clearly was to have a more abstract experience, where the supernatural are driven by visuals and certain themes. An example of that would be the main menu; the directions for it came from me.

So... to make a long story short: I had recruited a very close friend who ended up having ambitions to hijack the plot entirely and shape it only after his desires, while I was pretty much sick for most of last year. He still has done a lot for the game, and to this day I love everything he has contributed into the game, and also how he helped me on a personal level.

However, at the start of this month we had an argument, which while I was trying to defuse it, led to him leaving the team. I will leave it as vague as it is, since it is ultimately a private matter and anybody's decision to leave is their own.

The future

So, what now? We are now where we were at about two years ago when we lost our other (first) writer. I simply don't have the capacities to write out the entire plot and directions for the game with all the promises that the team made before.

As a result, we will be cutting down on some of the dateable characters. The patrons will however get everything we promised them; we will only be making cuts on our own characters. Most likely, Camila and Tish will be cut from the plot entirely; they will get their appearances replaced by other characters, such as perhaps Garreth becoming fully employed at the bar.

There will also be a couple of other changes on scenes which were made without really consulting me about it: For example, Garreth will probably get his second and third date removed and replaced. We know that these dates weren't particularly well received; these were made the way they were, since the plan was to only give every character three dates and one (or two) sex scenes each altogether. That was it. The idea for why Garreth just dumped you was to incite some drama in the plot to try to develop this character. However, the way this was done was not the best; and with potentially more dates to commit to this character we will try to see what we can do with him and hopefully make our muscle boy more desirable.

Aside from these changes, we will probably try to write more than the first three planned dates to each dateable character, but as said above, the pool of available characters will be lowered. We are still in talks about what the final pool will be, but I think it's safe to say that Brymror will most likely keep his status. Azorin and Draxima will also still be dateable, since they are patron characters.

So, despite this lowered workload I will still need more help. That is why we are currently introducing a new writer into our ranks; but this time we will be writing out all the plans internally to avoid any potential conflicts or attempts at hijacking the plot later.

If you are on our discord you will have noticed him already, it's Vinickus (https://www.furaffinity.net/user/asbeoth/)! He has primarily been a porn writer, but he is quite familiar and also adept with the kind of themes and horror we're pursuing in the game.

But the departure of Blue Bishop left us with not much on what his plans were for the more immediate future. Anything he might have planned he has taken along with himself, so we are left blank of what we might do for the next couple of updates. While my Day Six could theoretically be used, it won't connect to a day anymore that he would have written.

As a result we will be pausing our Patreon for at least the next month, possibly two. We will keep you up to date on how we progress, but for now we have to focus on doing some proper planning which we had neglected to properly write out during the rewrite.