Happy summer days to all! We have lots to share, including something that we've been planning for a while now. This may be a longer post, but we assure you it's worth the read.

Making our Discord server public

We have been using Discord since the beginning of this project as a common platform for team communication, allowing us to plan all our decisions and share assets for the game. Patrons would get invited to this private server of ours and be able speak to us more directly.

Over time, we watched our membership grow from a few dozen, to what is now over 250 members, all current and former patrons. And even if some are lurkers, as is often the case with social media, we know that there are many more folks out there who are interested to know more and want to talk with us.

Up until now, we kept this membership as a patron-only reward for multiple reasons. The biggest concern was that public servers require a lot of moderation, which we may not have much time for as a small team. However, as Discord grew in popularity, so did the ways to make moderation easier, using bots and many dedicated features for server administration.

Having made the necessary preparations for it, we feel much more comfortable with opening up the server to all our fans. Our patrons will still receive exclusive access to some discussion channels, where we plan to offer more transparency over what we are working on.

That said, you can now join our Discord server for free by clicking here. We have also updated our public pages to include the link for convenience.

Draxima no longer a character in Identity

Some of our players have been asking for more content with Draxima, the green-striped feral dragon working as a repairman for the Heaven's Peak Resort. We introduced him during the second day of the game, but have yet to write additional content with him.

Draxima was one of our earliest high tier backers, donating at the $100 tier for several months as far back as October 2017. Among the $100 tier rewards, they were promised a spot as a main dateable character in the game. Unfortunately, we can no longer fulfill this promise, and we will elaborate on the reasoning further below.

Back when we made this promise to them, we had an inexperienced writer managing our story, who didn't have a proper understanding of how much labour goes into creating a game with multiple diverging paths. The danger with a lack of proper work evaluation is that you will easily end up undercutting the funds that you actually require.

Today, 4 years after beginning work on this project, we are way better prepared as far as planning goes, but this has not come easily. We had to give up plans for multiple characters and lots of other ideas as we reigned in our scope, established a main storyline and justified the existence and dating options of every character in the game.

In this planning phase, we realized that Draxima's character traits (as were given by the patron) just couldn't fit in with the rest of the game's setting. We had these issues from the beginning, when we couldn't accept his robotic arm design and instead turned it into a power glove from an 80s movie that he geeks about.

They wanted Drax to be a cute, nerdy and clumsy virgin character just beginning to explore their sexuality. On paper, this would be fantastic for a slice-of-life story focused on dating. But we aren't making that kind of visual novel. Our current plans have the story leaning heavily into psychological/existential horror and the supernatural, and focusing on Yarin's journey trying to come to terms with his past and what it means to have a sense of self. The story will start experiencing a tonal shift during day 7 or day 8.

We want every dateable character to represent a part of Yarin's personality, be it his former self or the person he's trying to become. And we want the dating arches to play a bigger role in the main story, hence why the extensive planning of the psychology, backstory and purpose of each character. With Draxima, try as we might, our current writers could not integrate him in this story without compromising on the overall plan. The directions for his character work more as a comedic relief, which would tonally clash with the majority of the game that we have planned out. At best, he would have felt tacked on and unnatural compared to all the other characters.

So, we contacted Draxima and let them know of this situation. We apologized for over-promising and refunded him fully following extensive discussions.

It's important to note that this is an isolated occurrence. Our plans have not changed for our other patrons who were assured a place in the game. Although we realize lots of fans will be disappointed by this decision, we ultimately believe we acted in the best interests of the project. And to compensate for this, rest assured that it will allow us to focus more of our efforts towards the rest of the cast.

More transparency with our story plans

We cannot emphasize enough just how much behind-the-scenes work has been put into the game's content planning during the past 12 months. Unfortunately, we didn't show off much of this work, in part because we were still figuring it out ourselves, but also because we were afraid it could present spoilers to those who may want to be surprised as new content comes out. However, we have been silent for too long, and that has impacted our support and people's interest in the project as a result.

Moving forward, we want to be more transparent about our story development plans. We can show all kinds of plans, from a huge design document we created, to plans for individual character arcs, to the overall structure of our story. We will obviously mark these posts with huge spoiler warnings, and may choose to redact certain parts that we really don't want to spoil, but we hope it will help people get a better understanding of our current ideas and direction. Within the team, we are really giddy about the future prospects of the game and we hope we can bring that same level of excitement to those who will read through our plans.

So as a summary, we're happy to meet new folks who will join our Discord, we hope that Draxima's departure will be offset by fleshing out the other characters, and are excited to start making posts that finally reveal what we've been cooking for a year! Thank you all for your support, and have a great rest of summer!