Ik You guys already made a point that your done working on YL1 but im getting abit mad on your choice of timing. Think of it this way when you were still coming out with Ideas for YL1 you were granting updates like every month. you added scenes characters. i get that people explain that they want a character creator, but i mean a years worth and nothing has been released to the public? I just dont understand why you dont continue YL1 as a main project and YL2 as a side project. we can make skins to enhance our gameplay in YL1 and thats it. while in if YL2 your making these claims saying YL2 is coming out soon and then you dont follow through.
But if you decide to just abandon YL1 and just focus everything on YL2 i just dont see a point in waiting for this so called character creation when i can just play YF1 i mean can we get a vote for this? how many people want YL1 to still be worked on or YL1 to stop being worked on.
i dont wanna hear the saying its coming out soon wait a bit, youve been saying that multiple times.
Comments
"sorry guys but we couldn't deliver on this promise,by February is coming out,we promise!"
...and the cycle of life goes on.
So TL;DR i don't agree, but i understand why they did so.
I just hope it's going to be worth the wait... and money, as I'll not be waiting for a public release.
What upsets me the most, is the fact that so many people stuck around, and gave money, and continue to praise the team for their technical ability, which I do as well. I think what's being promised, what's been released, show amazing potential. However, since this is a pre-release, an alpha that's extremely limited. I think it would've been more than fair to release it to the $3 patrons, or even public, until builds start regularly rolling out. Remember, $5000 a month would be a very very low average, I would guess personally patrons have put well over $100,000 into this game. With the fact that people have waited for so long, and continue to praise the team no matter what, it would've been fair to everyone if the initial release was public, or to the $3 tier. It seems disrespectful to make everyone change back to the $12 pledge, to be able to see the alpha.
Another thing, again, the YL team has done a phenomenal job at providing tech details with what's to come, critique them if you have a problem with that's been shown. However, management of the project, and patreon imo has been sub-par, and it should be ok for people in this community to critique them for that. People compare this project to other failed projects because this project is lacking transparency and detailed road-maps, and do sometimes, maybe on accident, handle this in a somewhat shady way.
Regardless, I changed my pledge to be able to play this game, and I continue to be hopeful that management gets better, promises are kept, and we see an amazing game roll out before out eyes. But as of now, we don't even know when we will see updates.
You have to remember, here, that the $5000 (which Patreon takes their own cut from, naturally) is split between two full-time employees and two part-timers who could become more involved as things progress. That's pretty meager, all things considered.
Now that they've got the release out, the amount is $8000, which is much more comfortable for a four-way split. Obviously, that bump in revenue hinges on the fact that the release isn't available for a lower price, so doing otherwise would be very financially risky.
Still, I can see your point. What's currently there, I don't think most consumers would consider to be worth the asking price, unfortunately. There's many full games out there cheaper than that, after all. Of course, most consumers don't quite understand the numbers involved in game development costs and that those full games tend to have a much larger market to draw from, but what can you do?
I think, once they've got more builds out, they should do what they did with Yiff1 and start releasing the older builds to the public. Seems to be the most fair system for this sort of thing; the moneyed enthusiasts get early access and the rest can get a fairly representative demonstration to see if they consider it worth buying into.
i see YL2 and its logic they think on it as the new way, all days computers and programs grow and be more strong, surenly they just no will "lost the train" to continue at the correct way to the future
Oh absolutely. That amount per month isn't much what so ever. But, I can't imagine they're splitting it evenly as that wouldn't really make any sense what so ever to do. The additional two resources they have, I would imagine, aren't putting in as much work as the main two. But again, all of that could be cleared up very easily with a road-map, or a pie chart on who's doing what and where funds are going. With a game that's making $5000+, with the sky being the limit on how much they realistically could make, it would make a lot more sense to be fully transparent and explain what is going where and just how much time is being spent on creating this game.
Overall, my biggest gripe is management. How do we know that they're not working regular full-time jobs? How do we know how much time is being spent on this. How do we know realistically anything about this project other than what COULD come, most things shown aren't even necessarily guaranteed and can be scrapped without the say of any patron.
To me, it just seems like it's being created, but not really for the community. I feel like the lack of care of presenting the project in a better light, or managing patreon better..etc could be the death in the project in the longterm. This project could seriously make a lot of money to where either A: They could hire more people, B: They could truly quit whatever jobs they have and fully focus on YL2 C: At least put patrons at a better peace of mind to know that it's not going anywhere and it will be finished.
I'm trying to stay hopeful but, we'll see with how these upgrades roll out.
Obviously, it isn't an even split, but I doubt it's an insignificant part of the earnings. Odes likely takes the lion's share, but Dogson's probably getting about as much, Pegashis (the environment artist) will likely be getting a lot more in future as demand for new environments increases and Nomistrav probably gets the least, since he just provides artistic feedback. That's all speculation on my part, though, so your guess is as good as mine, I suppose.
I don't think you realize just how much work complete financial transparency would take, and how risky it is legally. There's a reason bigger studios employ dedicated managers and a whole team of lawyers to keep things running smoothly, you know, and it's to keep the actual developers focused on making the games. Smaller studios need to do all the management on top of the development, so that means sacrifices have to be made and I think we can all agree it'd be best to make said sacrifices in management rather than in development.
I'm pretty sure Odes does this full-time, at least. Not so sure about Dogson, but I've gotten the impression he's as involved with the project as Odes is. I haven't heard much about the other two, so I can't speculate on how involved they are, but like I said, Pegashis is likely to become more involved in the near future, at least.
I'm not so optimistic about the project's ability to generate large amounts of revenue in the short term, at least. Most people aren't as artistically inclined as we are, so they're not going to be all that excited about a "game" that plays like an art design program. Now, that could change once there's a healthy helping of user-generated content for the average user to browse through, but since the interaction system isn't going to be done in quite some time, said content will be limited to static characters. I'm sure you can see why that's a bit of a problem. Couple that with the exclusive catering to relatively vanilla furry material, and you've got yourself a niche within a niche. An important niche, to be sure, but a niche nonetheless.
I guess we can do a bit of a comparison to Wild Life to illustrate that. They've been in development for around 4-5 years now and are raking in $69000 monthly from 6400 patrons, which is about seven-and-a-half times more revenue from around five-and-a-half times more people compared to YL2. What they're making is an action-RPG with sexual content, namely human-on-human, furry-on-furry and human-on-furry, so they've got a nice, wide base to appeal to and are currently gearing up to release a vertical slice demo of the game's primary mechanics. Of course, they've also got a much bigger team of 12 in-house full-timers and 6 external contractors to pay for, but I think it shows the difference in market scale we're dealing with here.
All that said, I don't think YL2 is in danger of suddenly going through a major rework/cutback or being outright cancelled. Odes has, I think, more than proven he's dedicated to making the game and being able to deliver, given enough time. And time is exactly what he'll need, since he can't hire more help until there's more cash, and there won't be more cash until there's more game for the consumer to enjoy.
hth had good content then after i think it was 2018 where they made 2d flash game turn into a 3d game, biggest mistake in the company. had removed the older games which were very intact with details and performance...
Also if they dont come out with a public version in feb. pretty sure we will see the purge.
We are paying for R&D. The results have been amazing to be honest, and the team deserves a ton of credit for their sheer attention to detail. One thing I always appreciate is when a resource goes above and beyond just meeting requirements to find a solution that not only satisfies but delights the user. And this team has been passionate about those solutions.
Ah, good ol' High Tail Hall. I played that when it was a free, simple point & click furry porn flash game on Newgrounds way back in the early 00's, you know. That version can still be found floating around in old flash game repositories if anyone's curious, by the way. It's got a bit of a shady and sordid history, so let me tell you about it.
Imagine, if you will, a game that goes through more than five engine changes and complete redesigns through it's 15-year development cycle. It's gonna be a bit of a mess, I'll bet you're thinking, especially if you've had experience with titles like Duke Nukem Forever. Well, that game is HTH. Allegedly, the first time around, a fire destroyed all the source code and files of the original flash game. The next however many times, though, the dev just decided to arbitrarily start from scratch, without so much as a by-your-leave from his customer base or really even making any visible improvements to anything, only to repeat the process every few years. This latest (and frankly ill-advised, given his track record) switch to 3D is the only time it could be argued there was an actual need to restart everything, ironically enough. Best part of it? The guy's been milking his fans for every dime they're worth through all of these 15 or so years with a monthly subscription fee for access to what amounts to a perpetually unfinished flash game, with no archive of the older versions as you pointed out, and even has a defense squad that goes around the internet attempting to discredit any detractors they find. Wouldn't be too surprised if they showed up here, actually.
Now, does that sound anything like what the YL crew's been doing? The only correlation I can see is a monthly fee (though an optional one unless you want the latest version) and ceasing active support for one fairly feature-complete project (after adding one last feature in the form of an option for custom skins that forshadowed things to come, to boot) in order to actually improve upon it by adding the number one most requested feature in the form of a character creation system, as well as not writing quick and dirty spaghetti code early on this time around so that adding new features later down the line won't break everything and grind the project to a complete halt for weeks on end. Sure, it's been taking longer than anyone anticipated, but now that we've seen the results, I'd say it was time well spent, especially if the meticulously crafted code means new feature will be coming in quick now that things are ramping up. That, though, remains to be seen.
@odes
The hostility is coming from people wanting to get their hands on this latest release but not being able or willing to pay the asking price, I'm guessing. It is, understandably, a frustrating position to be in, especially if they've financially supported the project in the past, but the developers need to eat, too. The unfortunate reality is that the project was hurting for cash prior to the release, and that the resulting influx of revenue probably saved the project. Such is life.
its the same thing irl if you want to start a path, its best to make it a side project rather then a main project...(Thats a way you can end up homeless, cause you spent all your time and cash on something u just had the idea of but never started on. I dont wanna hear any thing from staff saying that they are working on it, "WHAT WE WANNA SEE IS ACTUAL DATA" not words, $12 for a game thats literally free, heres an idea how about $12 for a add on you know dlc.
Pledging is like a commission, commissions are paid to be done by a certain time, if you cant finish a commission by a certain time/date why the hell are we paying you to work.
The character creator could have been added via an update and was not really essential at the moment.
The interaction system could have been improved instead and other characters could have been added afterwards.
Anyway this "Yiffalicious 2" is a real disappointment. That's why I stop giving for it on Patreon. I no longer see the point, if it is to have more blah blah than anything else I will not waste my money in the wind.
YL1 is free, and will continue to be free and available, as Odes stated. Where the hell are you getting this notion it'll suddenly get nuked off the internet, eh? That's a lot more work than just leaving it as is, considering that eradicating something once it's out in the web is practically impossible.
It could be argued that YL2 sort of is an add-on DLC, you know, given it's the same basic idea, remastered and expanded upon. Besides that, I think you're not quite understanding that the $12 isn't meant to be the price tag on a finished product, it's meant to be fuel for development of that finished product, supplied by "investors" for as long as the project will take. Obviously, asking people to give you that kind of monthly cash for no reward just isn't going to work, so some exclusive perks are needed to act as incentive. In this particular case, there isn't really much other than access to the release to leverage in that capacity, so what are you gonna do?
You do realize the issue with side projects is exactly that, they're something you do on the side IF (and that's a very big if in this day and age) you've got any juice left after grinding out your day job. I know from personal experience that the only thing I want to do after a day of hard labour is collapse into bed. Hell, even a bit of relaxing in front of the computer screen carries the risk of overshooting your deadline for sleep, which can fuck up your whole week if you ain't careful. Considering how long it's taken with full-time focus, do you really want the devs to do this in their spare time and end up waiting for several decades?
Commissions are a two-way street. In this particular case, the terms are set by the commissionee, and the commissioner agrees to those terms by putting down the money being asked for. It's not quite how it generally works with other commissioned works where the commissioner sets the terms and the commissionee then quotes an asking price they think is fair for what's being asked, because in this case the term of "make a highly customizable yiff game" is very open to interpretation and therefore difficult to ascertain the exact amounts time and money needed to fulfill to an acceptable degree, especially as there aren't very many comparable projects to base any estimations on. Only one that comes to mind would be Honey Select, and that was made by a Japanese company that's been around since the late 90's and specializes in sex games, so direct comparisons will be tricky. Therefore, a slow trickle is better suited for the situation than a rigid lump sum that covers the estimated dev cycle, on account of that estimation being largely unfounded guesswork.
Also, I think it's unfair to compare YF1's first release with YF2's early Character Editor release. We don't know for HOW LONG odes and dogson had been developing YF1 before unveiling it to the public, way back in 2015.
What exactly do you find disappointing and what would you like to have seen?
What does this mean?
And is that supposed to be accessible to the overall public? What you described is rough, simple modding. What I meant was having a character editor developed for and integrated into YF1, with all its constraints taken into consideration (the whole character authoring process and all the things it wasn't planned to do or had implemented from the start), while, above all, being accessible to the common men/women that just wants some adult entertainment.