Hello pervs and welcome to our new Dev Diary series, where we'll be detailing some of the behind the scenes stuff during the making of everyone's favorite space RPG fuckfest.
I'll try and keep the techno-babble to a minimum and make this a fun and brief overview of what we've been working on. We'll aim to have a diary on the 14th and 28th of each month so this will be a fortnightly affair! I'm DC the creative director of the project, and I'll be walking you through everything this week.
POST CAMPAIGN
All the souls have been collected inside Fow-Chan's jar, and we're happy to report that most of you made it intact...for those that didn't, never fear - you can still support Subverse when we launch on Steam, so even if you're not interested in playing an Early Access game you can support the devs' pizza addiction that way.
We've sent out the surveys (20£+) and most of you have responded, but some of you have not, so please check your emails that you signed up with as there may something waiting for you in there! I noticed there's a massive number of Curious Colonists - you guys are gonna have to bear with us until we get through it all sometime next month.
Keys are on the way! We've been in touch with Steam support about sending out a large volume of keys and we hope to be pressing the giant red button very soon. Fow-Chan and her team will be handling the key allocation so you're in good hands.
RECRUITMENT DRIVE
Recruitment is underway! We've already begun filling positions for key artist personnel. Keep in mind that the final team size will be around 12 people, half of those being part-timers so it's still a tiny dev team and we're being careful about recruiting the right personnel. The primary thing I'm looking for as a Director when it comes to artists is attitude - I'm already getting price hikers sniffing around, trying to haggle overpriced rates because we've had a successful Kickstarter - these always go straight in the bin in favor of somebody who is showing me they're willing to be a part of this historic project at any cost.
Next month we'll be recruiting for dev positions so if you have extensive UE4 experience (no interns or "this will be my summer job" types please...) then keep an eye out for announcements regarding those. Once again, please be prepared to work and to work diligently - StudioFOW may be a team of degenerate neckbeards but we're also extremely hard workers - classic 90's crunch culture is the norm around here!
Casting calls for some of the roles have been sent out and our casting catgirl Samine is working super hard on getting a great cast together for the rest of the important roles. Hardcore fans will be pleased to know that you'll also be hearing the return of some StudioFOW favorites from our old movies to bring these babes to life!
For the rest of the positions, we'll be doing our usual headhunting which has worked extremely well for the studio in the past, so hopefully it does so again. We'll be introducing all the new members just before Early Access drops!
The Mangaka lineup has also turned into somewhat of an All-Star team, more on that next time!
CAMPAIGN SCOPE
Now that Kickstarter has closed, we'll be posting over on Steam as well (if you haven't seen us, be sure you've enabled Adult Content in your Steam preferences) and trying to keep a more active presence over there. That's not to mean you can't follow dev diaries on Kickstarter, we're just trying to keep it posted on multiple fronts for visibility. We've also had a lot of requests for curator copies and such but please request these closer to the early access date, we're not giving out curator keys at this stage or press copies to anybody whilst we still have backer keys to handle. Supporters are the priority, not curators.
The byproduct of all the milestones being smashed also means the scope of the game has slightly increased, which means we were hard at work this month expanding the script, animation pool, and doing general code cleanups to facilitate a couple of new modules. We've greatly enjoyed this process because we get to make the game we intend to, so getting Subverse into full gear is going to be really fun! The budget will also allow us to put an extra shine on certain things, which you perverts will no doubt enjoy... and also enable me to partake in some good old fashioned directorial wankery, like giant dick-laser space battles and a turtle with three ballsacks strapped to its chin.
Concerning the Boin Boin/Whale tiers, a lot of you haven't replied to these yet so please check your Kickstarter messages! I don't want you to miss out on these and we do have a time limit so get those requests in!
Due to the expanded scope, we'll also be a little more conservative with our media/video strategy. We don't want to blow our load too early by showing stuff that's not ready - and the game is changing rapidly each week so we'll probably settle a bit before drip feeding some hype stuff out on Youtube. I have some ideas on how to give the waifus a bit more limelight and it's gonna be awesome.
ELAISHA
Oh yeah, have a slutty space-elf!
- DC & Fowchan