2024 in the rear-view (Patreon)

Hayo! Yearly review here desu~

We had a pretty nice year for ToA overall - great technical improvements, some nice finalization and polish, and a good amount of new content we're really proud of. On the other hand, a few things fell by the wayside, so let's talk about that - we're undeterred, but we may be facing some headwinds.

We were hoping to get the world map finalization done so we could finish up story mode, but we've had to deprioritize it for other things over this year - that being said, some of that stuff has been pretty exciting, or just a long time coming, and we're glad to be done with it. We still have our sights on story mode and Evoker, as well as companion and exploration improvements.

That all being said, the pressure has been coming more and more from various places, among them the payment processors, to make it impossible to sell porn on various platforms. If that sounds impossible, consider that the Apple Store already doesn't allow it, and Apple has been throwing their weight around lately. Hopefully we can keep working on ToA for a long time to come, even after story mode is complete, but we're not so sure, anymore. We're not asking for suggestions on this front - it just is what it is, and hopefully we can keep making games for you guys - that's all.

That being said, let's do an overview of the progress this year!

YEAR-END REVIEW:

We added over 50 new pieces of art and animations this year, which is about our usual pace - just about one new one a week, though with our new animator we hope you've noticed the quality going up again. We finished up the encockening - every character now has a unique piece of cock art, and we'll be using those to give them all erection and flaccid animations, as well.

We've got a new character, the Alraune, and (s)he's got plenty of features that we want to make sure all the characters have - multiple expressions, gestures, erection states, and even togglable gender expression. Also some hefty fruits, top and bottom~

We've got the companions more involved, though the full companion system is still being cooked up - companions can now receive eggs themselves and can have multiple outfits, among other things. The animation system generally is way more flexible now, and we can easily create really nice, dynamic animations to really have a character or scene come to life - see the Alraune for an example of this - including really smooth mixing as the characters move around and change their expressions. I'd say it's a subtle thing, but it's had a really outsized impact on the look and feel of the game, and for the better. We've also added physics to the animations, which makes them look a lot more natural and gives us more time to work on polishing them up and adding more variation, which has been working great. The animations also can now have their speed adjusted, and can have synced sounds, which we're working on creating.

Speaking of animations- we've animated almost every single background in the game, including the interactable ones, which is going to allow us to place characters in the scene in more interesting and immersive ways, as well as itself providing a lot of immersion, including having things change in appearance based on time of day. There's just the Camp remaining - which Lemon, one of our animators, is currently working on - in addition to working on an Entire New Human, which we'd like to congratulate her on, as this new year will see ToA's first development baby, something unambiguously great that came out of this year.

We've got rich text added, now, as well, which lets us do fun thing with the script, and removes some of the old kludgy stuff.

We also added the prototype for the Smart AI in, and while that system is implemented, it still needs a lot of testing and adjustment before it becomes the default AI of ToA -- all in good time.

We're going to try for a Steam release once story mode is complete, but we'll see how everything shakes out. The future's always just a bit more unpredictable than you'd like it to be.

Thank you so much for your support and kind words about ToA. We hope to keep working on it, and other games, for as long as we can. Happy New Year!

Majalis