itch.io

We’re not 100% sure on the final price just yet, it will depend on some factors during the future development.

Since the all the issues with funding I mentioned here a lot of the prices and stuff have been in flux as we figure out how to price the game to keep the studio afloat so the best I can do is make a rough guess.

Currently my guess would be $10-15 for the game. We’re also considering character DLC packs that add new characters/stories etc. for $3-5 but again that will depend on the costs and such for Art/VO/Writing.

Unfortunately nothing is set in stone currently so that all could change, but I don’t expect it to go higher than that as it would put the game in line with other games of similar price points.

I am pushing a 1.3 update soon it’s coming with some small bug fixes, like a fix to an issue with the soul counter bugging out, as well as trying to help with some of the Shader Compilation stutter.

Unfortunately there’s no new content, the game basically broke even financially only recently, So we don’t have budget to pay for new enemy art.

Right now the remaining budget the studio has is coming from Patreon for Monster XXXPeriment so we are working on an update there. If we end up having leftover budget from Monster XXXPeriment we may come back here and add new content.

The last planned change(unless the game suddenly gets a second wave of funding) is 1.4 which will finally enable the scene gallery in the paid version.

Future things I’d like to do is add a new cave map, and add a few new ghosts, but again it’s a budget thing :/

Yeah I’ve seen that, based on what I know about it that’s specifically early access. We don’t plan on releasing in early access, any “early access” style content will be through the Patreon. The plan with steam is to post a demo with just one kin available once all the systems and gameplay is ready, and then do a full release after that with the rest of the content!

It hasn’t come out, we’re still working on the new version, but when it comes out, the demo will be available here, Patreon, and we’re also looking at Steam and we’re going to be looking to set the Steam page up once the demo and first set of content is ready to get Screenshots and videos for the Steam page!

The full game will be available through Patreon(and also again hopefullly Steam) eventually but not here as itch.io is not allowing paid Adult games after the Visa/Mastercard censorship issue.

We definitely know that the 18+ aspect is a major draw for the game, we’re not ignoring that, we will continue to provide ways to get the NFSW version where possible.

The plan we have is already basically what you suggested, make the itch.io page free leaving the demo as is for now, and use the page to promote the Patreon. The future updated demo version will also include the 18+ content on itch but again will promote other platforms to get the full version.

The change to SFW is a minor one, only replacing the explicit relationship scenes with non-explicit suggestive lewd scenes(M rating vs AO rating)and would allow us to be on other platforms besides just Patreon.

Both Steam and GOG allow SFW games with 18+ patches, which is a common practice on those platforms, and so we’d provide the patches like many other games do.

The SFW version would also allow us to get on platforms that can’t/won’t/don’t allow this type of graphic explicit content(whether that be payment processors, or other reasons) but do allow strong sexual themes, like the Epic Games and console stores.

The only reason the game would ever become 100% SFW, is if there were a “porn ban” a.k.a. A law that made it illegal to produce/distribute 18+ content in the US.

It’s totally fair, and we know it’s the case that not everyone can do Patreon which is why we have both options the way they are.

Exactly, you get the idea!

Yeah, that’s one thing we considered when talking about a SFW version. Focusing on leaning into the SFW dating sim aspect would let people who aren’t particularly interested in the sex aspect to pick up the game and enjoy the plot and romance stuff more.

If we go the SFW route we’ll continue to provide a NSFW patch as long as it doesn’t affect the ability for us to sell the game on various platforms. I mentioned one issue might be that providing a patch may still be skirting around the rules and may be cracked down on at some point. But for now if we do move to make the game SFW, we’ll try and get a NSFW patch for people interested.

Yeah Since I’ve joined I’ve been trying as best as I can to keep things open about where we are, we’re human, stuff happens, but I am a believer that if you’re honest about stuff that’s all part of the journey for people. We hope things get better too!

We have the email list of everyone who bought the game on itch so when updates that would have been posted on itch are released, they will be made available. We are still working on exactly how they will be distributed. When a steam version is released existing purchasers will get the option of getting a steam key.

Patreon is only for those who want to participate in the Subscriber only chat on discord(where I’m actively discussing a lot of the changes in real time) or if you want access to alpha and beta builds of the new version. The first release of the new version that Itch purchasers will get is the new version that has all of Flares content only, which will eventually be the demo version as the rest of the content gets added.

TL;DR: We will have ways for you to get the new one if you purchased it on itch.

I’m glad you enjoy the game, it’s okay we know not everyone can afford to do monthly, we appreciate everyone who’s supported the game financially!

GOG is an option, I have considered GOG cause I personally LOVE GOG a lot. One issue is I have some friends who have great games that tried to get on GOG and couldn’t. GOG is more curated than Steam is, each submission gets reviewed for quality and those I know who couldn’t get on GOG had really high quality games.

The second thing is GOG still uses the same payment processors, so they’re not immune, so unfortunately if a full ban comes through GOG will probably also cave to the pressure of payment processors. GOG did recently a free pack of NSFW games, which was awesome and I’m glad they’re showing support, but the fact that it was free helped them get around the payment processor stuff and also got them good press so they ate the cost there. In the end though they are just a smaller target than steam, but they need to effectively follow the same rules they’re just under less scrutiny. Either way I’d love to try and get the game on GOG!

Thank you, we appreciate it! I’m still trying to keep working on the game despite not having budget it’s just more of a hobby project now than diving full time into finishing the game. I’ll be posting updates here, I’m aiming for at least once a month with updates even if the update is small or insignificant, so keep an eye out for those!

Glad you like it! We’re still going to be trying to work on the game over time, and I’m pushing to keep posting stuff, I’m going to try and post at least once a month to keep people updated. And I’ll be chatting over in the discord about potentially shipping some small side projects to steam to try and build funding for MonXXX

Yep 100% I don’t know why people care so heavily about what others do in their personal lives, but here we are.

We’re really trying to move forward and find solutions because we believe in the game. We spent tonight discussing what I mentioned about shipping something small, and we’re trying to see if we even have the funding to buy some lewd gallery art for a small arcade game and ship that on steam to try and offset and build a tail of smaller games.

I think it makes a lot of sense to convert this to free and move the paid traffic to Patreon and SubscribeStar as well, and I think generally it’d be confusing to have 2 pages, and need to update both. Add on the fact that Dev Logs get emailed to people who follow the game, so we’d be losing ways to keep in contact with people, or at least make it more tedious(needing to post dev logs in 2 places?)

We appreciate it I’m committed to at least keeping things transparent in the community even if we’re moving slowly things will keep happening in the background and I’ll keep posting stuff!

Yeah we really believe in the game so we’re trying our hardest to salvage what we can! I have been trying to be as transparent as I can because I want the game to succeed! I joined knowing the game’s progress was at a total standstill before, so I’ll continue to post updates and stuff even if things are moving slowly!

We’re hoping things go up from here for sure! We have a plan and we’re working toward it!

We’re aware of the shadow ban situation, as of right now we’re waiting for more information from itch.io, they are working to change their policies to work with the new guidelines set by the payment processors.

Pages will remain deindexed as we complete our review. Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.

From: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

As of right now, based on itch.io’s recent actions(games we’ve seen officially banned) and also since this also affects Steam and we’ve seen what content Steam is removing, we currently don’t believe the game will be permanently removed and will still be allowed under the new policies.

However obviously we are paying attention to the situation and will have to continue to be willing to be flexible as things change in the space.

I’ll have Kaen double check the discord link hasn’t expired!

Yeah the game has been stuck in development for a while, I joined early this year to expand the game and we decided to do a full overhaul of the mechanics to help make the gameplay part of the game have more stuff in general, and yeah you’ll get the remake since you paid for the current version.

Glad you enjoy the content! We’re working on expanding the content as we add new ways to interact the with the kin in the remake version. We’re definitely looking at more sandbox-y games with relationship/dating mechanics that have this kind of post-relationship aspect where you can do activities after hitting max affection.

A lot of the content is getting re-written so we’ll fix some typos as we go.

I totally get that, that was a conversation that Kaen and I had a while ago. A big issue was that the way they were doing things in Renpy wasn’t built to be scalable, and so the content pipeline had basically come to a halt as adding new content became so time consuming that mixing it with IRL work wasn’t reasonable. Unfortunately the Patreon, while nice, isn’t enough to support a full time team(programmer/artist/writer etc.) so everyone works on it during off hours from other full time work.

Keep in mind in these screenshots here the character “skin” system isn’t in, so the character can only have 1 layer and it’s not loading any of the player customization, specifically the bangs here.

Since the bangs count as a layer like clothes and accessories(Karen’s glasses), unfortunately this means for them to have bodies they need to have the clothes layer on and since only one layer can be enabled at once they don’t have bangs or accessories. The whole skin system is something that’s still having to be worked on.

I quickly just manually set the the Female MC’s appearance in the editor to show bangs, so will look something like this:

Glad you’re liking the art stuff! I’m trying to get back into posting stuff here, I have been talking about stuff on the discord as I’m working on it but posting here I try to post when I have something worth talking about lol, so sometimes it doesn’t make sense to post stuff.

Anyway life’s been going for sure haha, we’re still making progress!

It’s GDScript the Godot specific language, and while I’d say it’s python-like, the GDScript documentation specifically says “GDScript is entirely independent from Python and is not based on it.” hahaha!

Anyway, yeah it’s usable, it has some quirks and the performance isn’t perfect, but as far as a scripting language goes it’s fine.

Worth checking out if you’re thinking of using Godot, or if you already know anything about python syntax stuff.

Everything should be good! It’s some IRL events I’m going to, so it’s nothing bad It’s just going to be a busy month so I won’t have time to work on stuff haha

Yeah! That was what I wanted to bring to the game, previously the game was mostly a visual novel, which are fine I’m not saying VNs are bad, but when AstroKaen and I started talking about me joining the team, we spent time talking about Godot to see what we could do with it, and we think the changes helps build out the fantasy of running a monster research lab.

And I am doing good the stuff preventing me from working on stuff is some IRL gaming events that I am going to be participating in for a few weeks for, and then I’ll be back in late April only to pack for another event early May which is why there won’t be much progress.

I’ll be talking about that later, some things about the dorms will change but yes they still have their own rooms.

Yeah the value I picked for the speed arbitrarily set to “5” and chosen entirely before there were even sprites in the scene so I also saw it was slow haha. There will probably be a sprint or something, as well as we’ve discussed having a map and letting you teleport to fixed places on the map.

The a lot of inspiration definitely came from Persona, I’m a big fan of 3/4, the initial idea came from Danganronpa, which also has a “3 characters per day” kind of setup, the 3 started as arbitrary then kinda fit as we tied it to time management(morning/afternoon/evening).

The happiness decay will ultimately depend on the work chosen, based on how much the kin likes or dislikes the work, but technically Just because they’re unhappy doesn’t mean you can’t assign them work. But for clarity playing as ‘expected’ trying to be as efficient as possible It’d probably between a 2:1 or 4:1 ratio, they need to roughly break once a day or once every other day, but again breaks aren’t mandatory.

As for interruptions, generally any hang out will forgo any benefits or drawbacks to the assignment chosen, if they have a scene and you hang out with them the scene will have choices and those become the bonuses like increasing affection(the stat that lets you have sex with them), or increasing/unlocking a stat/skill or something.

So hanging out with someone on free time probably won’t give the standard energy/happiness recovery but based on the choices may as an example, increase happiness 3x more than a normal free time. This is something that could change, but for now, the plan is interruptions would skip any assignment entirely.

I believe it sends you an email with the receipt, and you can access the game through the link in the email.

Interesting that’s probably an issue with the particle animation thing I added. I can look into it and see what’s happening.

As the most time consuming ghost in the game to trigger it currently gives the biggest reward of 50 souls so I think the rapid increase is expected.

I’ll look into if there’s a reason why the scene doesn’t trigger. Thanks for letting me know!

It does!

Its a small game that we released for Halloween last year, so its more of a high score chasing, arcade style experience. Definitely try the demo out and see what you think, the demo only has one ghost, while the full game has 4 different types and has upgrades like a sprint you can buy and a compass that can show you the direction of the closest ghost!

Thanks for trying it out! I know it’s a YouTube video, so you couldnt show off the scenes, but keep in mind the latest update also added soul rewards for interacting with the ghosts!

Did a quick write up on it for another comment but TL;DR: Currently no, the animation tool and Godot both have updates that we would need complete before we can export for Android

TL;DR: Right now there’s no plan for Android due to issues with the engine and our animation tool. If there’s an update to both the engine and tool, it would be possible and when that happens we likely will release for android.

Long Version:

Right now Spine, the tool we use for the animation in Godot, does not support exporting to Android when using C# so unless the Spine tool gets updated, we either switch to another animation tool, or rewrite the game, we can’t export to Android.

That said there is some thing promising, spine did announce that they are releasing an update that moves towards having an Android build, but even that relies on a Godot fix auto generate C# bindings for GDExtension.

The hope for me is that the management aspect ends up making the story and characters better by adding more opportunities for scenes!

Yeah the primary Lobotomy Corporation inspiration is some of the management aspects like assigning kin to specific rooms to do work/research, having different work types, kin having preferred work types, etc.

I’m new to the team so I’m bringing some other game inspirations to this as well, but minor spoilers for next weekend’s devlog but you’ll probably see chibis walking around haha.

When we started discussing it the difficulty aspect came up and I don’t think the game will be that challenging. I think a game-over state will still technically exist, but you’ll likely need to go out of your way to get there. Running out of funding is no longer an instant lose, and there’s basically a lot of ways to get back in the game if that’s the case.

An ‘easy’ mode isn’t out of the question either, but things have kinda shifted over the last few months, so we’re retooling stuff and spending a lot of time thinking about the impact it will have.

I know the Artist and Writer appreciate the kind words! The goal for this is not to annoy the player but to enhance the feeling of being a researcher and managing the facility. I’m going to be talking more about that over my next few devlogs.

The game was always intended to have better management sim mechanics, but the tech with RenPy really made it hard to add the features they were looking for.

We want to add these because we think that the player should be rewarded for actually spending time and learning about the characters. The characterization has a direct influence on the gameplay so there’s going to be new opportunities for character stories.

Yeah talking to AstroKaen over the last few months, it made it clear that the management part was always supposed to be deeper but throughout development, building the management aspect in RenPy was really tough.

We definitely want to get the game finished, I was brought on to help start pushing the games over the finish line. I don’t know exactly where Melting Point is so no promises there yet, but after MonXXX is in a good spot I’m sure me and AstroKaen talk about seeing what projects we can finish.

And yeah the original is going to stay up as the ‘classic’ version so it’s not going away any time soon.

A major goal with the move is to flesh out the management aspect, so the source of funding will be more apparent and the use for funding will be more around keeping the facility running. I’m new to the team so I bring some other new game ideas and inspirations to the team. The new version won’t be using the daily time limit in the same way, so we’re definitely playing around with it, we’re trying to make it both meaningful and fun so I’ll be posting some stuff next in a few days related to some concrete plans on that!