2019-11-13 Thank you for your concern, now piss off!

Well, it’s been a crazy week so far. Those of you keeping up with my posts know that over the weekend a fan art thread developed and I threw in my full support behind it.

By offering up the “recipes” for my characters, I thought I’d be doing my part to help make the fan art some of the best of any game around. And you know what, so far, it’s worked! Already I’ve seen some amazing stuff coming from the minds of filthy geniuses and it’s great!

And while the player community has been very supportive and appreciative of this, I’ve actually had three, that’s right, THREE developers send me messages explaining why it’s a mistake to supply my assets to other people.

I’m not going into the details of those messages or relaying who sent them. I’m not posting this to sling mud and start some kind of cock waving contest. But I thought it might go a long way to explain why I’m so supportive of people pirating or making derivative works of my game.

1. People aren’t stupid

Let’s be real. 99% of developers are pulling their assets from the same online stores. A little digging and a bit of playing around, and people are going to figure out what’s used for what. It’s not rocket science and there are already entire threads devoted to people trying to discover what assets are in play for different games.

2. It amuses me

For about two years, myself and a select handful of people have been messing with the models in this game. When I first started seeing fan art pop up, it was surreal. I keep comparing it to a waking dream, familiar, but completely new. I love the characters in my story and to see them doing things that I didn’t make them do, gives me something to look forward to and get excited about.

3. It’s good for marketing

Games like this exist in a very niche part of the internet. We don’t have national ad campaigns or television commercials. Sharing is what gets the word out. Sharing is how we build a player community. The creation and sharing of fan art draws attention to the characters and people really interested in a model might dig deeper to find the game and potentially support it. That’s a big deal for a project like mine.

4. It shows love

I’ve been living with these characters in my head and digitally for two years. I’m in love with every one of them. Fan art shows that I’m not the only one in love with them. It’s flattering that someone cares enough about my characters to sit down and spend a few hours playing with them (even when it’s filthy carnal things they are doing to them =D). It’s a validation of our design choices and it says that what I’m doing is worth seeing.

Those are the big Pros. And the cons pointed out to me, aren’t things I worry about. One creator asked if I was worried some one would take my characters and make their own game. No. Not at all.

I mean, first, how often does that really happen? Almost never with an active game (abandoned games are another story, but doesn’t apply here).

Second, you can take my characters, you can take my code, and you could make your own game. But what you can’t take is my story. Others could come along and pirate everything from me and make their own game, but only one of those games will have been written by Roman Hume. And I’m confident it will always stand apart from the others.

The other thing that can be replicated but never duplicated is my visual style. Fecal preached getting away from preset poses, facial expressions and animations. I fully agree and have carried that tradition forward. For a couple of chapters now, all the poses in the game have been done from scratch.

My personal control of body language and subtle facial expressions are what make up my style. And it’s always evolving. So even if myself and every other dev are using the same assets, there will probably only ever be one that has the “feel” of Roman Hume. And if it doesn’t, then I need to evolve it so that it does.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to share. That and this amazing render of Amanda I did yesterday. Who’s ready for a road trip!

Alright, I’ll shut now and get back to work on this game.

Salute mates! And thank you for the support!

OH, and if you missed it, the fan art thread is here!