It's finally here, the first version of Skantish is now available for all to play!

Some may be wondering what happens now, or where the game will go from here. At the moment, I plan on taking a short break to attend to personal matters, as well as pushing hotfixes for the initial demo. After I'm through with my immediate matters, I plan on bringing the next zone into pre-production. This will involve taking feedback into account, patron suggestions, as well as polling patrons on what species they'd like to see the next zone explore. After which, I'll get started on working it into the game and posting development progress to the Discord server.

To precisely lay out what I'd like to do in the long term isn't something I'd like to do, since I want for this project to grow and develop naturally rather than having a strict blueprint in mind. I do have a general idea of how the game will progress, and an ending in mind, however.

This public demo consists of what I would call a "Zone". The game, as a whole, will consist of multiple zones, each one inhabited by and focusing on one of the many clans that live on Rythe and its surrounding islands. Using the current build as an example, the first zone is inhabited and controlled by kobolds, which you see a lot of. Kobolds are a monster clan however, and I plan on having many more manid (anthro) clans for Naomi to visit.

"Zone Builds", then, would be what I'd consider completed areas of the games, content expansions to it that build upon the previous zone build. These are what most patrons will be receiving early, with the public demo only being updated to the second latest zone build, up until I feel that the demo has enough content. After that, the game will be exclusive to patrons during its development, up until it's fully finished and released.

I don't have any estimates on how long each finished zone build will take to complete. Each one will be unique, introducing its own mechanics, areas, enemies, quests, scenes, characters... The list goes on. Hence, why I thought it'd be good to award bi-monthly builds to higher tiered patrons, so they at least have something to mess around with during the lulls between full builds.

A lot have been wondering whether or not the game will ever have a male protagonist, gay content, etc. And the simple answer is No. Skantish is a 2D game, and I'm not sure if this is lost on people, but doing things in 2D such as scenes, animations, sprites, all of that, is a lot more intensive than having a 3D model that can be re-used and simply animated to do anything. Every single asset, sprite, sex scene, has to be painstakingly hand-drawn and animated.

In regard to this reality of development, I'm planning on Skantish being my final 2D project. So, I'd like to flesh it out as much as I can, a quality over quantity scenario. It may not have as many scenes as my previous games, as many options for how scenes are contextualized (Topple system, ambushes, sub/dom variations...) However, I'm going to stress the fact that I'm putting my all into these scenes. I spend multiple days on each animation, I storyboard and plan out each scene, how it'll flow, how it'll fit into the game's overall story and narrative. I built tools to flesh out the scenes in game, elevating them to a level never seen before in my previous projects. I hope that these aspects shine through, and that fans of my work can understand the perceived "lack" of content over Tailbound or Thirstchasm.

Skantish, for me, is a stepping stone to prove the skills I've developed in the decade and a half I've been making 2D games, alone, by myself. I hope that it's successful, so I can take time to learn 3D and make the leap to making more fleshed out experiences, with more possibilities. There are so many things I'd like to do in Skantish, things like having different protagonists, multiple variations on scenes, hell, just being able to move the camera would be a game changer for what I could do with these games and scenes.

For now though, I'd like to keep the scope of Skantish manageable, and thus not get burnt out as I pour myself, effort, passion, and time into it. This post is an explanation of my thoughts towards the game's future, to hopefully help others understand my mindset as I push forward with its development.

Thank you for reading, and for your understanding!