FULL ANNOUNCEMENT FROM VETEX
(posted in #news)
Since people are leaking this announcement from Patreon but cropping out parts and turning it into misinformation, here is the announcement:
I don’t know what’s been going on with me the past like 5 months but AO motivation has just not been there at all, I’ve tried to think specifically about what the issue is, and while I have a few small things that bug me, none of them really stand out and say “if this wasn’t an issue I would resume development full throttle”
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Roblox studio clunkiness - in AO specifically makes it super tedious to test and bug fix at decent speeds. in the past I have gotten around this by making multiple story parts in the code before loading in to test them all at once to minimize the amount of times I have to load in a playtest, but overall the slow speeds of Roblox studio for a game of this scale really kills the mood. Moochezz can vouch for this as well since its one of the reasons he has also been demotivated to do stuff.
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Community - I’m not sure if I’m the only one who thinks this, but I swear ever since like 2020 or so, the Roblox community in general is way more toxic. Back in Arcane Adventures times, everyone was hyped about basically ANYTHING added to the game despite its insane lag and flaws, but in AO it feels like there is zero positivity about anything added or changed. I know there are people within the community that aren’t like this, but this is mostly my experience. I can’t even add nice little details to the game anymore without being called “immersion man”, because for some reason people don’t like small visual details in a game that is so heavily reliant on immersing the player. People love to say that immersion ruins the game, but believe me it could be way worse if I was truly as “immersion man” as people believe, and just use this as an excuse to hate. It’s just hard to feel the need to want to do things for the community when it feels like 90% of it just absolutely despises me and the game, despite still being a part of the community. The reason this announcement was even for Patreon alone is because i wasnt going to announce it at all because I knew how the community is going to take it (as seen by it leaking) but felt that Patreon had a right to know since they pay for AO dev previews. In the past I was able to ignore the toxicity from the community because my motivation outweighed it, but for the past year or so I feel like its only gotten worse and its one of the reasons that its so hard for me to stay invested in developing this game. It feels as though I have to slave away to make any sort of good progress (which leads into the next point) and even when I do, almost all of the feedback I see is negative
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AO’s game genre itself - The main motivation I have always had behind AO is sharing its story, but recently it’s become more and more clear to me that this is the WORST medium possible to tell a story of this scale. If you think about it, writing a book you can simply describe a location which paints a picture in the reader’s head, whereas in a game that location has to be fully modelled and made explorable. The dev time to gameplay added ratio is always going to be abysmal for this reason. Even if every story chapter only took a month of dev time, that’s still only about 20-30 minutes of gameplay added at most. And you could say this is a “hire more devs” issue, but that brings about another issue I have with Roblox in general: if you have ever made a game or dealt with other scripters on this platform, you’d know that finding good ones who are mature and listen is insanely rare. I got super lucky with Moochezz.
Lately I was feeling like I just didn’t enjoy game development at all anymore and that was my issue, but over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new game and actually really enjoying it, which led me to start thinking about my issues with working on AO above. I don’t know if or when my motivation to work on AO will come back, because right now I don’t feel anything for the game. Because of this, I’ve been working on trying to hand the game over to a team of current testers/friends of mine who are passionate about the game so they can try to work on it while I oversee the project. I won’t say who the new devs are because I know that in doing so they will just be harassed. Some of them are inexperienced so I won’t make any promises, but doing this ensures that the game is at least being worked and not just abandoned for the foreseeable future. Hopefully my motivation for AO comes back eventually, because I still really like the world and story of the game and want players to experience what I had planned.