Cloud Meadow

[JudgeHeath]

I feel like the whole game is a giant mess, with countless bugs and sub par mechanics. The thing people wanted which was an H-Game is buried so far beneath the rest of the unplayable stuff that it really isn't even there. S-Purple's art is the only upside I have seen with it and even that is marred by poor design choices. All the characters were drawn well but then the sprites and assorted other things in the game art shrunk down to unbelievable sizes that you can't see any of the details that make them good. That along with the fact that you guys have an income and team far bigger than most of the other projects on Patreon yet just like Breeding Season the amount of content people are seeing come out of this is at best half of what a one or two man team produce monthly.

I'm sorry you feel that way, it's not an unreasonable thing. We have a lot of ground to make up here. As for why we seem to put out less for more, there's a couple of reasons.
1) We refuse to pay our people starvation wages. We have 5 employees including S-Purple, everyone on the project makes between 2.5 and 3k USD if they work full time, Foxy makes under 2k and works part time.
2) Our employees work to the clock, not to the job, cause you know, ethics. 40 hours a week. Maybe a little overtime to meet their pay cap, but by and large we work to the clock, we don't force our folks into constant crunch.
3) We can't really afford to grey box stuff and then push it out. Too many eyes on us, too many folks who get angry, and because we have to frontload animations and artwork, that means we spend money and resources on an animator that could have gone to a second programmer to focus on getting the game out faster and less buggy.

Yes, things are slow, but we're taking care of our employees and working at a pace that avoids burn out/lack of ethics. 40 hour weeks, not constant crunch. We're upfront about that, and never lied about it. Other games can do more with less because the people making them tend to drive themselves to the wall to put out a product, sacrificing health and sanity to do so. I should know, I've been part of those projects, it's something all game developers do more or less. I have to take a switch to S-Purple to get him to stop working on stuff and take a break so he doesn't aggravate various health conditions of his.

So I can understand your frustrations and concerns. I can't do anything except explain why what we have is what we have. I won't compromise on the lives and health of the people working for Team Nimbus, even if that slows us down and makes us look bad due to the lack of comparative output to less well funded projects.

And hey, if folks don't like it? They don't have to pay us a thing. They'll still get the releases, and the codes, through piracy no doubt, or they'll wait a month for the public release. I don't think we can do better than that.

 

[IvoryOwl]

I'm sorry you feel that way, it's not an unreasonable thing. We have a lot of ground to make up here. As for why we seem to put out less for more, there's a couple of reasons.
1) We refuse to pay our people starvation wages. We have 5 employees including S-Purple, everyone on the project makes between 2.5 and 3k USD if they work full time, Foxy makes under 2k and works part time.
2) Our employees work to the clock, not to the job, cause you know, ethics. 40 hours a week. Maybe a little overtime to meet their pay cap, but by and large we work to the clock, we don't force our folks into constant crunch.
3) We can't really afford to grey box stuff and then push it out. Too many eyes on us, too many folks who get angry, and because we have to frontload animations and artwork, that means we spend money and resources on an animator that could have gone to a second programmer to focus on getting the game out faster and less buggy.

Yes, things are slow, but we're taking care of our employees and working at a pace that avoids burn out/lack of ethics. 40 hour weeks, not constant crunch.

I'm sorry but that won't fly - when people come up with reasonable and / or technical concerns the least you can do is acknowledge it and work on rectifying it, not coming up with sob stories or justifications that have nothing to do with us. In fact, that whole excuse you just used would have made more sense in a scenario where money is a concern, not when you're paying everyone in your entire team the equivalent of a rich person's wages (which usually comes with extra responsability and expectations). If you don't want to compromise the life and health of your employees then hire extra people to compesante and speed things up.

Truth be told 2.5k a month is more than most specialized doctors make in my country, in the end its not my business but it helps put things in prespective, specially when you insist on paying a handful of indie developers working on a porn game about 2.5k a month. Keep those numbers if you want but don't forget, when it comes to Patreon, people don't like fattening other people's purses only to get crumbs in return and it certanly doesn't bode well when that game is based on another one that kicked the bucked the way it did and had just as much money. People will start to think you're milking them... just like Breeding Season did.

 

[JudgeHeath]

I was addressing, initially the claim based on the idea that other teams do more with less, the rest of the points I didn't feel needed to be addressed as badly given that we are an alpha that has not had multiple years of behind the scenes labor before being presented to the public and thus, more often than not, had a good foundation to build upon. As to the numbers you bring up, I'd ask what the costs of living are where you are? For a lot of spots in the USA $15.00/hour is the minimum living wage to make ends meet in terms of rent, gas, clothing, food, and medical expenses, along with putting even -anything- away for emergency issues. Especially if you're living urban rather than rural.

Yes, there are places in the world where 2.5k USD monthly goes a very long way, the USA is not one of them, nor are the other nations our members work on. I can't help that, all I can help is making sure that the people working on our team are well seen after.

Do you want to know what the wages are for an actual industry animator or artist in the games industry? An average of $56,498 USD yearly. Ours make $36,000 yearly.
You want to know what a general, not specialist, physician makes yearly on average in the USA? An average of about $184,275 USD yearly, or about $15,356.25 USD a month (imagine how much more specialist doctors make here). 2.5k is by no means a rich person's wages in the USA. Please keep in mind, we're not operating in your country and the tax laws and buying power change drastically depending on the location where said money is being handled.

The salary I listed might be incredibly rich elsewhere, but it isn't here, and this is without any form of benefits. We can't pay overtime, we can't give our team members insurance, we can't give them anything that a lot of companies give to their employees in terms of coverage. Heck, because everyone on the team is a contracted worker, everyone has to pay their own employment taxes.

While we could afford to pay folks less if we were all located in your home nation, and while there are groups that make due with less money, paying their members less, that is not what they should have to do, and it is unethical to ask them to do so.

Finally. Yes, we may eventually be accused of milking our audience, to avoid that we are entirely transparent with our reasons and our income, especially since we have moved to a pay upfront system and that enormously obfuscates (by approximately 2000 dollars) how much money we are making versus how much our public pledge tracker shows. That's why we release monthly earnings statements, and keep our patrons in the loop. It's also why I engage with folks on these forums and others like it in what I hope is a candid and honest manner, rather than giving you guys some kind of weasel-worded corp-speak that has all the humanity of a thrown knife. I have no doubt folks are going to take offense at me breaking it down in this way and defending our decisions in this manner, but I think it's better to engage with you guys, address your concerns given how monumental a fuckup Breeding Season turned out to be, and risk the bad reaction, since the return is you guys hopefully having a better understanding of our personal reasoning on some of our hiring and payment decisions. If you guys still think we're spending our money badly, fine, you don't have to give us more. I only hope you'll take a moment to actually read what I'm putting here and not just write it off as "greedy bastard is trying to skin us for all he can get away with." Call us naieve or bad at business, but at least do us the courtesy of believing we aren't dishonest (or if we are, we're just as dishonest with ourselves as we are with you guys).

Edit: Also I don't want to sound ungrateful here, you're bringing up stuff that I have to address sooner or later, so thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so.

 

[karunama]

rather than giving you guys some kind of weasel-worded corp-speak that has all the humanity of a thrown knife.

Off-topic, but this made me lawl.

 

[JudgeHeath]

Off-topic, but this made me lawl.

Sounded better in writing than my original statement that was more along the lines of "I'm a rude bastard."

 

[JudgeHeath]

New Build is out!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/public-release-4-11500631

Warning: We've found out what we previously believed was a simple, and code related issue is actually a progressive and systemic issue related to how Unity builds the project file in question. This means that the animation corruption has grown, and will continue to grow progressively worse in each build we do until this issue is solved. For obvious reasons this is now our primary focus.

 

[JudgeHeath]

A New Programmer Position with Team Nimbus Opening Soon

 

[OddGoon]

How can I play this on a Mac?

 

[JudgeHeath]

How can I play this on a Mac?

Unfortunately, your options right now are to use Wine (which according to some folks has a very high success rate and stability), or to wait until we feel comfortable enough with our progress dropping money on Apple's Developers License.

If you want to try the Wine option though, you can jump on our discord and check with our Wine using fans how to get it up and running?

 

[JudgeHeath]

New builds out today, public build has new randomized dungeons in it, while the patron build includes dungeon events, random battles, loot drops, and the new equipment system, as well as laying down the foundations for leveling up.

 

[JudgeHeath]

New builds out today, patron build includes the ability for monsters to start passing on traits to their descendants, plus other things such as petting, feeding, and similar.

 

[marsup]

Hello I am encountering a problem. I havent played this game in a very long time, so I have never experienced this before. Basically I just downloaded this version and whenever I try to launch the game it starts up, then fades to black and the music starts but it stay stuck like that forever. Whenever I click on the screen my mouse goes through it. I upgraded to windows 10 not too long ago so I don't know if it has an effect. Can someone help I really want to try this game. (By the way is the main character female only or can it be switched or planned to be able to?)

Actually it seems to be with any unity game. It seems unity is experiencing problems with windows 10 as other people seem to have problems launching unity games with windows 10. Does anyone have a fix apart from reverting back to a previous version of windows.

Edit: Sorry figured it out anyone who has this problem this solution actually works. https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1480982971174752598/

 

[JudgeHeath]

Hello I am encountering a problem. I havent played this game in a very long time, so I have never experienced this before. Basically I just downloaded this version and whenever I try to launch the game it starts up, then fades to black and the music starts but it stay stuck like that forever. Whenever I click on the screen my mouse goes through it. I upgraded to windows 10 not too long ago so I don't know if it has an effect. Can someone help I really want to try this game. (By the way is the main character female only or can it be switched or planned to be able to?)

Actually it seems to be with any unity game. It seems unity is experiencing problems with windows 10 as other people seem to have problems launching unity games with windows 10. Does anyone have a fix apart from reverting back to a previous version of windows.

Edit: Sorry figured it out anyone who has this problem this solution actually works. https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1480982971174752598/

Thanks for the heads up on this! I'll pass it onto KodexKommander and see if we can't integrate this fix directly into the game.

 

[Leixein]

Can we romance the npc as of now yet? And can we get the monster variant such as giant cat if im not mistaken about its name? If we could how? Thx... and i love this game a lot its the 1st time for me i played this type of game, i know it looks like rune frontier but with monster girls its a whole new thing for me which is good.

It does have a lots of potential and so far from dozens of h-games i saw on patreon this 1 is the best so far, for me at least. And this might be the 1st games on patreon which i subscribe to.