Hey everyone, Thaum here with a update on Chained Ether.

It's been a busy month--I guess that's every month, really--so I'm taking this opportunity while I have a fever to finally update everyone on Chained Ether. The super short version is that we just weren't satisfied with the quality of the game so far, and we're going to scrap Unity and rebuild the game portion in 2D on a more familiar platform. We'll be keeping pretty much everything except for the actual engine, and so hope to have a first public release in the last half of 2025.

For those of you interested in the full story, here we go. It all started with my first mistake: deciding to build the game in Unity. It wasn't a random decision, of course, but it just didn't work out as expected. At the time, several years ago now, Unity seemed to have several advantages that would make it a good option for CE...

• It's a 3D engine, and while CE gameplay is 2D, 3D could offer a big bump visually with the background, lighting, and especially effects.
• It's pretty much already set up to export builds for different platforms like Windows, Mac, and Android.
• The Unity ecosystem has a store with a lot of pre-built systems, effects, and visual elements, so we could avoid reinventing wheels.
• I had played some hybrid games made with Unity that were a mix of visual gameplay and VN style content, so we know it's at least possible.

The plan was originally to slowly learn Unity on the side while continuing to work on Accidental Woman primarily, and then be ready to go once it was time for development to start. Then Besty and I would be able to take our time building CE while the artist we hired completed work for the game. Right as this plan was starting, our third member at the time Anenn suddenly left. It's a long story, and I've posted all the details before so I won't rehash anything. It turned out to be a good thing for AW, but suddenly we went from three people to two, and that extra time we expected disappeared. We were still progressing, and had hired an artist in the spring of 2022. We were making progress in other areas, but the more vague "learn Unity" task just never got started. It's pretty hard to squeeze something like that into a few 30 minute chunks per month.

Right about the time we start thinking about how to fix this problem, our artist passed away at the end of summer in a car accident. That kind-of just derailed everything, as you'd expect. It was effectively a hiatus on CE where we still really liked the idea of it, but just weren't sure if we'd go forward with it or wait until some hypothetical point in the future such as being done with AW. It's rather difficult to find a reliable artist, so we figured that regardless of what we wanted to do, things would be on hiatus until we found a new one. Thanks to a bit of serendipity, we found a new artist and the end of 2022. She's been awesome to work with, too. So at the start of 2023 we suddenly found ourselves back at it.

We realized by that point, however, that there just wasn't any way that Besty or I could spend enough time away from AW to work on building CE in Unity. It's not like we could just skimp on our AW efforts, after all. The answer seemed to be hiring a dedicated Unity developer. A lot of checking out different developers, including a brief look a couple who worked on different platforms entirely, and we landed on a certain guy named zPoly who turned out to be a smooth talker and not much else. With a developer working on the Unity portion, I continued focusing on AW with brief excursions to get assets from 3D artists or work with our Artist on the characters.

It seemed to be going well at first, but by summer it was pretty obvious that things weren't going the way we expected. Unity seemed to have plenty of issues, and by our first milestone at the end of summer zPoly was nowhere close to having a minimally functional game that we agreed on. With so much of a Unity game being a mess of a hierarchy of GUI-based values, it's hard to check how much work has actually been done, particularly when you don't know anything about Unity. So we've got some videos of an airship moving around and some extremely basic stuff, along with plenty of reasons why there are issues doing A, B, or C. zPoly was quick to point out that a lot of the other items would be quick and easy by comparison, so things would start coming together a lot more quickly. He was was pretty persuasive, so we decided to give him six more months.

At this point in time, with all the work and just a little extra craziness in my personal life, keeping the status quo was a lot like putting off any big decisions. We figured zPoly wasn't the most motivated sort, but because there was so much for us to do that we wouldn't have been ready had the milestone been met anyway... we could deal with a slower speed.

Over the next six months we had wrapping up the futa expansion, family and holidays, some serious family issues for Besty, and generally the usual level of craziness we call life. During that period we found more issues with Unity and slow progress... and it probably isn't a surprise that we didn't hit that milestone on time. There was progress, but we still weren't at the point we expected to be six months before. At this point Besty and I discussed things, and actually came up with an alternative non-Unity plan (one we've since refined).

Deciding between continuing with Unity and zPoly, and dropping them in favor of a new approach wasn't an easy one. We found merit on both sides. Besty ended up mildly in favor of plan B, while I was still on the fence. Of course, zPoly made some persuasive arguments in favor of continuing in Unity, but it really came down to the sunk-cost fallacy. Something that you can apparently know all about but still walk right into. After paying zPoly for a year, spending money on various Unity store assets, meshes from 3d artists, and several other things... it was hard to accept it as a loss/failure and move on.

Part of this is probably because most of the money came out of my "AW paycheck", so I personally wasn't making much at all from AW during that year. I have always tried to use the money that comes in from people supporting AW to help pay for more AW, and not just as a personal revenue stream. Luckily I can support my family well with my day job, so I haven't had to choose between spending money on something important personally, and spending money on AW. We made it through the crazy inflation, and while we had to cut back on things like most people, we've been doing okay. Not making much money from all the work on AW for a year does give that investment in Unity/zPoly a lot more emotional weight though. And so we kept going for another six months. Obviously a bad decision in hindsight, but hopefully at least understandable.

zPoly didn't meet the target, of course, but at least at the end of October we had a minimally functional game. A lot of basic mechanics weren't in, but you could fly around, shoot stuff, and buy slaves. The problem was... it sucked. Absolutely almost zero effort in polish, basically the bare minimum. It took a bit to step back and appreciate it, as your judgement can be clouded when you're working on something for so long and invested in it. We sent a build to some close people, and they basically confirmed what we thought. We also sent all our files to a couple experts to evaluate what we had, which turned out to not be much. A mess, with plenty of things slapped on to look like progress was being made or that there was a real functioning system. It'd be faster to scrap what we had and start fresh than it would be to use it, assuming we could even find a dev willing to take the mess over.

I don't want to speculate whether zPoly was maliciously taking advantage of us, or if he was working vaguely in good faith but was incompetent; in the end it doesn't really matter. Ultimately, it's something I have to take responsibility for. It's like the saying goes: "fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice, shame on me." The experience is definitely something I've learned from, and it was certainly expensive enough in terms of money, time, and stress to make sure the lesson sticks.

Re-evaluating things, it was obvious that Chained Ether wasn't in a state to release. It has some cool things like an opening video and really neat city meshes, but we think putting it out there would only hurt its image. We still believe in the potential of the game and setting, but the execution wasn't up to snuff. So then we had to decide where to go from there, and our alternative plan is really the only thing that made sense. Not only was our Unity project a mess, Unity itself wasn't ideal. Assuming we were to start over from scratch with a new developer (not an appealing option, obviously), or one of us learns Unity and tries to rescue what we have, Unity just has a lot of problems for a game like Chained Ether.

• Despite a large variety of plugins and assets in the marketplace, there are very few that are actually relevant and an absence of some needed items. This is mostly because CE doesn't fall into the usual category of 3D game, platformer, or click-based game. Unity depends on plugins for a lot of basic functionality, and there's a whole array of issues stemming from multiple conflicting build pipelines and plugins that only support certain pipelines and Unity versions.
• Horrendous text support. While there are some VN plugins, they lack the functionality of something like Renpy, and have even less support for dynamic text or branch logic. This is a key point, because we got a taste of the effort involved in creating a markup language to write content that could then be parsed into scripts that could then be run through more code to turn into something functional and then finally actually imported into the VN module. Basically it was the opposite of what you'd want for a text-heavy game.
• The more recent craziness from Unity itself about charging developers for each install. Even though they walked it back in the end, the platform was suddenly a lot less appealing.

So we're going with Plan B. We have a solid array of art and content, a fully fleshed out game design, and several other things we can keep. We're going to build the game in 2D using technologies we're more familiar with. This way we can present an experience we can actually be proud of, and do so a lot more rapidly. Chained Ether is really an erotic setting full of lewd but meaningful stories, that also happens to have gameplay elements. The gameplay elements help mediate how the stories are presented and unfold, but ultimately it's a story-first experience. So we're going to prioritize that aspect of the game, so we can have a good text UI/UX, dynamic content, and ease of adding new content. I have to admit that while it's pretty cool visually to have rockets streaming across the screen trailing smoke and exploding against an enemy airship, it's not as important as smooth and fully functional gameplay.

When it comes down to it, the humble trifecta of html, css, and js make for a superb method of presenting dynamic content. Most text game engines utilize at least some of those technologies as a result. So many apps these days use node.js and the electron framework (such as Slack, Discord, Visual Studio Code, GitHub Desktop, Atom, 1Password, Dropbox, Figma, Notion, Postman, Skype, and many more), not only because it's easy to present content and make them visually appealing, but also because of cross-platform compatibility. Even Steam utilizes web technology for it's client (which originally was a lot more custom framework, but lately has been incorporating chromium and electron). So our plan is to follow the same route, utilizing the electron framework. We'll probably go with Phaser as our game engine, which will integrate nicely. Of course, we're still investigating the details.

Arcanist is going to use the money freed up to hire another person to work on AW (a pro writer), so we can keep up our fast pace and continue to make the game better and better. We're going to take our time with Chained Ether as a side project, With Besty and I keeping our focus primarily on AW as before. We've already got a big head start on a lot of the time-consuming things, and already have things like data structure designed, so we're hoping that things will go pretty quickly. I'm hesitant to make any promises on a time frame, particularly because our dedication to AW doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room if an obstacle causes something to take longer than expected. That said, I'm hoping we'll be able to get something awesome out in the last half of 2025.

If you made it all the way down here, thanks for reading. It really means a lot that you care enough about all the crazy shit we're doing to read all of this XD.