Hi folks, Whry here, and I just wanted to take a moment to talk about what we’ve been doing with House of Tail.

Well, to understand what we have been doing, we need to explain some of where we were at a good while ago. The major thing there is- HoT sucked.

It was a neat idea when we started with it, and really, it was a test to see if we could do it. But- once we had played it some, and watched some of our friends play it, we could really see issues. This put us in a very odd situation. The original design was nothing more than a way to play with porn pinups. It was received fairly well, especially being an unfinished demo. We could slap some more characters in, finish out the story mode we were planning, and call it a day. We could have.

And- we could have shipped a game that none of us here were very happy with.

Instead, we looked at what we had, and what we could do with it. What would we want to do with it. The simple answer was, we wanted a game that we would like to play, and would enjoy sharing with friends. HoT, as it was, was not that game. I’m not going to say that it didn’t have its moments, but, overall it was not all that. Once we had decided that we were not comfortable putting out what we did not believe was our best, came the difficult decision of, what can we do with this?

I’m not going to lie, for a while I was thinking it would be best to just get the game out the door, so that we could move onto our next one. We have several ideas for games that we would love to get started on, but we also know that working full time on more than one game is a recipe for disaster for a small team. Could we just throw HoT out there, let it do as well as it could so that we could move onto our next idea?

We could have done that. But, we also realized, what happens when we are not happy with the direction the next game is taking? What happens when we feel like our art assets aren’t the best we can make them? What do we do when we aren’t making the games we want to play? Do we just start down a path of half finished games that we have rushed out the door so that we can jump to the next newest and brightest thing that crosses our path? Or do we look at what we have, decide if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing to the best of our abilities and focus on making it the best game we can?

We decided to do that. It’s not the easy path. It is most definitely not the short path. We are not even really sure it is the “right” path. But, we do feel it is the path we need to take to make sure that we can be proud of our games.

So- the real reason everyone has been reading through this- when will we see the finished product? I would love to have some nice hard date when we will be done. I would love to say that we have x number of days worth of bugs, coding, sprites to add, music to make and things like that still to do to be able to give you a time line. Unfortunately, just because I want to do something, does not mean that I can.

So instead, I will let you know the game will be done when it is done. We will try and make sure that before we consider this game done, it is the best game that we can make with what we have available. Does this mean it’s going to be a match for all the triple A games out there? Hey, we are a small team here and we do have to keep ourselves on a reasonable budget. But we will try and make it a game that you will want to play, that you will want to show to your friends, that is fun and enjoyable and an experience that you will be glad to have tried. We may fall short of that, but we do want to try.

It is for these reasons that we have been taking the time to work on this game, not to get something out of door as quick as possible, but to have a game that we can all be proud of. So that when we do finally say we are done, it will be something we will be glad to see go out the door, not something that we were trying to rub out by some arbitrary deadline.