Hey folks!

Starting today, I'd like to make a monthly post about how the development of Rivencliff is going and I figured I start with giving some explanation as what exactly Rivencliff is, what Sunbath, Sunset, Cataract are so there is a good base line for everyone to understand what I am doing here!

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Rivencliff

Alright, so what is Rivencliff? Rivencliff is the main story that I would like to eventually develop and is about Buru, a compassionate bull with healing powers, who has found his place in the peaceful village of Rivencliff, which is nestled within a lush valley.

The village, a melting pot of cultures and customs, is where he honed his abilities and forged his deep connections with the community. However, the end of his relationship with Taro, his first boyfriend, has left Buru heartbroken and questioning the true nature of love.

Determined to find answers, Buru embarks on a journey that takes him across breathtaking landscapes, from snow-capped mountains to sun-drenched coastlines. He immerses himself in diverse cultures, learning about their unique perspectives on love, relationships, and commitment. As he travels, Buru encounters a variety of captivating characters, including wise elders, passionate artists, and kind-hearted strangers.
During this time, he also gains insight into the gay hookup culture, a lifestyle that focuses on easy, anonymous, and convenient encounters.

While the gay hookup culture provides short-term excitement, Buru comes to realize its limitations, such as leaving him inexperienced in forming deeper connections and navigating the complexities of dating and long-term relationships.
This realization prompts Buru to reassess his priorities and seek more meaningful connections with those around him, including the wise and intriguing individuals he meets on his journey, who share their wisdom and life experiences with him.

One day, while exploring the bustling market of a vibrant city, Buru meets a charming and enigmatic individual named Kael. Their instant connection surprises Buru, and he's drawn to Kael's warm nature, intelligence, and sense of humor. As they spend time together, Kael helps Buru understand the complexities of love, encouraging him to be more open and vulnerable.

As Buru continues to travel and learn, he discovers the importance of trust, forgiveness, and acceptance in love. His experiences help him grow, both as an individual and in his relationships, as he learns to balance his personal values with the needs and desires of others. The friendships and bonds he forms along the way teach him the beauty of platonic love, familial love, and self-love, and how each contributes to a fulfilling and balanced life.

Upon returning to his village, Buru applies the wisdom he's gained to create more meaningful connections with his community and those he holds dear. He also begins a new chapter with Kael, exploring the depths of their love for each other and the world around them. Their relationship serves as a testament to the transformative power of love, vulnerability, and understanding. So, in short, Rivencliff covers:

• The exploration of various forms of love
• Personal growth and self-discovery through relationships
• Balancing personal values within said relationships
• The power of vulnerability and emotional connection
• Trust, forgiveness, and acceptance in love

This is a massive undertaking. The first chapter of Rivencliff has been completely written already (introducing a lot of new characters!), but creating a game of this scope, given the way I make art (3D) is expensive.

Characters need to be sculpted, textured, optimized and rigged. Each character can cost anywhere between $500-$2000 (depending on the artist, quality of the rig, complexity of the clothes etc.), and I already ran through roughly $15000 in the past 2 years getting characters created (sometimes multiple times), research and development. I haven't had a job in a year (which finally changes in March), so I'm out of budget. I hope with the new job I can start saving up money again and get this project moving forward. Until that happens, we have a couple other projects to look at:

Rivencliff: Sunbath

In Rivencliff: Sunbath Buru meets Lunjy, one of the barkeepers of the tavern, after he invited Buru to meet him at a secret spot he has in the forest, where Buru and Lunjy get to know each other better and explore all "secret spots" Lunjy has to offer.

It's a 15-20 minute short story that served a couple of purposes:

• Putting the investment and research to a test.
• Establishing a (first) creation pipeline.
• Finally getting something done.

I am quite happy with how Sunbath went. I learned a lot of things about making Visual Novels, improved my art in the process and post-mortem noted what could go better next time, which brings us to our current project:

Rivencliff: Sunset

Sunset continues where Sunbath ended with Buru and Lunjy enjoying each other in the forest. In Sunset Buru wakes up noticing his clothes are missing.

Buru has to make his way back to town and through his adventure of trying to avoid getting scene, he starts to notice that is kinda into it. The idea that he could be seen naked outside arouses him and he's struggling to his keep massive dick down so he can focus on getting home, where...well, you'll figure out soon enough. ;)

With Sunset I want to address some of the things I noticed during the development of Sunbath, but also introduce some new things:

• I'd like to back the backgrounds animated in-game. The images / clips were also rendered in Unreal Engine before where the foliage was already affected by wind, but since I rendered out images, you never got to see that.
• Improve mobile game experience and giving it more attention while development, especially while testing and in UI / UX design.
• Make it possible for iOS users to play the game. Either through AltStore PAL (how Epic Games distributes Fortnite to iOS users in the EU) or a web-version that is optimized for mobile first.
• Treat the development of the game closer to a movie production than a game production, meaning that I'll write a proper screenplay, think about camera angles, shot progression etc.
• Improve music selection and introduce SFX.

Patrons can also visit the Watchtower, a website where you can see production progress like you could with a movie production.

• You can see all planned shots and their most recent thumbnail.
• You can see an "editorial" which is basically all clips of the game stitched together and go through time.
• You can see the progress of each shot in the diagram at the bottom. Blue means WIP, Green means Done, Grey / Nothing means not started yet.

Rivencliff: Cataract

Rivencliff: Cataract is going to be a very short story that has been written by dear friend of mine and features Biff, The Moose! In this story Buru puts his camp down while traveling and meets Biff while taking a shower under the waterfall! What happens next, well, you can imagine! ;)

This project will be implemented using a custom "engine" that runs exclusively in the browser and is optimized for both mobile and desktop! I find RenPy for web too slow and heavy so I wanted to introduce something new for stories that do not have that many gameplay requirements.

The story for this is completely written and waiting for me to be tackled after Sunset.

This is it for the introduction of all the stories that are in the pipeline at the moment. I would like to take a small moment to talk about how these stories are financed.

The Ugly Talk: Business

As mentioned before, these stories not only take lots of time to create, but also lots of money. The main reasons as to why that is the case are:

• I prefer to work with people who are experts in their field.
• I can not be an expert in all fields required to make a good game.
• I insist that people who contribute to this project are paid fairly.

The main income source for these projects are my job from which I can build up savings and then pay for:

• 3D characters. (incl. sculpting, texturing, rigging)
• A writer to write a compelling and interesting story.
• Any assets used (Environment, SFX, etc.)

Any mangement, directing, programming, infrastructure ("IT work"), character posing, rendering and editing are done by myself and "just" cost time for the most part.

Given this, the way I want to handle support and monetization is as followed:

• Patrons will be granted access to any In-Development / Alpha builds (should I create them) as well as finished games on itch.io. Access to the game on itch.io will NOT be revoked once your membership ends, though you will not be granted access to new games that release after your membership ends.
• After the game has completed development and the first version is published, that game will be sold on itch.io for a yet-to-be-determined price. Patrons will not require to pay for a copy of the game as they will be granted access automatically, by linking their Patreon account with their itch.io account.

I do not wish to create a monolith game that will continously create updates only for Patrons. Games will be created with their intended scope and then released.

Subsequent updates will only be for performance improvements, bug fixes or polishing of existing content.

Should additional content be created for a single game (i.e. chapters), they'll likely be distributed as DLCs, although I need to figure out how to do that with itch.io in mind.

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Alright, biiig wall of text. But that should cover where Rivencliff as a whole is right now. Next week I will post some more Story + Image bits for Patrons, so stay tuned for that! I hope you have a great weekend!

Sincerely,
Buru