Subverse News

Hello everyone!

It's been a busy two weeks here at the studio - I'm back to my usual 80-hour a week schedule, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, no days off - trying to organize everything across the studio and getting the last of the new pre-production duties out of the way. As a director you have to work these kinds of hours and lead by example otherwise you really cannot ask the same of your team when the going gets tough. Burn-out is not really an issue since it's an honor to work on such an amazing project, but I hope to dial it back a bit once production gets into full swing and departments become self-sufficient.

Here's a rundown of what we've been doing since the last update:



We've expanded the game from a 3-chapter game to a 10+ chapter game, so a lot of the ending and third act is still a work in progress - but we've made amazing progress on the script so far and we're on course to have it ready for recording well ahead of time. We're also in the process of headhunting an additional writer to help with the onboard dialogue sequences. This new writer will take a bit of weight off Kristoff and myself in terms of the writing load. We also hope the new writer will vary it up with a more feminine tone as well, instead of the usual testosterone-fueled fuckery.





The Mantic bestiary is expanding by the day, and thanks to the hard work of Dzung and his team alongside our new modeler, we have alien dicks galore! We're also cleaning up some of the existing models and making them more consistent with our art direction. Anything else we don't have time for will be supplemented by buying them off the trusty Unreal Marketplace and corrupting them, in true StudioFOW fashion.





Elaisha is getting finished up rigging-wise (the hair is fucking insane) and she'll be all good to go next week. Dzung and Portsman are working on the outfit for the next waifu so we're well on schedule here. The Smenchkin, whilst not a waifu (thank god) is also going to be ready by the end of June. I can't wait to share some screenshots of this critter with you guys!





We've synced our cloud storage and updated our GitHub repository to make sure its production-ready for the devs. We have a new chain of command established for ferrying assets across as well as complete backup system to prevent any mishaps when Manski's obese, 20kilo monster of a cat chews on our cables.




Basic documentation is now in place for the new devs coming onboard - this will enable them to get their bearings quicker as well as be a point of reference for the team internally. We hope to expand the documentation in the coming weeks.




The animators are pleased to be experiencing the full power of DEMI's butthole. Very pleased.




Steam keys are now being sent out in waves, over 30,000 of you have already activated your copies which is awesome. If for some reason you don't receive a key - check your spam/junk folder. Then double check it again. Then triple-check it. 99% of the time the key email is in your spam folder, 1% of the time it's an actual error. Keep in mind we send keys to the email address associated with your Kickstarter account. If by chance you do have an actual problem please email [email protected] with your issue and she will sort it out for you.




I've just returned from a crazy, 3-day storyboarding session in London where we sketched out about 300 shots for the new cinematics that were added as part of the Kickstarter goal. These cinematics are going to be kickass in every sense of the word and will make you all proud to be supporting the game.




We appreciate your support and will see you for the next page of our Dev Diary!

- Studio FOW

Hello pervs and welcome to our new Dev Diary series, where we'll be detailing some of the behind the scenes stuff during the making of everyone's favorite space RPG fuckfest.

I'll try and keep the techno-babble to a minimum and make this a fun and brief overview of what we've been working on. We'll aim to have a diary on the 14th and 28th of each month so this will be a fortnightly affair! I'm DC the creative director of the project, and I'll be walking you through everything this week.





All the souls have been collected inside Fow-Chan's jar, and we're happy to report that most of you made it intact...for those that didn't, never fear - you can still support Subverse when we launch on Steam, so even if you're not interested in playing an Early Access game you can support the devs' pizza addiction that way.

We've sent out the surveys (20£+) and most of you have responded, but some of you have not, so please check your emails that you signed up with as there may something waiting for you in there! I noticed there's a massive number of Curious Colonists - you guys are gonna have to bear with us until we get through it all sometime next month.

Keys are on the way! We've been in touch with Steam support about sending out a large volume of keys and we hope to be pressing the giant red button very soon. Fow-Chan and her team will be handling the key allocation so you're in good hands.





Recruitment is underway! We've already begun filling positions for key artist personnel. Keep in mind that the final team size will be around 12 people, half of those being part-timers so it's still a tiny dev team and we're being careful about recruiting the right personnel. The primary thing I'm looking for as a Director when it comes to artists is attitude - I'm already getting price hikers sniffing around, trying to haggle overpriced rates because we've had a successful Kickstarter - these always go straight in the bin in favor of somebody who is showing me they're willing to be a part of this historic project at any cost.

Next month we'll be recruiting for dev positions so if you have extensive UE4 experience (no interns or "this will be my summer job" types please...) then keep an eye out for announcements regarding those. Once again, please be prepared to work and to work diligently - StudioFOW may be a team of degenerate neckbeards but we're also extremely hard workers - classic 90's crunch culture is the norm around here!

Casting calls for some of the roles have been sent out and our casting catgirl Samine is working super hard on getting a great cast together for the rest of the important roles. Hardcore fans will be pleased to know that you'll also be hearing the return of some StudioFOW favorites from our old movies to bring these babes to life!

For the rest of the positions, we'll be doing our usual headhunting which has worked extremely well for the studio in the past, so hopefully it does so again. We'll be introducing all the new members just before Early Access drops!

The Mangaka lineup has also turned into somewhat of an All-Star team, more on that next time!





Now that Kickstarter has closed, we'll be posting over on Steam as well (if you haven't seen us, be sure you've enabled Adult Content in your Steam preferences) and trying to keep a more active presence over there. That's not to mean you can't follow dev diaries on Kickstarter, we're just trying to keep it posted on multiple fronts for visibility. We've also had a lot of requests for curator copies and such but please request these closer to the early access date, we're not giving out curator keys at this stage or press copies to anybody whilst we still have backer keys to handle. Supporters are the priority, not curators.

The byproduct of all the milestones being smashed also means the scope of the game has slightly increased, which means we were hard at work this month expanding the script, animation pool, and doing general code cleanups to facilitate a couple of new modules. We've greatly enjoyed this process because we get to make the game we intend to, so getting Subverse into full gear is going to be really fun! The budget will also allow us to put an extra shine on certain things, which you perverts will no doubt enjoy... and also enable me to partake in some good old fashioned directorial wankery, like giant dick-laser space battles and a turtle with three ballsacks strapped to its chin.

Concerning the Boin Boin/Whale tiers, a lot of you haven't replied to these yet so please check your Kickstarter messages! I don't want you to miss out on these and we do have a time limit so get those requests in!

Due to the expanded scope, we'll also be a little more conservative with our media/video strategy. We don't want to blow our load too early by showing stuff that's not ready - and the game is changing rapidly each week so we'll probably settle a bit before drip feeding some hype stuff out on Youtube. I have some ideas on how to give the waifus a bit more limelight and it's gonna be awesome.





Oh yeah, have a slutty space-elf!




- DC & Fowchan