September 2, 2019
Fall of Eden
101 Comments

Hello, Alder here.

TLDR: While it’s been a long time, I’ve been doing some Quality of Life work on FoE lately that I will release in the near future pending some testing. I will try to produce more content for the game in coming months, but I’m not moving the Patreon back to monthly quite yet.

Where to begin… as I’m posting this both on Patreon and fenoxo.com (where the game has been hosted courtesy of Fen), I figure I’d give a bit of a recap for those who don’t know what Fall of Eden is, or who I am. Fall of Eden, or FoE for short, is my take on a text-based fantasy smut game, heavily inspired by the original Corruption of Champions.

Active development started somewhere around March 2014 and went on into 2016 when the project went on hiatus. Since then the game has only had a few minor updates as I dealt with IRL stuff like work and health issues. I haven’t been very good with posting updates, either on fenoxo.com or on Patreon, mostly because there largely haven’t been any progress during said time period. The game is considered abandoned by the Internet at large, for good reason.

This brings us to the last month or two, when I’ve begun to seriously work on Fall of Eden again. It’s been years at this point, so I was a bit rusty with the code base. I started working on some mechanical improvements, but quickly hit some hurdles due to some rather wonky code. I shifted gears to upgrading the code base to something more manageable, and before I knew I’d rewritten the entire thing in TypeScript/ES6, putting me on much better footing for future updates.

Beyond the backend changes, I’ve spent some time making general Quality of Life updates, including streamlining the combat engine, cleaning up a bunch of scenes and made improvements to the game’s introduction.

The crux of this is, of course, that if I’ve done my job properly, the end user won’t see much difference in their experience playing the game (if you doubt that it’s there, you are free to check out the sheer amount of commits I’ve made to the FoE git repo in the recent month or two). Not much to see in the way of new content yet unfortunately, but it’s something I hope to be able to rectify in the coming months.

My most immediate concern is to fill out some placeholders that’s been around since the beginning. Empty/incomplete low level combat encounters, interactions with early game NPCs and the like. I don’t want to move into Act 2 with so many threads still hanging around unfinished.

To start with, I will be working on my own. Though I do eventually want to get back to working with a team, I want to produce some writing of my own again first. Much like with the players, I have to prove that I’m actually invested in working on the game to potential writers.

I’ll try to maintain posting updates once a month, and at the very least maintain posting even if I don’t have anything to show. I’ll still be continuing working my regular full-time job for the foreseeable future, so my time on FoE might be limited (most of my recent work was done during my vacation).

Finally, I need to mention the Patreon/monetization for FoE. When the game went on hiatus, I moved payments from monthly to per-submission, and while I’ve made a few minor updates over the years, none of them have been monetized since early 2016. For the time being it’s going to stay that way.

While the 0.5 update involved quite a lot of work, I don’t feel the minimal amount of content in it justifies monetizing it out of the blue, so I won’t. That said, whenever I release an update to FoE next, it will be, so take a moment to consider if you want to be backing me or not going forward. I can do nothing but thank the people who’ve stuck around through all the silence, and hope for your continued support.

For the moment, the Patreon will stay on per-update until I feel I can keep a monthly release schedule. I’ll also be reviewing and revising the Patreon reward tiers/goals in the near future.

The 0.5 update of Fall of Eden will be released to the public on Saturday the 7th of September. It will be released on Patreon the same time that this blog post is released, but might initially contain some bugs.