F95 FAQ Extravaganza!!!
Hello everyone! One of our demos was recently discussed in detail on F95 Zone, which is a forum for adult content connoisseurs of all kinds.
Thanks to everyone there for checking out our game!
We were happy to see the positive feedback but also took note of a lot of fair concerns about the project and wanted to take a moment to use those posts as a format to produce a fresh FAQ post for Tamer: King of Dinosaurs.
After all, it's been quite a while since we've done one and a lot has happened since then.
We'll go over the good stuff first and then the bad.
THE GOOD
WOW THESE BROS ARE ACTUALLY COLLABING WITH TAMER'S AUTHOR???
Of course! Michael-Scott Earle is not just the creator of Tamer: King of Dinosaurs (along with many other awesome harem book series like Star Justice, Monster Empire, Viking Runesmith, etc.), he's also the owner and co-founder of the studio.
MSE wanted to turn his books into games ever since he started writing them and through a series of events he managed to find our team. We immediately hit it off and started working together and hope that Tamer will be a success so we can turn his many other series into awesome adult games as well.
One of the primary reasons why we decided to work together is that we were totally disillusioned with the state of the adult gaming industry, especially on Patreon. Almost every major 3D project started over the past ten years is either suffering from poor management and extremely slow development, has been seemingly abandoned by the creators or is an outright scam.
The sad thing is some have been in development for nearly a decade and taken in literal millions of dollars in crowd funding and still haven't produced anything more than buggy demos.
We've been in development for less than three years with a relatively small budget and a team of only six full time employees plus a handful of temp contractors...yet we will launch a completed game early next year.
We hope to not only be successful with our project but to also set the bar higher for what supporters should be able to expect from adult dev teams moving forward.
WOW GREAT CUTSCENES THE VOICE ACTING IS FANTASTIC HOW???
Along with collaborating with MSE, we also worked with the original narrators of the book series - and not just for their voices. Being talented stage actors, they also did full body performance capture for the entire game.
We really can't stress enough how crazy it is that we as a very small team have a high-quality performance capture studio in-house.
Not only that but Tamer features over SIX AND A HALF HOURS of cutscenes woven throughout an even more substantial amount of gameplay content which is on par with AAA games like God of War fucking Ragnarok that had hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
THIS DEMO RUNS GREAT WHY NOT A BUGGY 10 FPS LIKE MOST PATREON GAMES???
Optimization is a core part of our studio culture. If we can't make it play well, we don't ship it.
Also, we consciously made the decision to shoot for a lower overall benchmark for the project because we wanted to cater to a substantial playerbase.
THE BAD
YOU ONLY ADDED ONE CHASE SCENE AFTER A YEAR WHY IS DEVELOPMENT SO SLOW HOLY SHIT GUYS THIS THING IS GOING TO BE ABANDONED FOR SURE WHY WHY WHY???
If you're a Patreon and have seen the supporter-only posts then you know that we've actually completed a lot of work on Tamer. There is zero chance this project is abandoned or doesn't see the light of day early next year.
The entire game's skeleton is already playable in a pre-alpha state from start to finish, meaning you can launch it from the main menu, watch the cutscenes, play all of the chase/race/combat sequences, gather items and craft, see character progression, etc.
We still have a lot of placeholders for these things however, and we have a lot of work to do putting it all together. However, at this point we're mostly just creating content, polishing and plugging those holes.
AN ALMOST 15-MINUTE CUTSCENE WHAT IN THE KAJIMA FUCK???
Don't worry! Despite being a story-driven game based on a NYT best selling novel, the average length of a Tamer cutscene is only two and a half minutes. The Day 3 Scene 3 scene included in the demo is one of three much longer scenes you see towards the start of the narrative that is meant to set up major plot points and character development arcs.
You can count the amount of long cutscenes in the game on one hand and this is the longest of them. In addition, we are going to cut this one up into chunks by the main game and make the later portions optionally accessible by interacting with the female characters in the cave.
All cutscenes will be skippable and also have an indicator on the skip option that tells you how long they are and how far through the scene you are at the current moment.
Also we want to assure everyone we already have English subtitles integrated into the game but haven't added them to the demo code yet. We hope to include Chinese language support by launch and hopefully a few others like Russian and Japanese as well but it might have to be post-launch content.
We're also working on cleaning up the audio as we know it's uneven at the moment.
WHY IS THE DEMO DOWNLOAD SO BIG FOR SUCH LITTLE CONTENT???
A fair point and the answer is simple - Tamer is a 3D project with detailed environments that use a lot of assets in every sequence and since we're a small team with a tight schedule we haven't done the kind of optimization needed to significantly reduce the download size of our demo as it would take time away from other development tasks.
The priority is finishing the game so our apologies to everyone around the world suffering with slow internet speeds. We're a globally diverse team and have all felt your pain at one point throughout our lives and travels.
However, rest assured the final download of the game will be fully optimized and won't be the monster mega-GB net-fucker you might fear it could become.
WHY IS THE CHASE SEQUENCE SPEAR ATTACK SO HARD TO HIT???
We agree, it was poorly implemented and we've already included a fix for it that will be present in later builds. There will also be a tutorial added at some point that makes what you need to do clear.
WHY ARE YOU USING STOCK ASSETS???
Truth be told, we don't like using stock assets but we need to be realistic.
We don't have a full-time environment or character modeler on staff and as much as we would love to go through the whole process of creating detailed concepts and nailing a cohesive, professionally directed look for everything in the game including the dinosaurs and world it's just not financially viable.
We have however spent time redressing bought assets as much as possible, such as our utahraptor that we've covered in feathers, scars and a new color scheme to make him fit the project better.
We've also rejected using AI to create our character models so every dollar spent has gone to an artist that made something with their own hands one way or another.
WHY CAN'T YOU FUCK AND/OR GET FUCKED BY DINOSAURS???
While we here at Ride the Lion Studios don't kink shame and welcome all scalies, furries, etc. to enjoy our game, Tamer's narrative is based on a vanillia harem book with no beasty banging. The only real fetish on display is love and creampies with hot alien babes that could technically classify as monster girls but are still more humanoid overall.
That's all for now! We again want to thank everyone for their interest in our project and welcome more feedback in the future as it's super helpful for the team.
Sincerely,
Rektor