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Q&A (Winter 2025 edition)
🕑 Added 2025-03-03 14:52:34 +0000 UTCHey, hey, people,
What's up? How are you all doing? We are grateful. Grateful because Final Orginity and the Ropo-community keep growing (we're now over 1000 on Discord and have more than 200 paying patrons!).
To show a bit of appreciation for all the love and support you've been sending us, today we're releasing this post with the Q&A, questions and answers, we've gathered over the past few weeks.
This time, we've selected a total of 10 questions. We'll answer them honestly:
1. Does the ropo team work daily for the game's development? (Geo)
Salamin. Good question! Everyone has to make a living, and I've chosen the hard path: founding a video game company without any resources. Luckily, I've managed to build a lifestyle that helps me with that. I'm a part-time Spanish teacher at a design school, and I also have my screenwriting projects. So, at least 3 days a week, I dedicate myself fully to the development of Final Orginity.
That said, making a game is a full-time commitment (especially near releases!). It involves a lot: designing events, writing dialogues, coordinating with international peeps like Xer, and managing a growing community. Developing Final Orginity is a constant challenge, but every effort is worth it.
SpaceSandwich. Working on the game can be in several ways, can be active like sitting down and drawing or programming, or passive like planning, deciding the story, communicating with the team about what to do. The latter is definitely a daily thing and we always have the game in our heads, even if we don’t do the same tasks every day. I mainly spend 3 or 4 days a week actually drawing and the rest of the week I stay in touch with the team helping or planning while I do my own stuff.
Xerlexer. While I don't put in nearly as many hours as the other two, I do my part in the little moments I can muster. Everyday I am thinking of ideas and concepts, and I do my work on my phone. So I am able to freely jump on and off projects whenever I want. Everyday I do a little something during lunch breaks at work, or when I'm somewhere bored. A little everyday. Though I might start setting time apart to work on my own stuff.
2. Just curious, but when developing Final Orginity, I wonder which part of the development process that can be considered the most labour intensive/time consuming? (Drawing the art, Animating the art, Story/scenario/dialogue writing, Programming, Musics and SFXs, Beta testing/bugs squashing) (Tomner)
Salamin. Even though we divide the tasks you mentioned and it's not easy to compare processes, I'll try to make a ranking of what takes us the most time to what takes us the least time (I’m adding marketing to the list):
1. Drawing the art / animating the art.
1b. Story/scenario/dialogue writing.
3. Programming.
4. Marketing (patreon, itch.io, discord, twitter).
5. Beta testing/bugs squashing.
6. Music and sfxs.
Space. I’d say I agree with Salamin’s list since we basically have 2 (Me and Xer) people working on the first point alone (art) while Sala works mainly on 1b 3, and 4 (writing, programming and marketing) which kinda go hand in hand the way the engine works. He also does 6 (sound) but that’s like, the final day task or while testing.
Xerlexer. I mean I don't have much to add ahaha. They pretty much nailed it on the head. Though I think art and Programming might be interchangeable. Especially when we get that one bug that eludes us.
3. Who the best girl other than Amy?And rank them from 1 to 3 or 5. (Vision)
Salamin. Okay, I’ll make a top 3 rank (without Amy) for you: Kylia, Jenny and my underdog will be Rachel (Lazlo’s Roomie).
Space. My current top 3 might be Rebecca the slave girl, Madame Figue and Jenny? This can change after more characters come or existing ones get some spotlight though.
Xerlexer. OH BOY. Here we go. Easily, Munga, Anya, Jenny, Rachel. Can you tell my type? Ahaha.
4. Are you thinking about adding new paths in future? (Gänsehose)
Salamin. Main (tenant) route, slave route and military route will be the three of them so far. Anyway, we have some ideas to make some new subpaths / pseudo-paths in the long term. Amy with the blue church would be a good example for that.
Space. I don’t know about doing any major branching for some time, I think we’d rather focus on giving the player exploration options inside of the ones that already exist (I think some people mistake options as whole paths but we only count the ones that are clearly giving you completely different stories from the others, which like Sala said are tenant, slave, and guard), If we think of a fourth route it would have to be different enough to justify it, otherwise it’ll just be offering something to explore from any route
Xerlexer. I mean. There ya go ahaha. I am eager to help the lads with the new subpaths if we ever get to them.
Last week Salamin saw Portobello mushrooms in the supermarket. Of course he had to buy them!
5. If Final Orginity is finished will you register it to sites or apps like Steam and other game site/ If you do whats your price. (Vision)
Salamin. Our main quest is to finish Final Orginity. We want to sell the full game in Steam some day. I can’t say the price but I hope it’ll be affordable… IDK, maybe 30.00$?
Xerlexer: Steam would be pretty cool, especially with how accepting they are with these types of games. If I were to name a price, I base it on the length of the game. Hard to say with what we have so far. But a decent price imo is 15~$? Maybe 20, but that's if it proves to be HUGE.
Space: We agreed that we want to put it on steam and I suppose somewhere between 20$ and 30$ would make sense from the games I’ve gotten from there
6. How far would you consider the games progress? Or will it be more of a spontaneous story? (Gänsehose)
Space. The game is neither fully spontaneous nor fully planned, we’ve written down things that we want to do in the future and have an idea of Amy’s arc, we can estimate how far we are with that.
For the main route, Amy’s arc is in like the second third of the story because she’s in a calm point and from here we’d probably see her get into more danger entering the final third of the story? But that isn’t the same as how long it would take, that’s way less predictable.
Salamin. Like Space said, it’s a mix of both. Usually at night, when my brain gets more active, I come up with ideas for the story of Final Orginity and I write down in a Google docs I share with Space and Xer. That document is currently 40 pages long, and it includes a summary of events we want to include sooner or later. Because of that, we have a general path to follow, but there’s always room for new ideas along the way, and we can add them at the last minute while working on each version. Right now I'd say we are at the half of the main story.
7. What's your goal for this year? (Geo)
Salamin. Our goal for this year is to keep releasing juicy updates full of content every 3 or 4 months. We wish we could take less time to develop each update (we have MANY stuff planned!), but we'd need more help for that. Hopefully, we can grow in that aspect this year. As for numbers, even though the game hasn't "exploded" yet, it continues to grow in fans and revenue. I hope this trend continues for this year.
Space. Well our goal for Final Orginity is to continue making it. I predict by the end of the year we could update all three main routes and if the story advances enough, maybe see more than one new area in St. Polla. As for a personal goal, I gotta say Final Orginity isn’t the only thing in my creative mind right now, there is a game in my head, but I don’t want to take away time from Final Orginity now so who knows, time will tell when I’m able to do it.
Xerlexer. I'm gonna continue to help the lads with as much as I am able to. Hopefully we’ll dig into more meaty parts of the stories and scenes. :]
8. Which path is next? (Justice)
Space. Right now we are continuing with the same events from last version, the red district. After that we should do something with the slave route.
Salamin. Aside from what Space said, I want to add that the next version not only expands the main storyline but also brings a lot of character development, especially for Amy and Frank.
9. Is Elden Ring worth playing? (K)
Salamin. If you are not use to any souls-like (I am NOT) and don’t mind dying after every serious fight (I do), then why not? But, to be fair, after few hours of gameplay and dozens of deaths I can say it’s visually stunning indeed. I’m sure Xerlexer could give you a better feedback.
Xerlexer. As someone who has beaten the game. If you can manage to learn the game and get past the difficult, and in fact relish in the challenge, it's a fantastic game. Beautiful in many regards.
10. If the ropo team never started developing final orginity what the members would be doing now? (Geo)
Space. Who knows, Assuming I still met Salamin, perhaps we would be trying to get funding for something like a non-nsfw game or a cartoon but regardless I’d probably be forced to do at least something else like working at a printing office doing layout design or something like that and not having much free time to dedicate myself to my passion but hoping the opportunity comes.
Salamin. I would be a full time Spanish teacher with no major dreams and hopes. In that scenario I’d try anyway to participate in audiovisual projects as a screenwriter.
Xerlexer. Probably try to make something of my own, maybe. Become a dedicated NSFW animator or solo game dev. Hard to tell.
Frank is ready for the Red Light District... What about you?
Well, folks, that’s it! These were the questions you sent us, along with our honest answers. You can’t complain, guys: we’ve been totally upfront with you.
Now, it's back to work! Very soon, we’ll be posting the first Progress Report for the next version, which will be exclusive to our paying patrons. But before that, you’ll get another post revealing one more surprise. That, however, will be for another day...
In the meantime, you know the drill: take care, be super, super happy, and see you in the next post,
Ropo
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greeshy
Also is a walkthrough going to be available for 0.4.3? Just a bit of a completionist here.
