SID Gaming's Fifth Anniversary and State of the Studio - Public (Patreon)

We had our fifth anniversary as a gaming studio earlier this month. There were plans for a bigger celebration, but those had to be scrubbed for various reasons. Even so, we'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of our fans and especially our supporters for giving us your interest, feedback, and donations to encourage and enable us to continue making these great games.

As you may know, the artist for our flagship game Park After Dark completely dropped out of contact a few months ago. No one was more discouraged by this turn of events than we ourselves. After 4+ years of providing amazing and perfectly on-model content, they'll be greatly missed. It puts us in a tough spot, but we knew we weren't going to give up on this game, so we began reaching out to other artists who have interviewed with us before. Someone new has joined our team, and they are currently working on Kim Possible content for our next build. We made the decision to go in a different direction with them at first, in order to feel them out and let them practice mimicking the original style with some characters who did not quite fit the traditional D***y style in the first place. Once we've all built up a little more confidence, they'll return to finish the Pocahontas content and continue with more with our other established characters. The main writer and programmer for Park After Dark remain unchanged.

If you haven't heard the story by now, the artist responsible for Magixxx Conquest was a scammer from the start. They over-promised on their abilities (especially regarding timeline and animation skills) and disappeared completely immediately after collecting payment for the second, unfinished update. Since that game had barely had a chance to get going, we didn't know how to deal with the situation. Finding a new artist would mean either introducing a dissonant art style almost immediately after starting the game, or having them restart everything and taking perhaps months and cost sunk only just to redesign the large cast of characters. Instead, we placed the project on-hold, and would like to return to it one day with fresh eyes and a more positive attitude.

Our third game, Total Degeneracy Island, has been booming, receiving more interest and support than even PAD and giving us the perfect morale boost after everything else that's happened. This is a really fun game to work on, as we can get a little crazier with our scenarios since the source material is so bonkers to begin with. Our artist for this one is sharp, communicative, and always on-task, and since the writing follows a more linear plot, that usually gets done quickly as well. We're back to a normal release schedule and consistent content delivery thanks to TDI, and between talent aquisition and the advancements in the Ren'Py engine over the past five years, we've been able to elevate the overall experience of the game with more fun and engaging minigames, branching story paths, and of course animations. Everything is going smoothly here, and the next update will be ready before you know it!

We're always searching for new ideas and gathering inspiration, but we do not have plans to move forward with any additional projects until either PAD or TDI reaches its conclusion. There are plenty of other IPs that we'd love to parody, but since this is only a part-time passion project for everyone involved, we've achieved a comfortable workflow right where we are. We're always open to your feedback though, so make sure to keep sending in ideas for these or future games on our Discord or in the gameplay surveys we release after each and every build. We never would have gotten this far without you, our loyal fans, subscribers, and patrons, and we thank you for all of your support these past five years. There's plenty more excitement to come!

-SID Gaming

-P.S., regarding the current controversies with Steam and Itch.io: due to the nature of our games, they have never been on Steam and never will be. We will continue to upload new builds to Itch, but for now they have been "delisted", which means you'll need a direct link to the game pages, you won't be able to find them by typing the game names in directly. Luckily, Google is still your friend, and you can find all of our content just by searching for them and getting that direct link there.