I received a backer only update from AJ Tilley through Beach Bounce announcing a change to his company. How this will affect current and future projects is beyond me but it sounds as a weird decision at this point in time. Particularly with regards to his track record. It may work out and it may make things worse. Only time will tell. Here’s the basic gist of what was mentioned.
AJ Tilley is splitting his company up into two arms, one being keeping AJTilley.com as a publisher of third party visual novels and the other being called Dharker Studio, his new development studio. It’s not unheard of to split a company into two entities to differentiate each other, but the update makes it sound as if this is needed to make sure that everything gets pushed out in a timely and productive manner.
He continues to claim that he’s released “several games” so far but as yet only 2 2/3 have been released, with one or two in early access. Claiming that things have “not always gone well as splitting yourself between two important tasks can be overwhelming.” Maybe this is why development seems to be going so slowly. He has admitted to making several mistakes with games like Beach Bounce, citing an unedited script and the decision to go episodic among them.
Dharker Studio will be breaking off completely from AJ Tilley’s main site, which can mean a number of things. Things which I’d rather not discuss as the actual reason could be way off from my own thoughts on the matter. Suffice it to say, this split may be beneficial towards the still outstanding titles or it could just be a way to sweep the mistakes under the rug. Either way, time will tell.
This is of course a big change not just in how we develop game but will also affect how we fund them going forward but our hope and belief is that this is the right way to put the past behind us, learn from those mistakes and move forward to make better games that our supporters can enjoy.
Wow this could actually go either way O_O
Cutting in two, one useless thing. I wonder if we’ll get a new definition for nothingness.
Well some people back AJ for their games and not the games other people have developed. Before this line wasn’t always so clear. There is sometimes the fault of the developer then there is the fault as a publisher. Whilst work with AJtilley as a publisher will continue on working with other developers for now, some well known and some not so much. Dharker Studio will only be listed under their own products.
Beach bounce isn’t being brushed under the rug with a new announcement regarding this post further on their website. A remaster of it will be coming some time next year.
http://www.ajtilley.com/18-frontpage-articles/73-split-information.html
I Joined the team 7 days ago to help improve the PR/Marketing in certain sectors. Not everything is up to me but I’l be around to help Improve things both publicly and internally for as long as this relation works. I will do my best to help things be more transparent in the future. I’ve been helping out the EVN/JVN industry since mid 2014 and won’t be stopping here.
Thank you for commenting. Lately the news regarding AJ Tilley and all of the current and future projects have been shady at best. It’s hard to pick out the truths from the half truths to the bold-faced lies. And I caught the link from the Beach Bounce update. I just read through it and think it’s worthy of an article in and of itself to at least try to explain the reasoning behind the split.
This is a line of thought of mine from my knowledge of Crowdfunding.
From personal opinion and knowledge with working with people that run Kickstarters. More often then not the funding raised is a fraction of a realistic sum that was actually needed. This tends to be a result of how the team is actually connected. Some crowdfunding campaigns run where everyone knows each other personally, others are where people are contracted in or quote a price for how much x amount of art or music it be will cost.
Even with these quotes you never always know if things won’t come up. Sometimes from my experience with vns especially. An artist might be hired but then take x2 times as long as initially planned or leave for something else all together(this is the worst that can happen and has happened to AJ once so far.
Most companies really most of them never actually say what % splits are in terms of the team involved. Or they don’t say how much they’ve spent so far or will have to spend even if kickstarter succeeds.
Also Kickstarters are predominantly done on a USD rate and we look at those sums of money equivalent to our usual expectations. Projects can chose to be cheap in order to get past some of these needs and when I say cheap I know certain studios circumvent usual price issues by hiring in certain Asian countries. Numerous People involved in the Ajtilley brand (At least 3) are from the UK so the USD is a pretty tricky currency.
In another comment somebody compared Sekai & Ajtilley whereas this is the difference between funding a translation(already know what your getting) & funding a game production in most circumstances.
Some vn projects out there have teams where people work at a pretty equal pace however there are outlier cases where the writer has a lot more free time or the programmer etc. Especially when you have one person being full time and one person part time. In many cases this tends to mean that person with more time goes to work for 2-3 other studios or more.
P.S you can’t find the patreon because its name has been changed to reflect the Studio name.