Hey, everyone! Quick status report for you.
We're still a few days out from the first early access release of the next update. All the issues with payment processors and games getting delisted sidetracked me as I tried to figure out how best to navigate the situation.
I already put in place content toggles so you can choose what certain "taboo" topics you want to see. Turns out the content that payment processors consider unacceptable is even more extensive than I thought, meaning I'd have to code in even more options to address them all.
Taking into account just the content I already made togglable, it would be easy enough to turn off that content entirely. But that would make significant portions of the work I've done unplayable.
Another alternative would be to create a SFW version of the game but have a downloadable NSFW patch on another site. Another developer shared how to do so, so I know how, but the work involved would be pretty immense for a single person to do in a reasonable timeframe. Having a separate download might still run afoul of various platforms as well.
On top of it all, making these concessions could serve no purpose because one of the vaguely written rules is no "barely legal" themes. My guess is they mean games where characters are "18" but look much younger or are just written to seem much younger. It's also possible they mean any game with characters that are 18, no matter how they're presented. That would mean the entire game couldn't be hosted, period.
I was able to set my concerns aside slightly when Itch announced on Thursday that adult games can be relisted on their site as long as we don't accept payments for them. The game goes free on there after an early access period on Patreon, so the only payments I got from Itch were the occasional tip. Turning off the tip option made the game compliant again, and it can now be found on the site.
Since there's currently no issue with Patreon, I'm going to just go with my original plan (the existing content toggles) and hope things stay that way while going in a positive direction on other platforms. The distraction of all this (plus the house move I mentioned last time) did delay wrapping things up, but the next update is still just around the corner.
I don't necessarily want to dwell on this particular issue since I want my work and the discussion around it to be something to escape to. If you do want to learn more about what's going on with delisting games and payment processors, though, Aaryn of Straight!? fame wrote a good post about it that you can find here: Politics and Censorship:How Legal Games like Straight!? are getting Removed and Banned
Anyway, there's actual fun stuff to talk about, but I'm going to save that for the next status report, which will be post-early access release. For now, I'm heading back to work!