Hello everyone! As many of you have seen from the previous news post, I have officially bought HoFa! I am glad to have you all here and I am ready to saddle up, take HoFa by the reins and gallop into a new chapter together. Today's update is all about providing context and sharing current plans. I expect an update later this week to go over some bug fixes.

💵 The HoFa Purchase

Bedouin and I have worked the last few weeks on a purchase agreement and after signing paperwork and paying my dues, HoFa is officially under new ownership. I am extremely excited for this next chapter and am glad to have so many of you coming along with me. I am fully committed to HoFas success and over the next few weeks/months I hope to tie up many loose ends and squash lots of bugs. All that said, I have a large backlog of dev work to pay for and bills to pay so resub if you feel so inclined. ;)

💪 My Commitment to HoFa

My goal is to create stability for HoFa. The game has had its ups and downs but a game works best with consistent planning and dedication. Currently, HoFa is my full-time job and therefore has my full attention. Thankfully, I know the ins and outs of the game and the processes that stability shouldn’t be too far away. However, there is code and the business aspect to learn. As I stumble around please excuse any slow replies or lack of knowledge on my part. I’m figuring things out as I go and hope to learn quickly! 

🌟 What I’m Promising You

Yes, I’m going to make promises and only those I know I can keep. However, many things depend on my ability to hire devs who do good work and/or my ability to code. Yes, I can half way code a thing or two. Thank you YouTube university! While we are all here I want to put a few big promises out there to you because I strongly believe in transparency and want to set the stage for our next chapter.

First, both Roze and ERA are continuing the HoFa journey with me and have been a huge help to me during this process. I have full faith in their ability to help tidy up the game and build the community and new features. They are a couple of rockstars and I’m more than happy to have them. If you see them around, show them some love!

Second, I am in contact with all of our current and former artists and working with them on new contracts. All of the artists who have worked on HoFa have been absolute gems to work with and I believe in treating them well. All artists who sign contracts to work on HoFa will be paid $20+/hr plus a % of merch profits for all original works. This means art is a large expense and I expect it to use up ~30% of HoFas budget per month. Art goal #1 is to finish and release the campaign breeds ASAP. Goal #2 is to work on the large back log of unreleased art.

Third, HoFa never will use AI in any aspect of the creative process. In the past this had come up and I have always (and for ever will be) opposed to using AI to replace creative jobs. In an ideal world we all would spend our time as creatives and removing the human from that process just makes for uninspiring, stolen, and cheap work. That's just to name only a few of the many issues AI has. No art in HoFa has used AI and all work is 100% original. 

Lastly, I am in contact with several devs for work on the game. Getting them set up and bugs fixed is going to take more time than fixing image bugs and anything I can do in the admin panel. The game has 5 pages of bugs with about half of them image related. The other half I estimate to be at least 100 dev hours of work. That being said, I expect to put about 50% of HoFas monthly profits into paying devs to fix our bug issues. Getting bug work finished will be the most costly and time-consuming process. Once we have new devs set up and a good work flow in place we are aiming to have all current bugs squashed by the end of February. This greatly depends on game income so bug squashing may vary in frequency and completion date moved back.

For full transparency and because I know y’all are curious, I legally can’t tell you how much I paid for the game but my wallet is much emptier and my debts are high. All income will be going toward paying artists, devs, and what's left of my debt. 

✨ A New Direction

With everything having to be transferred over to me and plans realigned, I wanted to give a rough idea of what to expect from now until the end of February.

• Fix major game-breaking bugs, specifically the lag issue. I’ve already checked the error log for the lag and have found the issue. I have several devs ready to do work as that comes in.
• Release all campaign breeds and fix any currently broken campaign breed images. This is at the top of the art to-do list. I expect to release several of these back-to-back.
• Redo the help site. The majority of this is done thanks to our wonderful helpers. It just needs to be built and launched. I hope to have this finished by the end of November.
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💬 Discord

We are transitioning back to the original HoFa Discord. Come on over and join us as we chat abut HoFa, other games, and have an all-around good time. To join use this invite link: https://discord.gg/rctT9fN5jY

I look forward to being back here with more of an update soon!

Cheers,

Curly