Weekly report 63

Hi everybody.

Last week Chestnut and I had a lot of conversations about our design decisions for 0.5 and what we could have done differently. Since they may impact the future releases of the game, we want to share them with you.

Main Story updates

The last time we did the Main Story, we dedicated 2.5 updates to it (0.1, 0.2, and a bit of 0.3). Breaking the continuous story into chunks allowed us to have a shorter release timeline, but it reduced the sense of completion since the first part of Serena's quest (giving the message to Madeline and getting its reward) couldn't be achieved until 0.3.

After doing Myrtle's content for 0.4, we really liked how it had a satisfactory end and tried to create something similar for 0.5.

Now, although 0.5 finishes with a cliff-hanger that leads to the next part of the Main Story, I think we have managed to 'end' a chapter satisfactorily.

The cost, of course, has been that it's taking us longer to develop it than we had anticipated or planned, and this has led to several problems:

• the stress of constantly thinking that we're later than we had hoped
• the understandably higher expectation that people will have after an update takes several months to develop (if it's with me, I'd rather underpromise)
• the notion that some of our supporters may assume that taking this long will be the new norm for our future content releases as well

With the first two, we can't do much as we're already working as much as we can, and hopefully, the quality is good enough that you'll like it after the release. But we just want to let you all know and confirm that we don't plan for the future updates to take this long, and we'll release 0.5 as soon as it's ready.

We had planned to tell our side-stories using two quests (unless we see it doesn't work and we need three, of course), but we didn't have a similar plan for Main Stories. After working on 0.5, we're considering whether breaking up the future Main Story updates into two chunks will be a better design decision. It's something we're still thinking about, and we'll have to wait and see the response to 0.5, but we're conscious of alternative approaches.

Anyhow, do leave us a comment and let us know your thoughts about it.

Weekly report:

We have started a new way of editing/completing the content in that we begin from the beginning and finish everything until certain points in the story. One of those points was Simmone's content, and although it was almost done last week, on a second visit, there were many small, but I think important changes that we had to make to finish it, and that took much of our time last week (especially mine). We have begun work on the second chunk of edits and completion, and Chestnut has been working on the second sex scene (its presex). I won't need to rewrite anything new, but one of the scenes needs to be posed differently since we had created new facial expressions we didn't have earlier.

Next week's plan:

By the end of the next week, we want to have finished the second sex scene and have everything ready leading up to it. Then we'll start testing and fixing the third chunk of edits, including the third sex scene.

That's all we have.

Have a great weekend
Cheers