Dev Update/Notes #18 (LONG) (Contains Spoilers)

Contents:

1) Thank you!

2) E2 Survey

3) Dick & Selina Changes

4) My thoughts on E2

5) Public release for E2

6) E3 Development

1) Firstly, thank you so much to all of my subscribers for your generous support. I said it on the bronze release but you guys are entirely the reason why this game has a future and I am so grateful for you. Those of you who subscribed so early on to a brand new dev with just one episode to their name - I can't explain how much I appreciate you. And amazingly our community has grown significantly after E2's release, so a big welcome to everyone who is new here. You may be new but if Elmwood becomes as big as I aspire it to be, you'll still be some of my first ever supporters.

2) Thank you to everyone who has already filled out the survey! If you haven't, please check it out! It's 100% anonymous and every question is optional so you don't have to spend any longer on it than you want to. The results so far are already helping me quite a lot but I don't want to mention anything yet (with one exception) until we have everyone's responses. Also, last survey I analysed evey question in two very long posts. This time I may split that up much more and maybe review a pair of questions every day

3) But here's the exception. There's one thing from the survey that I'm very happy with. In the question asking whether you would mind if characters underwent changes during development, a very strong majority answered that they wouldn't mind at all and almost no one said that they would hate it. I'm really happy with this result because my ultimate goal is to produce the best final product of Elmwood that I can and this question is basically you giving me more freedom to try and achieve this. I'd rather admit that I did something wrong at this stage and improve it than sticking with something average that I know I can improve. So I am going to make 2 moderate changes in E3 - the protagonist's dick is going to slightly smaller (still big but not a nuclear weapon) and also a moderate update to Selina. Selina is going to have slightly smaller breasts and a brand new hairstyle that's very similar to the last one but looks much better imo. Selina doesn't even have the largest breasts in the game and I'm not looking at changing anyone else's I just think the new Selina looks much better overall, especially given her very skinny frame. I'm not looking to update any of the other girls at this stage but it's quite important for Selina's character that she is very attractive. Every Elmwood girl draws their power from different things. Some girls draw power from their social status or their intelligence or their charm but Selina's power comes from her appearance. All the Elmwood girls benefit from their looks but Selina uses hers to a much greater extent. So I was just a little bit disappointed in her attractiveness rating in the E1 survey which is why I think this change is needed. But I'm very happy with this change and I hope you guys are too. I know Selina was the favourite girl of some of you so I'm particularly interested in the feedback of those people - let me know if you prefer the new or the old. As for the dick, it was always a bit too crazy... It was 10+ inches in some scenes and I think it's probably people's biggest complaint about Elmwood. The biggest issue I have with it is how it impacts blowjobs and results in girls having to completely unhinge their jaw to take it. I do want the to protagonist to have big dick however and so I'm currently testing it at 8.5 inches but it's going to end up somewhere between 7.5-9 with a corresponding reduction in girth. I think 8.5 is within the bounds of realism while still looking excellent in sex scenes and even better than it's predecessor in BJ scenes. But this change is still a work in progress so it's not finalised.

Something I will make clear though - any changes like this will not be applied retrospectively to past episodes until at least the end of the first season of Elmwood (ep7) but probably the end of the game (ep21). What I mean by this is that I'm not going to go back and change how Selina looks in E1 for now (or the dick). I'm sure the bigger priority for you all at the moment is to keep moving forward and producing more episodes. As far as I'm aware people really don't like when AVN's go back and keep remastering the same content so I don't want to do that. We're just going to move forward with the new changes (unfortunately at a moderate cost to the game's immersion) and then either at the end of the season (e7) or at the end of the entire game (e21) I will go back and finally do this. I actually really like the idea of eventually going back and redoing E1 once the game is complete even if I didn't have any particular one thing to change. The thing about AVN's and especially a developer's first game is that the quality tends to get better as the game goes on as the dev has more experience. So I am planning to do that but only after e21 or e7 at the very earliest.

4) So let's talk about E2. (SPOILERS! SKIP IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED!) Overall, I get the impression that you guys were pretty happy with it. I received lots of very positive feedback and also some mixed feedback (both of which I am grateful for) but based off the current survey results and our Patreon community things are looking good. Our community has grown and our discord is more lively. We'll try to quantify the quality of E2 vs E1 when the survey closes but I don't want to skew any new responses by discussing it now.

But in terms of my personal views, I also have mixed feelings about it. First and foremost I am very proud of 90% of it and I'm extremely proud of it's existence. To me E1 was proof that I can start a game but E2 was proof that I can complete one. And E1 and E2 were created under very different conditions. E1 was essentially done at my leisure, obviously no one knew about Elmwood prior to E1 and so no one was really pressuring me to finish. When making E2 on the other hand, I had a bunch of amazing and incredibly generous supporters who of course wanted to see progress and want me to produce good content in a reasonable time frame (as you should). And I'm not complaining at all, you guys were incredibly supportive during the E2 development with many of you even telling me to relax a little. But unfortunately E2 was still a little rushed. At the end of June I kinda just recklessly pulled a release date out of my ass and had to work ridiculously hard to stick to that. And I just about managed to but a few things were pretty rushed, most notably the music, the mission with Nina, and there weren't any achievements to gain. The music was all arranged in a few hours and the infiltration into the psychology building was just a lot shorter than I originally wanted. On top of this there were also a number of small bugs on release, fortunately nothing that stopped you from seeing anything but just more bugs/spelling issues than I'm proud of. I'm so so grateful to everyone in the discord who helped with bug finding and grammar correction - you guys are such heroes and helped so much.

But with everything else I'm very happy. I did the sex scenes very early on so they weren't rushed at all and I'm happy with those. I'm especially happy that I managed to make some of those scenes a bit more complicated than the ones in E1. In Ella's scene you had enough skillpoints to use any of the level 3 cum perks on her so you saw the effects of Cum Drunk and Cum Selfie for the first time and I think I managed to do what I wanted there. And on the other hand Lydia's scene didn't involve any new perks but it was the most unique scene so far in the sense that there was an interruption during the scene, you then made a decision on whether you wanted Ella to stay, and then the scene continued while occasionally showing Ella or not depending on your choice. Not super complicated but something I'm fairly happy with and something that gives me experience for if I make something like this in future. Maybe there's an Elmwood girl who's going to love to watch you have sex with other girls... who knows... (and it's not Ella btw).

5) Occasionally I see messages and questions asking about a free release for E2. This has been quite a difficult decision for me and I've been a bit bad in just ignoring those questions because I couldn't decide on whether I wanted to do it and because I really need more subscribers. As I'm working on this full time, solo with no other income and having to live off my savings until I'm earning enough to match my living expenses, my decisions here do have to center around money or I wouldn't be able to survive or to produce the game. Previously I intended to have E1 serve as a demo of the game and then for E2 access and beyond to be exclusively via a Patreon subscription. But Elmwood is still a little under the radar of most AVN players and our community needs more exposure to thrive and for the end product to be as successful as possible. So after taking a look at some other developers' strategies and some careful thought I've decided to make a public release of episode 2. I could not be more grateful for my subscribers and I really hope you don't feel like you've paid for something you can now get for free because even though you paid for early access, you much more importantly funded the whole episode's production are the reason that there is an episode 2 and for that you are so so amazing. So I hope no one who has recently subscribed feels wronged by this decision but after looking at some other developers and some analysis I believe this is the best decision for Elmwood's long term success. I don't intend to make public releases of E3 or beyond but I do need to spread E2. So E2 will be released to free members on the 7th (3 days from now), one week after the bronze release. Because of this I'm also going to extend the deadline for the survey by 3 days (closes 10th) to give a chance for those new players to give feedback. But I'm not going to extend it any longer than that because the results of that survey are very very influential on my strategy in producing E3 and E3 production is already underway.

6) (MINOR E3/E4 SPOILERS) I really should have finished off the missing character bios by now but I've just been having too much fun designing the outfits for E3 and updating Selina. I've also just finished creating a fairly important side character (Kat) who I think is looking really good and I'll be revealing her at some stage in the coming weeks. E3 is completely planned out and right now I'm working on outfits, environments and a basic outline for the script. On the subject of side characters, I am keen to add some more side characters with some more diverse ethnicities and body types but I'm afraid Kat will be the only side character in E3. I'm particularly keen on adding a bunch of side milf characters to the game and I know exactly how they're going to fit into the story. First side milf will be in E4. As you can probably expect, our main milfs, Florence and Veronika will be very slow burns due to how taboo the student/professor dynamic is but hot scenes with side milfs will be coming much sooner in E4 and onwards. The side milfs themselves will be quite diverse - in body type especially - and so they're going to help a lot with this.

I'm surprised if you've read this far lol but I think that's all I wanted to say at this moment. Dev updates were on pause during the E2 releases so apologies if this one is a bit long/waffly. If you have any questions - as always please feel free to comment or shoot me a dm.

WW