September news post #3

Well this month flew by! ^^" The only good thing about that is a upcoming month of spooky themed movies and decoration ahead. :P

I'd like to quickly say that once again, I'm very thankful for everyone being suuuper patient with this upcoming v0.20 release. I don't want it to seem like we're a broken record, since v0.19 took us forever to get out and many of you knew how that went. So let me say the good news right here in the start of this post...

v0.20 is in it's near final phase. It's still purely in writing script form right now, but I'm working on the major story moment that pops up that ends ep 5 currently this week. I can't say much as it's pretty spoiler heavy, but I'm double checking to make sure that moment is spot on with my notes on the story direction overall. I fully expect that next week, I'll be doing a once over of the writing script to make sure there's no minor issues in pacing and then move it along asap to Artie, so that he can quickly edit through the script and get it in the engine so we can play test it.

I really don't want to give a solid exact date, but I would say 150% with all my hype and energy behind it... Expect Oct 15th-22nd at the verrrry latest for v0.20 release!

Now with that hype out of the way! Let's dig into some other details to end September as we brace ourselves to end 2021 in a good light. ^^

~Updated roadmap plans~

Mentioned in our previous news post.

I'm slightly updating this information to match with the expected v0.20 release.

v0.20 ~ Mid Oct (15th-22nd)
v0.21 ~ Mid Nov (12th-19th)

Now I'm excluding v0.22 from releasing in 2021. Why is that?

Knowing that we'll be more or less taking a holiday break for December, I doubt we'll have v0.22's content done within 1-2 weeks after we expect to release v0.21.

What will very likely happen, is that during December. I've already talked it over with Artie and we're both still going to work on content for MA during the month. Not as extremely as our normal development schedule, but still enough to get some prep work done as we prepare for 2022.

Our plan for December is to make sure that v0.22's content is ready for early Jan 2022. On top of also having the quality of life content for episodes 1-4 added to the game and the finalized gui elements to kick off the new year. We'll most likely add all of the above within v0.22 instead of our previous plan, which was to have quality of life/gui added as v0.22.5.

To add to the above... Our plan for 2022 overall is to improve greatly on the not so perfect schedule during 2021.

Heading into 2022, we're going to shoot for a 45 day deadline per release cycle. That means that once v0.22 releases for example on Jan 7th. We expect v0.23 to be released on Feb 21st, regardless if we have all the cg art ready for the content or not. (We'll probably handle this by adding a tag on our release posts or split up our release version numbering system.)

Here's a example..

v0.23 - Adds episode 6 for Juliet, Erika and Lola. Adds 2 of 3 cg scenes.
v0.23.5 - Adds the 1 missing cg scene and acts as a hotfix version of the game in case of any bugs/issues reported, etc.

If we do the above example for our release version numbering system, we hope it'll work well for those who would rather wait a extra 1-2 weeks for the extra content to be added before playing. While others can jump right into new content regardless if there's some art missing, etc. (We'll most likely do a poll asking everyone what feels the best overall for this later this year.)

Anyways to wrap these roadmap mentions up. We fully intend to make 2022 our year to redeem ourselves in a sense, which might be silly to assume or say... <.< But we don't want chaotic feeling schedules for new releases like 2021 has shown us. We feel that 45 days as a deadline should be ideal without feeling too short to pace ourselves in development, but also not too long of a wait for new content.

Of course if we have any new content for releases done long before our 45 day cycle, we'll release said new version even earlier than that.

~Personal life mentions~

Moving onto some personal stuff!

One final mention regarding my whole pinched nerve/back injury that happened over a good 2 months nearly by now. I can honestly say I'm back to normal after continuing to check in with my chiropractor every 2-3 weeks, daily stretching and exercise. ^^

I think between my day job and the project for October/November. It's probably safe to say my free time during weekdays will be kind of crazy, so I don't really know if I'll be doing too much outside of work on the weekdays. ^^" But luckily with the development schedule for the project that I've been sticking with, I give myself the weekends off. (Which includes partly Friday after some writing.)

Things generally seem to be going more or less the same here in my part of the midwest. Work has been kind of hit or miss some days from the domino effect from covid, but in terms of cases popping up around here in our county. It hasn't been worrisome luckily. I don't really want to talk too much on covid as a whole, mainly since it's reminded daily for everyone in one fashion or another without any politics involved, etc.  <.<

I haven't had the chance to watch much anime since the last news post, but I've wrapped up some reading I've been doing. :P I'd like to get back into playing some games here possibly this weekend, since it's been a while. I caught the recent Nintedo direct they had last week and I'd like to try out the demo for that card/tabletop rpg they showed off. Most likely I'll try getting further in Bravery Default 2, slowly making my way through that since it came out. ^^"

Think that's about it on personal mentions.

~v0.20 details~

Since I've already gave us our expected dates. I'd like to just mention some quick details on some stuff behind the scenes being worked on and possibly expecting some previews into October.

First off, if you missed it the other day.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/upcoming-diaper-56730230

I requested from Lisa to adjust some diaper designs for mainly side/supporting characters like Lola, Charlotte, Rosa and Allie to have more flashy diapers. The main change being colors added to the sidings/wings.

Juliet received a front decal/print added, but the rest of her design is the same. Heather is the biggest adjustment, being that her whole diaper design had a complete make over. The main reasoning for these design adjustments was to help the cast overall and this will be the last of adjustments like this for design related elements.

Lisa is now back to working on Sadie, our next supporting character who is nearly done. Then she has about 2 more sprite related requests left to tackle mainly for this year. One being a very minor addition piece/layer added for a existing character and the other being a sprite in similar fashion of John or the Nurse, etc.

Then Lisa will focus her efforts during 2022 on Kickstarter oc's and we'll later in the year figure out if we have room to open up oc requests as a Patreon tier again.

MarxeDP is nearing the finish line with the final cg scene expected in ep 5. I actually want to possibly add one more for the major story moment, but I don't really know for sure yet about that. Along with this ep 5 cg in the works, they're working on a moment from ep 4 when Rachel was pretending to be Mr. Whiskers.. Yeaaah... That moment will be receiving a cg scene with some choice variants along with it in the future. :P (Probably added in v0.22 with the quality of life content.)

I think the plans for cg art in October is to have the Summer Festival wallpaper done and also a Halloween themed wallpaper. I might've mentioned it else where, but regarding wallpapers. We're going to tone those down majorly in 2022 as they're meant to be a fun bonus thing for supporters/fans, but we want to make sure we stay ahead on game content for cg art firstly.

Plans for ep 6 cg art is already being thought about and will be in the works soon.

I've talked with the gui artist since the last news post and it sounds like I'll be getting some previews here as we head into October. I'm very excited and nervous about this, but we'll be sharing these previews as we receive them!

~2022 Crowdfunding?~

Okay, so I want to do a poll and post about this sometime here in the near future.. <.< But I'll briefly mention the idea in mind and our thoughts.

We raised more than we expected with our Kickstarter launch about 1 year ago from today and we're super happy about that. I honestly didn't think there would be as much support as we received during the campaign, part of me was expecting it to fail based on MA being diaper focused or receiving a ton of hate, etc.

So it was really a blessing to see that overall everything went much better than expected! Of course we also receive monthly funding from Patreon even at that time, but the main idea for doing a Kickstarter originally was to help raise enough funding as a extra pool of money for the resources needed during development of the project.

It's a huge thanks to both Kickstarter and Patreon supporters that we're able to cover the costs monthly for the demands on cg art mainly, but also paying for other assets, etc.

Now getting into the topic.. I'm expecting that the extra pool of funds we raised from Kickstarter will be completely done sometime by early Spring 2022. This doesn't seem like a major issue considering we still have wonderful support on Patreon that's been very stable.

But with trying to provide better cg art, variants and demands of the quality of said art. It's also getting a bit more pricey than originally expected and I can admit. In a given month, our Patreon funds is normally lucky enough to cover 2 cg scenes in recent times before we dip into the extra Kickstarter pool of funds remaining to cover costs for more and keep development moving along without any lack of funding issues.

So with this in mind... >.> I'm thinking of possibly doing another crowdfunding by Summer 2022. The goal would be about $3000, nothing too extreme, but roughly just enough that'd help cover costs of development alongside the already stable Patreon funding. I think we need to address some concerns with this first though...

The biggest concern I have and it's actually more like a worry, is that we still have some rewards to deliver to those who backed our Kickstarted. Both digital rewards and physical, some are naturally not going to be done until we finish the project by Summer 2023. But there's still some rewards we can deliver as we move along into 2022 and before that, which we'd like to tackle so that nearly 75% or more of rewards are fulfilled before Summer of 2022.

My worry is that even if we fulfill nearly all of the rewards that backers are expecting to receive before we do another crowdfunding campaign. It might come off in a very bad look for us and the project to ask for further funding, while not having everything fully delivered from our previous crowdfunding yet by that time. I think it needs to be said that my biggest worry beyond the funding or anything like that, is ensuring that supporters, fans, backers who already help or has helped us greatly already feels like they can trust us enough and don't see this in a bad light firstly before all else.

While I would like to try doing this plan by Summer 2022, long as we hold true with our development schedule plans leading up to that point and also tackle much of the Kickstarter rewards. I mainly want to know what our beloved supporters and fans honest thoughts are about possibly doing this. If you all believe it'd be in bad taste of us to ask for even a dollar beyond what we already get from Patreon monthly right now. Then we want to know that 100%, while it is true that a little extra funding from another crowdfunding campaign would help greatly in our development.

The most important thing is how our supporters and fans think about this. If it generally feels off-putting by many, then we'll just move forward without trying another crowdfunding campaign. Simple as that! ^^

The only warning to give about this, is that we might end up bottle-necked at some point early in 2022. What I mean by this is that if our expected release is meant to have 3 cg scenes on average, but we can only cover the costs of 2 of those based on our Patreon funding for said month. We might fall behind on having cg art provided with new releases as time moves forward, to the point where at some point the cg artists will be working on episode 6 cg art still, while we're releasing episode 7 content without any cg art.

Of course at some point during development, even if the writing is all done and everything else. We'd expect cg art to finally catch up with what content is released, it'd be a bit odd looking.

With that said... I wanted to bring it up here, but this topic will have it's own dedicated post and poll with it sometime in the future. We're well aware of other projects who do shady things during their development and knowing that, we've always tried to have this transparent thoughts on what we do or how we spend funding in development, mainly trying to show that said funding can be seen through the development of each new release.

Anyways, I've gone on enough about this for now. I just wanted to bring it up early on.

~Ending statements~

This ended up being a bit longer than expected... ^^"

The biggest takeaway from all of this being that we fully expect v0.20 out by mid Oct as we're wrapping up the content behind the scenes for it now. We'll have the final behind the scenes writing post put out in the first week of October, which covers the last 2 events we haven't discussed in those posts yet.

The other big takeaway is the possible crowdfunding for Summer 2022. <.< Something that isn't being taken lightly. I'd like to think that as we move along to wrap up this year and begin to show how our release cycles look early into 2022. On top of delivering most of the rewards that backers on Kickstarter are waiting for, that maybe it'll generally show ourselves still in a very good light. That it wouldn't feel shady or off-putting for us to try doing another crowdfunding campaign, as that's my biggest worry more than gathering a little extra funds.

I think that about wraps up September! With that said...
From all of us at Messy Studios! Thank you for the continued support! We hope to see you in October! ^^