Game News #68

Hey, everyone!

My apologies for being fairly silent on here for the past month and a half.

Sometimes I feel like a mechanic, getting too focused on trying to fix the car before I come out to the waiting area to tell you how I cleaned the fuel injectors and reset the flux capacitor. And then I remember I’m the only one working here, and I should also answer the ringing phone and open the backdoor for the delivery guy.

So I wanted to take a breath, slide my way out from under the car, wipe my face with a greasy rag and tell you what I've been working on.

What's the problem, you ask? The problem is it's taking too damn long.

The past week has mostly been working on the walkthrough guide. At first, I was only going to use it for the newest update and fill in the rest later. But you've all been waiting a long time for this update, so I wanted to include something extra, a little thank you for all the support.

Thought it would be as easy as incorporating the existing walkthrough. Plus, there was already some of it done. But I thought it made it a lot further in the game. Nope. I ran out of time before posting the update for chapter 7, and jumped right into working on episode 8, apparently never looking back.

But the existing walkthrough didn't take a lot of paths into account, and things have changed since I made it anyway. I'm not trying to add context to every choice, only the important ones, and to label where paths split and to lead to the most scenes, getting the most girls.

Before this, I was going through the ever growing list of problems and inconsistencies, all the little issues reported over the past few years. Here, my goal was simple: fix things, don't change them. Don't add anything. Keep it simple. By quick. That's basically what I've been doing for the previous month.

Fixing issues is overdue, and although a lot of you don't care about the past of the game and only want to play new content, I waited too long to do a lot of this and am glad it's getting the attention it needs. Over time the game needs to be balanced and reevaluated, and I’ve skipped these steps for too long, always rushing to get the next update out.

My list of things people have found and reported was over 30 long, so going back to track and fix of them has been a process. I’m pretty happy with how far I’ve gotten, but honestly a lot of it is also playing through the game and leaving notes for myself on how to fix it all better in the future. For example, deciding which of the girl’s paths can be optional and which can’t now that we’re facing the final stretch.

This goes with the game being replayable anyway, with more rewards for players who set out on their own without the walkthrough. I used to love doing this myself when I would play other games, but lately I’m so busy working on my games that when I play others I have no interest in wasting time, I want to get as much content as I can, and time spent away from the story grinding or replaying the game becomes a chore I’m unlikely to even bother with.

Finishing up the walkthrough is an attempt to reward the players without a lot of extra time on their hands. Plus, it avoids most of the other issues I can’t fix currently, as 80% of those issues are found by people trying to play the game in the way I deliberately advise them not to in the intro.

So that’s what I’ve been working on! With the update as a whole we're nearly there. Normally this is about where I'd release the tester update, but I'm no longer planning on putting them out several weeks before the main update. It wasn't meant to be a ploy to get people to join the higher tier, but sometimes I fear it looked that way when two weeks or a month would pass where I'd still be finishing up renders.

I want the testing release to come out no more than a week before the main update, as that should be plenty of time to work out the bugs, especially with a more complete version to test.

I realize some of you are getting impatient waiting for the next update, and I completely understand. This one has been my longest wait yet, as it's now been over six months since the last update and I am in no way proud of that. I knew it would take longer, which is why I've been releasing the other stories with visuals to give content while you're waiting, but I realize a lot of you are only interested in games and aren't interested in side stories, even when they feature the same kinks and fetishes, have visuals added and often have overlapping characters.

But the good news is, the first half of this update was spent looking to the future, so the next two updates are planned out and will take far less time. Part of the time spent working on the previous episodes of the game was in setting up things for the future.

As for progress, my percentages suck since some projects take far longer than I expect, but I will say I'm nearing the home stretch. I still have a few missing pieces to fill in with the multiple paths, mainly the evil ones, but they're relatively small.

I plan to get back to the weekly dev updates until Episode 14 is finished, at the very least to say, "this is what I've accomplished this week".

No idea if this is actually the 68th news update, it's probably only half that, but it seemed a fun number to start on for next week.

Thank you so much to all of you, it means a ton to still have your support when I work on the not exciting background stuff and it's been so long since the last update.