Quick Update #14

Hey everyone! 😊

We hope you are having a good month, all of you!

Today we have a bit of a special update to share with you. So, first thing, here's the status of v0.10.0:

• Writing : 90%
• CGs : 100%
• Coding : 75%
• Music and SFX : 80%
• Proofreading: 10%

Having said that, there are some slight changes and Mint wanted to explain things in his own words, so we'll let him take it away:

Hey all,

As many of you reading this know, we delivered the last update a bit late. There are multiple reasons for this including personal setbacks and logistical production issues, but speaking honestly the biggest reason is that I simply aimed to add too much to recent updates. Allow me to explain.

Basically, at the start of the month, I decide how much story gets added in the next update. However, due to wanting to give you guys a satisfying conclusion and not just end on a random scene, even when things were behind schedule I still had to push through and complete that planned amount, or perhaps improvise some small changes to allow for a satisfying conclusion. Because the last two months I ended up biting off a bit more than I could chew, any “flex-time” that we had at the end of the month for rewrites and proofreading got eaten into, leaving us with none. In fact, as you can see, we actually went negative.

Now, this obviously isn’t good. Not just because it leaves us with an unsatisfying amount of time to polish the game once we are “done” our first draft of the update, but because if anything goes wrong in our personal lives or if we get sick or anything like that, the release will automatically get delayed, and there is nothing we can really do about it. The margins we’ve been working on are that thin. This isn’t even to mention vacation days or holidays, which most of us have foregone for a very long time now. We were very happy that Christmas ended up being a Sunday this year, because it meant we could justify taking the day off. Simply put, this isn’t sustainable.

So, starting this month, we have done two things differently in an effort to regain some flex-time. First, we have reduced the planned scope of the story content for the update. Second, we put a firm “end date” for the primary script work to be completed by, forcing me to stop at a certain point so that we can focus on the “post-production,” so to speak.

We will continue doing these things in the future, and I do believe that will allow us a bit more flexibility. However, due to the fact that work on our previous update ended incredibly late and we planned a due date for the new script which was much earlier in the month, I ended up having a lot less time to complete it than usual. As a result, this update will be shorter than previous updates. In the future, I suspect they will be a bit longer because I will have around 3.5 weeks to work on it rather than the 2.5 weeks that I had this time.

While I do wish that things were a bit different, I have complete faith that in the long run this will result in a better quality, more consistent product, as well as a happier and more productive development team. Because at the end of the day, as we’ve said before, we want Azienda to be around for a long time, creating some of the best NTR content we can. We enjoy making it and hope that you enjoy reading it.

To all those who have gotten this far in this wall of text, thanks for supporting us in this bumpy period. Reading your positive comments on Patreon and Discord has been a really bright light on some of the darker days.

Thanks,

Mint

Azienda