Weekly preview - new phone messages

tl;dr - Next update will include new Hirai phone messages in the shops district.

This week's images

These are from an upcoming feature in the next release - a batch of new phone messages from Hirai that you can find in the shops area. You'll need to have the items to unlock them, as well as the progress on the Hirai relationships, of course.

These are probably the three images out of the phone messages that I liked best personally, but I tried to make them all interesting.

New Hirai phone messages

I know some of the older phone messages aren't all that long; these ones aren't interactive scenes but I did at least try to give most of them a couple of images and a bit of extra writing to make them worth finding. Figuring out what's worthy of being a monthly release can be a little difficult, but I feel like there's a decent amount of content to find between the different messages.

There is more stuff coming in the next release too, by the way - expansions of the toy scenes since new toys will be available - but I'll talk about that more next week.

Part of the reason I stopped adding more phone messages was that in terms of the game structure, they were becoming a bit too hard to access within the time scope of the game. As a game designer you want most of the content to be reasonably accessible so it's not just maybe 1% of players who find it, because if so the updates aren't really hitting the mark.

That's part of the thinking behind creating this shops district - it allows for some good opportunities for players to discover new content that's not too strictly bound to the time limits.

Which of these three images do you think is best? Does the addition of new phone messages sound like a good update to you? Let me know in the comments!