v0.7.4 Debrief (May contain spoilers)

For those who have already played the update...

I wanted to take a moment to unpack, now that the bulk of the update has been released.

My intent was that this would be a "short" update for Wednesday, and that Thursday will also be a short update, so that we can get to the weekend when some big events will happen. However, the writing seemed to take on a life of its own, and I think that was because there was still some more context needed for Anna's tendencies with older men.

There's a lot of history with older men and scar tissue from her father. I know Marvin is not a favorite for many, nor are the other older men in the story, but these older men are a reality in her life, and I like telling that story. She's drawn to them, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, or whether it's willingly or reluctantly. And these dirty men are most certainly drawn to her.

And then there's Hank. Sure, there was some blue balling going on in this update with that storyline, but it's setting the table for future events. Same with Dale and Timothy... even though they aren't main characters nor pivotal to this story, there will be some scenes with them in the future.

The whole story isn't going to focus on the old men stuff, but it was the main theme in this update, and there will be Grant Stenstromber in the next update. There are several flavors in this story in terms of lewdness, so some updates will please some of you, and some updates won't. I know we live update to update and immerse ourselves in each update because of the development process, but the overall vision of the story when it's finished is that people can choose their own adventures in a complete play-thru to their liking.

The good news is there's enough context with the old men stuff now where we don't need to explore it any further. If I'm going to dive into that, it will be in a prequel or a Patreon post. And no, I'm not committing to a prequel, I'm just saying there's enough interesting content on how the "real" corruption of Anna happened prior APM.

We have enough context with the Chris situation too, so I don't need to hammer on that anymore.

As for Marvin, there were four ways it could go. There's the Anna that rejects him and refused the shot. There's the Anna that rejects him and takes the shot... which can open the door to her reconsidering her stance on Marvin. There's the Anna that accepts him and refuses the shot, and there's the Anna that accepts him and takes the shot.

Unfortunately, the path where Anna accepts Marvin and takes the shot is not in a place where I'm entirely happy with it. I had to step away from it in the interest of time, so I stuck with what I had instead of picking it apart like I usually do. I want to revisit this scene, however, to refine it to my liking.

I want to point out - that scene toes the line for nonconsent material, which I'm not into. I love reluctant, but I'm not a fan of rape/nonconsent. Therefore, Anna will only go to the van with Marvin if you've accepted him. This happens whether you take the shot or not, so it's not rape if she would've done it anyways. Where it would be rape is if you had rejected Marvin, but he drugs her and takes her to the van anyways... but there's not a path for that in the story.

As for the speed of development, this is something that's wearing on me because I want to be further along. And now, as I've explained previously, circumstances in world events has had a ripple down effect to my full-time job; therefore, I've had less development time for APM in 2025. I need to find ways to take shortcuts without sacrificing the quality too much. The immediate thing will be that David and Anna are mostly who they are. I had a vision of you being able to influence them into different versions of themselves, but I'm just going to have to limit that to certain situations here and there, because trying to write different scripts for scenes is a very daunting and time consuming task.

As for what to expect going forward...

I want to refine the scene I mentioned above, and I'm going to finish the remainder of Anna's night when she goes back into the house. I plan to do this by the time the public release is ready, at the latest.

For the next update after that, she has the dinner with Stenstromber, but otherwise, nothing major will happen until the weekend. The weekend is where some of the key scenes will take place, so I want to get there asap! I want to do some more animations for these upcoming bigger scenes too, so hopefully you'll see more of that.

If I think of anything else, I'll bring it up in the chat or in another post, but that's about where the state of things are.

Thank you all for your patience through this. This community we have is special, so thank you! Looking forward to continuing to experience this journey with you all. We're lucky to have such a great artist too, so a big 'thank you' to him for all the great renders!