My Catgirl Maid - A Look Back - Part 2

Part 2: Building a Game After You’ve Released the First Chapter

This is Part 2 in the series. If you’re reading this first, you will want to go back and find Part 1. I’m releasing them all at the same time so they should all be close together.

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Chapter 1 released on March 6th, 2020 on Newgrounds to…alright reception. Newgrounds is still Newgrounds at the end of the day so you can’t expect much from them. A few days later, thanks to Bridget, I got “My Catgirl Maid” released on F95Zone (March 10th) and saw some more encouraging results.

The complaints were the usual you would expect for slapping out a game with the minimum art assets needed to test a reaction. The funniest complaints were about 1 of the royalty free songs I had chosen.

Apparently, the song was Hitler incarnate or something according to these people so I just swapped it out. Kevin MacLeod has a 1000 songs, what’s swapping one out for another after all?

It’s a shame I don’t still have a copy of the song or its name anywhere as it would be a pretty funny little trivia thing at this point. There might be a single copy of the original Chapter 1 release out there somewhere so maybe we’ll see it surface one day.

Despite that, it was a promising release and I had quickly fallen in love with writing for Cynthia so I was willing to continue and start work on Chapter 2. First step though… catch up on art by actually adding some CG artwork to Chapter 1.

Of course, as soon as all this was decided, the Covid lockdowns began so not only was I laid off but so was everyone else. So planning the budget while trying to figure out if people would be willing to sign up for patreon around this time was a bit of a challenge.

I ultimately decided to take it one month at a time and just focus on what art I could get and build around that.

With the art for Chapters 1 and 2 looking to take some time, it gave me the chance to actually build upon the bare bones world I had put into the game. I left myself some little ideas to build off if needed but it was time to actually start figuring this stuff out.

Who was Cynthia going to be? What other characters were going to appear? What would their roles be? How many locations was this going to have in total?

Who the fuck knew? Haha

Chapter 2 and 3 were released at a steady rate and I had some answers but not all of them as we headed in Chapter 4 needing to do 2 important things: Introduce a new character and add the first sexy time scene.

The lack of sexy times was starting to become a gripe amongst the comment sections and I was still a little unsure when I wanted to add the first scene. There were a couple reasons for my hesitation. The first simply being that their relationship hadn’t progressed to the point where it wouldn’t feel forced.

Chapter 4 felt way too soon but we had to start moving forward a little bit. Adult content is adult content so it’s not like the relationships are supposed to be 100% realistic after all.

We were going to have to put it in eventually if we were hoping to try and keep people interested as the game started to enter the mid chapters so… now or never, am I right? haha

Oh! Also, funny side note. One person on Newgrounds made me laugh so hard about this. They were rating and commenting each chapter, giving it 5 stars and talking about how much they loved the story and then when they reached Chapter 4, it was a 0 star review and them freaking out because the characters didn’t kiss first. Then that was it. Their name didn’t pop up in my news feed anymore haha Everyone fews adult content differently I guess.

The second reason for the delay to any sexy content was answering the question on what gender the MC was.

I had walked into this project with the idea of the MC being female but left it open as I thought it would be fun to have the game work for both genders. It’d be a nice way to make getting the other endings a little more interesting because you could play it male and get a good ending then play it female, unlock a bunch of new CG artwork and get a different ending. It felt a little more rewarding to go through multiple playthroughs like that.

For financial and time reasons, we couldn’t do both genders at the same time so I looked through the comment sections and saw that most people were playing male MCs anyhow so we went with that to start with.

The gender debate would continue until before Chapter 8 was released, I think. It was quickly becoming obvious at that point that the game wasn’t going to be a big enough patreon hit to get the funding to do everything I had planned so I posted a poll to determine the future of that idea and it was overwhelmly in favour of dropping the female MC idea.

I took the content I had written for the female MC and made a post of it on patreon and just continued forward with it being a male MC only game.

Looking back at that Pre-Chapter 8 poll, I kind of have to chuckle about it. It was the poll that pretty much determined everything about the game and the reason it looks like what it is today. And it was decided by 10 people haha

“My Catgirl Maid" and by extension all my work, has always been a really small production. I think our top patron count during 2020 was like 25-30 people. The server was about 30-40 people and mainly just me posting my thoughts on the anime I was watching during my A-Z challenge.

We really didn’t see any major growth until after Chapter 9 or 10. Which was December 2020 - January 2021. Until then, it was a pretty small group of people.

So when I posted the poll to ask how the money should be distributed amongst the remaining features. It was the “My Catgirl Maid” version of The Council of Nicaea haha Just a bunch of bearded dudes trying to determine if the MC should be a girl or if we should do a bonus DLC instead haha

It worked though. Custom soundtrack and female MC were out. Bonus DLC, the fancy chapter screens and additional CG artwork like the Purito were in.

We had decided on what we wanted to have happen, we started to execute the plan and then the game randomly started getting more notice and a bunch of new people showed up saying they wanted it longer or more routes haha All I could do was laugh at that point. Everyone missed the bus by like 1-2 months on all that haha

It worked out that the game was going to end soon anyhow as the start of 2021 was a little turbulent. I had just started working again (part-time but it was something) so I could get the art assets for the new backgrounds together quicker but then we started to have delays with the CG artwork in Chapter 10.

It didn’t get any better by the final chapter as more delays resulted in the artist ghosting me after doing half the assignment and needing to be replaced.

In January, I had hired another artist to do some of the extra CG artwork so when it was needed to do a rush order to get Chapter 12 out, it was them that I called.

It wasn’t the smooth ending to things that I wanted to do but looking back, “smoothness” wasn’t in the games vocabulary haha

And that was the production of “My Catgirl Maid Thinks She Runs the Place”.

Considering the origin story for the game in Part 1, when the game was complete, I was quite happy with how it came out and where I stood in terms of my writing abilities. I didn’t “win” in adult content but I didn’t “lose” either. I could walk away happy knowing I just didn’t give up and I made a few people laugh.

Who knows how the next project will go and if it finds an audience or not but if the name “Uncle Artie” has proven anything to me, it’s to not count the old man out.

Maybe there’s a little more magic left in the tank.

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I couldn’t touch on everything here as I realised after my first draft that it was way too long for a simple little blog post like this.

If you want to hear more stories or simply you were hoping to hear some behind the scenes stories on events like the Market Challenge or the origins of the beach events, you can find me in the server or just message me here.

It’s hard to condense a year’s worth of events into a single blog post and I do tend to ramble on if I’m not careful so it’s best that I don’t subject people to that unwillingly haha

Part 3 will be about the short production of the DLC and it was much more relaxed to produce so enjoy that.