February Progress Update and A Change In Patron Tiers

Posting this a little early because I'll be busy most of the week and then all weekend helping a family member move to a different state.

First off, I wanted to give the monthly progress update. Here's the current to-do list.

Add final lab character (done)
Do lab ending (done)
Finish Angela's storyline (done)
Add pregnancy and new scene for working girls (done)
Add new scenes and outfits for Rinko, Freya, and Aoyagi (in progress)
Add 4 more rare women (done)
Add Random Beach Babes (in progress)
Open the Hospital with Random Nurses
Finish the office building and add the Office job and Random Office Ladies
Add Seika's final scene and pregnancy
Add Minori (Akari's daughter) and her storyline
Add the rest of the MMC characters
Add collectable sets into the hospital and office building

Was able to finish up Angela's storyline, which ended up taking longer than I expected. Rinko's second scene is tied to Angela's storyline, so that's also done. I'm still working on Freya's second scene. I've included a quest to unlock her outfit, which involved creating 4 new areas. All of them are made now and overall the quest is about 75% done. So it's taking a while to fully implement. Luckily other things have been shorter than I expected, so it's all balanced out. I hadn't done much testing since finishing the lab storyline, so I did a lot of testing too.

As a bonus for those reading this, I'll give a couple of hints on how to unlock the extra outfits, because both Rinko and Freya's second outfits are going to be missable. Rinko's is linked to Angela's storyline, and Freya's is linked to your decisions in the Lab storyline. So if you finish those questlines and haven't unlocked the outfits, or at least started the quest to unlock the outfit, that will mean you missed something. Aoyagi's wont have any extra unlock conditions though, that's why I'm doing Aoyagi's last. The only unlock condition will be unlocking Aoyagi. Then she'll appear in the wild in her other outfit. I just wanted to be sure there were some more involved quests in the game. I had originally planned on doing the more involved stuff at the higher tiers. Stuff with longer and more complex quests to unlock them. The lowest tiers are meant to be mostly the type of women who will do things like bang a stranger, or are helping you out, so they're meant to be easy. But as you got to higher tiers, women would be a bit more selective about who they sleep with. So you would need to do more for them than just talk to them. I wanted at least a little bit of that for if this is the final version of the game.

MMC -

Also, you may have noticed that I removed the "and storyline" part of the MMC characters. After a lot of consideration, I decided to cut the full storyline. This is for a couple of reasons. The first is because it would have taken a very long time. I was looking over the outlines and planning out exactly how to code it, and I realized that it would require a lot more than I had initially thought. Doing Angela's storyline already took longer than I expected, and that was much simpler in comparison. Realizing what went into that is what gave me a more realistic idea of how to implement the ideas and gave me a better idea of how long it would take. The other reason is because it wouldn't really make sense with the current structure and overall vibe of the game. 

Since I'm cutting it, and to further explain why it wouldn't work, here's the original plans for the storyline.

Originally, after seducing and unlocking Shiori you'd be able to find a note in her house to Ms. Hartley about recruiting you for the "MMC". You would have then gone to Ms. Hartley where she would've told you that Shiori made you a candidate. She'd then test you. You'd go through tests with Ms. Hartley, then Ms. Tyler, the Dean, and finally Mrs. Holiday. Where it would've been revealed that "MMC" stands for "Man Maker Club." A group of women who teach inexperienced younger men how to have sex. The group was started by Mrs. Holiday and then further expanded. Which was the original idea for the MMC series of games that started with Holiday. Anyway, after you discover and get officially brought into the club, you'd be able to visit the meeting place for the club (a house in the neighborhood) and each day would have a different member of the club there "teaching" about group sex. So it would have been a gangbang with whichever member was there that day. The problem with this is that one, the game isn't really based in group stuff and it isn't really something many people who like WW may like. And doing an extra gangbang scene for 5 characters would be a lot of extra work. On top of that, it also would create a lot of issues with the pregnancy system. If they got pregnant at a gangbang, then in-universe, specifically the father would have to come back and have sex with them to have the baby. But the other guys in the club are supposed to be randos who happen to show up that day, not specific people or anything. With a group, it wouldn't really be possible to know who the father was, and having it supposed to be random guys every time, pregnancy wouldn't make sense. In general, knowing they're always sleeping with other people would create further possible issues. Again, some people may not like having that explicitly stated and shown to them. It's not something that appears anywhere else in the game either. Then I'd also have to account for them potentially getting pregnant by someone else and having them randomly out of commission. The obvious solution would be to make it so none of them would have had pregnancy, but pregnancy is a major draw for the game at this point, and I don't want to cut that for any named characters. All of this is certainly possible to implement and account for, but it would take a lot of time to work through, implement, and test. I'd rather as many of them as possible have pregnancy, and would rather spend that time implementing more content. Rather than niche content that many people may not like.

So instead, they're going to be more like cameo characters. This honestly will work out better in terms of balancing. I originally was going to have each one be more and more difficult than the last, but now I can balance them more with their personality rather than as part of the storyline. Originally there were 2 more characters, the Mom from Holiday/the random women you bang in Teach Me and then the main character of what would have been the third MMC game. If there's time, I'll include both of them as well. Since I'm not doing the full storyline, it's certainly possible, but I want to get through everything else first.

Which means that these are the new stretch goals.

Gloryhole
Touko (a neighborhood MILF)
Apartment Neighbor and Neighbor's daughter
2 more MMC characters
Storyline for apartment neighbor and neighbor's daughter

I don't think I'll be able to get to the neighbor storyline at this point, but I'm fairly confident I can get through to include the last two MMC characters.

A Change In Patreon Tiers -

And now with the game progress out of the way, I wanted to talk about changing the Patron tiers. With no one at the higher tiers right now, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to adjust them without screwing anyone over. The tl;dr is that there's fewer now and Early Access is cheaper.

Right now the tiers are like this -
Waifu Support - $1
Waifu Fan - $3
Waifu WIP - $7
Waifu Early Access - $18
Free Pin-Up Commission - $50
Free Commission - $75

That's just too many tiers. I recently have been gathering models for Waifu Wonderland 3D, and I've run into a few patreons that have a lot of tiers like this. I noticed it's always a bit confusing. Even more so when there's limited stuff and they only send out stuff on certain dates and it's all just kind of a headache. I realized that this page is a lot like that. I haven't done anything to limit access to older stuff like some people, but the tiers can be confusing.

I also noticed that very few people have done Waifu Fan, and no one has ever done either of the commission ones. Most people have done either Early Access or Support, with a few people doing WIP. It probably doesn't help that I noticed that I forgot to upload the 1080p versions of scenes on multiple occasions. So I wanted to focus on preserving the content in those tiers.

I decided to change the tiers into just 3 categories.

Waifu Support - $1
Waifu Fan - $4
Waifu Early Access - $9

Waifu Support is staying the same. It's a tier that's there just for anyone to be able to support the game. It makes your vote worth 2 in polls.

Technically I increased Waifu Fan by $1, but it's got some of the benefits from Waifu WIP now. It gives access to WIP posts.
Votes are worth 5 instead of 3 now.
You get 1 week early access to builds instead of just 3 day early access.

Then lastly, Waifu Early Access went from $18 to $9. Everything else is still the same.
You still get maximum quality scene packs.
You still get 14 day early access.
Your vote is still worth 10 in polls.
You still get access to WIP posts.

Hopefully all of that makes things less confusing. I'll explain the full rationale for the changes now if you're interested.

First off, I technically changed the Waifu WIP tier to Early Access. There were some people still at that tier

The big thing I wanted to streamline across all tiers was vote weights. I wanted it to be as simple as possible and wanted everyone to be getting the same value. Now every $1 adds 1 vote power across all tiers.

The next big thing was that I wanted to make sure the tiers were more affordable overall. I know it's a bit rough out there right now, and wanted more people to have access to the benefits. Especially the poll weights, since with Waifu Wonderland 3D coming, I'll be doing a lot of polls. Now more people should be able to afford tiers to help the characters they want get into the game. I'm also not as focused on making money anymore. I was really pushing Waifu Wonderland to be retail release and be able to make money because I was hoping to turn this into my career. I was also unemployed, so I was trying to push monetization as much as possible so I could pay bills. Then after getting the job in Japan, I wanted to save for the move. I also didn't want to change tiers as long as someone was at the higher tiers. To make sure they were getting as much value as possible out of their support. But now, game making is more of a hobby for me. Support will help me be able to do things like buy models, pay for programs, upgrade my computer, and buy other things that may be needed for the games. But the main goal isn't anything more than making a game people like and play. All the money I make I plan on putting towards the game, rather than trying to make it my main career.

And then like mentioned above, a lot of people weren't using a lot of the tiers, and it was confusing. So slimming it down to 3 should help with that.

On top of all of that, condensing the tiers and taking away the benefits people aren't using will make things much easier on me. For example, I was making 1080p versions of everything. While it wasn't hard to do, it did take extra time to export out those versions. When it came to random women, those took a looooot of extra time. Since I have to resize, export out to a different folder, then save it. It usually took an uncomfortable amount of time to save, so each one was an extra couple of minutes. When there's 20 versions of a scene, each with 2 images, and each one even takes 2 minutes, that's a good extra hour. Then having to do it again for the blacked version means an extra 2 hours of just exporting images. It was easily the worst part of making random characters. But now I just have to resize once, so that'll speed things up.

Having to do 4 releases of every version was also super weird. Especially the 3 day early one. It wasn't really enough time to matter, and I think it was taking a bit away from the 7 day early access. I'll still be doing 3 releases, but it will be a lot easier for me. Since now I can do the 2 week early access and attach the maximum quality artwork to that post. They're the only tier that gets the better artwork, so I wont have to worry about doing a separate post. Then I can do the 7 day early access to release to the public at the end of it. So I only really need to do 2 posts. It streamlines the process for me and should be less confusing.

As for when it's coming, they're already live! I unpublished the higher tiers about a week before this post to ensure no one else could subscribe to them, and then reworked the tiers before posting this.

Outro -

That ended up being a lot longer than I expected. This is what I meant in my last post that I do drafts and add to them. This all would have been added to the last post if I hadn't released it early. Things tend to gradually change throughout the month, and I like to keep people as informed as possible.

Anyway, Once v0.5 is out, I'll be revealing more plot details about 3D. I know that Juno and Hikari's artwork isn't going to be in v0.5, but if you don't want 3D spoilers, I highly recommend playing through the end of the Lab storyline. The end of Waifu Wonderland leads directly into 3D, so there will be spoilers!

I hope you're looking forward to the release of Waifu Wonderland v0.5, as well as more details about WW3D as well as the first WW3D poll!