General Update

Okay! So, a couple of things to get out of the way, touching on Chastity Quest and Story Rewards (yes, plural) for the month.

Chastity Quest

I was coming along fairly well with it yesterday...until the software I'm using crashed and destroyed upwards of 3 hours worth of work. At that point, after I finished several minutes worth of cursing, I took a deep breath and thought things through. To be blunt, the game is taking longer than I had hoped in the first place and trying to get it out this month is piling on a metric ton of stress that's sorta ruining Christmas time for me. When I realized I'm actually dreading my favorite holiday, because it would take time I needed to work on things away, I realized I needed to step back a tad.

The result of that is that I'm shifting gears slightly. I'm still going to put some serious time for the rest of the month into Chastity Quest, no question. But I'm not going to focus on getting it out this month. Come January 1st, I'll see how far I've gotten with it without stressing myself out majorly. and decide how to proceed from there. If it happens that I'm really close to finishing, I may push DoL back up to 5 days (max) in order to finish and get the first release of CQ out. If I'm not close enough to justify that, than I'll simply proceed on the usual schedule, focusing on DoL and then releasing the first build of CQ later in the month.

Now, despite these delays, this isn't going to turn into Cosplay Cafe, with three months needed for a new release. What's happening here is a combination of two things. First, I'm learning an entirely new engine, which is slowing things down the first time I do anything. That part will fade quickly. After I've done something once, replicating it later on will be much smoother. In example, yesterday I was figuring out how to do random variables, condition statements, and refining some earlier work on how to make a character menu.  The second thing...is that this first release is actually going to be fairly large, content-wise. It's going to be at least half again the size I'm planning for follow-up builds. There's 5 'main' NPCs, with each of them having multiple sex-scenes. Jillian for example (who you met if you played the intro I released) will have 5 different variants, depending on various character statuses and random chance. And there are a number of other actions I don't count in those 5, the five I'm counting for her are just the ones where something sexual happens.

The combination of the initial build's size with my needing to learn everything almost from scratch is what's making this first build take so long. Follow-up builds should be monthly, as originally planned. I always knew this build was going to take longer, I just underestimated how MUCH longer. Well, that and two back-to-back holiday seasons happened in the middle of development.

Story Rewards!

Alright, since I'm probably not going to get Chastity Quest out this month, that has made me more determined than ever to do something extra for the holidays. As a result, I'm planning to double up on the story rewards. One, obviously, is going to be the new fanfiction story. On that note, by very narrow margrin, Orianna won the poll! In fact, she only won by a single vote, with Kelly coming in a near-run second. I've already got a few ideas down...and this particular story, since I teased all patrons with the polls, is going to be released to All Patrons as an extra this month. In part, that's also because I don't expect a lot of sex in the front part of the story, as there will need to be some world building.

Having said that, though I didn't want to be super mean by withholding the story I teased with polls for two months (while it worked its way through the release queue), I still need to do a $5+ exclusive this month. To that end, I'm going to do a chapter of another story as well. I'm tempted to make that The Elven Maid, since it was the runner up in the poll...but that story requires a follow-up poll each time, which I don't think we have time for at this point. As such, it's more likely to be either Merchant Princess or Transformation Estate. Though, I'll decide that for sure later today when I'm more awake.. If The Eleven Maid is at a spot that needs more linear development, I may do it anyway, getting some stuff that needs to happen out of the way there. I need to check exactly where I left off with that story, as it's been a while...