State of the Game - August 2022

First of all, I'm really happy to work with Erronwolf, who has come in to provide writing support for all of the pregnancy dialog. So now all of the expansion stages and anomaly logs for that gameplay is filled. That was a massive amount of content that was very nice to see get put in. That did require some formatting work on my end, which did take a lot of time. Took longer because RPGM is very picky about text formatting, and I was simultaneously trying to put it into the language support at the same time.

Second, I tried to make the game as modular as possible, but going over playtesting for both gameplay themes in the game, I realized how many things need to be different for the pregnancy gameplay. There, distortion shouldn't accumulate until the main character is actually pregnant. In the weight gain theme, everything is constantly accumulating. So this has been a lot of reading old code to make sure I'm tracking all of the places where I need some branching logic.

Art assets has been the hardest challenge for this game, namely because it's the one that I don't know where to even begin with. I feel lucky to collaborate with two amazing artists that has allowed me to provide two different themes for players. Two other themes has been requested often, breast/butt and blueberry expansion.

My breast/butt artist has been working on art assets for a while, which like the pregnancy I started to get started on some of the gameplay content to be ready for it. However, in the end of July they backed out. So not only am I on the search for an artist again, but my time could have been spent on current content.

I did start talking to a blueberry artist, but after starting it just didn't seem like a good match. They also ended up backing out.

My objective for Project Gaia is to provide more what the players want, so I'll be continuing on the lookout for art assets. However, I have reached much farther than I first thought I would ever get to. Instead of wondering if I would get this project completed, I'm securing stretch goals, and need to start thinking about final release plans. That means the best news for supporters like you, because you can get your final copy. If I do setup a final release and publish to steam or something like that, I'm thinking somewhere in the $9.99 price range, but I have emails from all of my supporters, so I'll likely find out how to get keys for supporters in advance. I'll definitely keep supporters updated on any release plans when they start to become real.

A lot to read there, but the reasons why I was delayed. My plans for v0.9 has changed, as I'm also realizing how much catchup I need to do on the pregnancy gameplay, as well as wanting to do way more for handling the grind and encounter balancing. I'm spending the next week to regroup, and see how much I can tackle of those two things specifically.

As always, thanks for your support, as well as your patience.