Plans for 2022 - Weekend Update

Hey guys!

Several of you now have patiently reminded me to make my estimates more realistic. Saying, "I should have this done in a couple of days" repeatedly is dumb. Yes, it's theoretically possible. But realistic? No. This was proven several times over. So I'm looking at the next six months and putting together a release schedule. 

I started 2021 with a story. Lockdown With Victoria And Her Sister was something I really enjoyed writing. After working on ongoing projects for over a year, it was refreshing to finish a project. No multiple paths, no choices, only a linear story written in spare time when my laptop wasn't handy and when I was trying to put myself to sleep.

I've written several other stories since then, some of which I've received feedback for and plan to finish up so I can post them. So more stories soon, and I included those in my planned schedule.

Speaking of, that's my plan for Hypnosis as well. For this past update, I had stated "this will be the last update for the broken watch branch." This was partially to motivate me to keep it short and get it finished, and partially because I really wanted it finished. However, this wasn't great toward keeping things timely, as we saw when the update took far longer than it should have.

To prevent that in the future, I'm going to try releasing smaller updates. This would let me get back to the monthly schedule, especially now that the average episode takes significantly longer with all the multiple paths and variables combined with the added time spent on renders for multiple girls, especially larger ones.

The next full episode of Hypnosis will have a larger scope yet. Not only do I plan on going back to add a path through Episode Ten, but I also want to go back through the game in its entirety and fix all the early shitty animations. It wasn't until Episode 7 that we started getting fluid animations, as until then things were pretty choppy.

An idea I have to keep the monthly updates is to begin the girl's individual endings. What happens if you choose to date Jenn exclusively when she asks you to in Episode Nine? What happens if you only date Leah back in Episode Four? Or Ashley and Leah together? 

These would be short endings, but I think they would add a lot to the earlier game to get to know each girl on a one-on-one level. To keep it simple, I would link to the new content in game so people don't have to go around chasing it. I believe this would make for a good compromise for keeping up new content for the game as I'm also fixing up previous content and working on the next major episode. 

I'd like to get back to my original plan of a new Hypnosis update for two months in a row with a new chapter of Endowed every third month. The latest addition is a new side story every three months.

That would make the upcoming schedule something like:

January - Finish up the Broken Watch Branch, publish a short story

February - Finish Chapter 5 of Endowed, start working on Hypnosis

March - Hypnosis update with Jenn solo ending, Leah solo ending, lots of background fixes for Hypnosis including updating all the early animations

April - Episode 14 of Hypnosis, a story

May - Chapter 6 of Endowed

June - Either Episode 15 of Hypnosis or one of the main endings, depending on whether another episode is needed to get to that point.

July - Remake of many of the early Hypnosis scenes, including the bowling alley, scenes in Cory's house, etc, with more endings, either individual or bigger, and a story.

This, to me, looks like a much better schedule than one update in six months. You guys keep reminding me to stop overestimating, and that's advice I'm trying to follow. I tend to make my estimates about what I want to strive for instead of being about what I can comfortably accomplish. This schedule still might also be overly ambitious, but the point is to have a new update out each month, even if that isn't always a full episode.

And hey, if I can put out content faster, even better!

One more thing to mention is that I'm sure some of you are asking how much more of Hypnosis is there? That's something I plan to iron out. My outlines take me to around where we are now and then splits off into multiple endings. But what I learned from the Broken Watch Path was that the end wasn't as close as I thought. 

It took four solid updates to get there, and I can't keep doing that for each ending. If it's two or three more episodes before the endings split, great. But that's something I need to sit down and plan out. 

I'll go over that for the next weekend update.

See you then!

Thanks, everyone!