Production Preference

As mentioned in the previous Status Update, the style of Next Steps is causing the game to be produced at more or less of a crawl.  I really don't want to change the style or anything about the game just to be able to make it faster.  But an idea crept into my mind to drop it for a different game altogether, one that could be made faster.  After the results of the last poll, however, I felt that there were too many people interested and invested in Next Steps to simply abandon it, so I will keep making it, even if it takes 20 years to do so.  That said, without sacrificing too much development time, I could produce another game along-side it.  I've already done the R&D on it and here are the options:  

Hypnoperv
This is a game I came up with, that would be the same traditional-style VN, but more of the generic tropes that a lot of people look for.  It will be a young male protagonist, shot in a first-person perspective excluding sex scenes that will offer other angles.  The plot will be a bit more linear but still have a good number of options.  The general plot is that the MC, after an accident, learns the art of hypnosis, then uses it to slowly control the women in his life.  A slow-burn harem-style adventure.  This is easy to make for a few reasons: first, from a first-person perspective, it's easier to use and reuse camera angles, so you can really take advantage of rendering separate backgrounds and foregrounds while maintaining quality because you don't have to switch camera angles during conversations.  With the third-person perspective in Next Steps, the camera is pointed at the speaker.  In first-person, it's never showing the main character, it just stays on the other character.  This method, along with having usually only one character in any shot, or at least being able to render them separately, should allow all the foreground shots to be rendered in the GPU and recycle the background shots that might need to be rendered by the CPU.  Plus the more limited story-line and setting will reduce the number of backgrounds needed, allowing the game to be produced much faster.

Office Undercover
This is a wild ride.  The plot is simple.  I took a lot of inspiration from two games, Jessica O'Neil's Hard News and The Office Wife.  Essentially, I really liked The Office Wife but I hated the RPG Maker low-quality sprite sandbox parts.  Really, I hate that even though the game has an "ending" and it's just at a point where content is being added to fill it out more, the game is so bugged and broken, I haven't been able to play through and see all the content before I get stuck in a no-content loop.  Anyway, I didn't actually mind the running around part as much as I thought I would and it gave me an idea.  The plot of the game is the MC is a female reporter, who's married, and gets her first big break to get a story by going undercover in a sketchy office to figure out what's going on.  This game would be a live-rendered third-person/first-person environment made in the Unreal engine where you would interact with NPCs that would bring you to a conversation window where you have more VN-style conversations.  Those conversations would be rendered in Daz so would be higher quality that the in-world parts and would be fully animated and voiced.  Think of games like Mass Effect, or more recently Starfield, but without the combat or looting.  This game would be easier to make because a lot of it takes place in the open-world which, once initially set up, literally doesn't take up additional time.  It would just be adding the conversation animations.  Those would be able to be rendered quickly because they'd be made with static backgrounds and a single character in the foreground, which could be GPU-rendered and even rendering animations with multiple frames, wouldn't take very long if done with the GPU.  

In all honesty, I might work on all 3 regardless, as I like all the concepts, but it's more about how I divide my time.  My priority and focus will be determined by the results of this poll.  If you want me to work on one of the new concepts, how it will likely work is I'll release one Update for Next Steps, then switch and release on Update for the other game.  So you'd probably see One update for each game every 2 months, 6 weeks for NS and 2 weeks for the other, or roughly something like that.  Also, the new games, either one, would be Patreon-exclusive, meaning there will not be a free version released some time after the patreon release.  It would only be available to patreons until the game is complete, then available to the public for purchase, or again, free to patreons.