2021-2022 A Year In Review and What’s To Come

Hey, folks!

I hope you had a wonderful New Year celebration, and if you didn’t I really hope it gets much better for you next year.

A Year In Review

The early months

First, let’s go over everything that happened to the game last year.

Months of Jan-Feb were all about Yona. Technically, she was added in December 2020, but then there was the look update, and all the story bits. Her story ended on a cliffhanger and probably a bit too early, but it will pick up. More on this later.

And February gave us this side event:

There will be follow-up to that, promise.

Springtime for Lyriel

Then March and April were all about Lyriel. We got to meet all the other elves in Taena’s tavern, have some dreamy fun with them, and then, of course, The Event happened.

Then a few months later her alt/kink route got its advancement with her totally innocent offer to keep the MC’s room tidy and all the steamy reading. There will be more to that later as well.

Bun-bun

Then another anniversary happened and we kinda got carried away with it. 20 animations in a single update. And that’s after we cut out some optional bits, too. And there will be more next year!

Oh, and we also added the first version of the occupation change system. It matured over time and by now it works pretty well if I say so myself.

Summer of Cait

And then Cait’s story started and sorta-finished a big arc. We got to see her University, meet Headmaster Duncan, and meet most of Cait’s friends, too!

And then, of course, it was her time to have her The Event. I can’t show it in a public post, but I’m sure you all remember it well. Her story is far from over yet, but we’ve made a lot of progress. Our redhead magi is now more open to fun times, so expect more all-out scenes with her soon.

This arc is also where our new workflows for environments and characters were validated. I’d say it was a success, but there were some issues. I’ll talk more about it in a bit.

Rae’s Fall

Continuing on into Autumn, the focus moved to Rae. The main story got another push and we got the ability to etherwalk in daylight. It does not come as easy as our nighttime ventures, but it’s certainly a move in the right direction. And with the update of the City environment we started exploring it, too.

Rae got her new Earth-glamour and then bought herself a new costume, too. All voted on by you, Patrons. And we got to go on a dinner date with her. It was cute, I think.

We met some new characters there as well, and they will definitely feature in some future events.

Oh, and the Halloween event got yet another route for Yona and some new exciting ways to die!

And on that note

We ended the year with a cozy Xmas event. It dropped a bit later than I wanted, so many of you haven’t experienced it yet, but I hope its general cozy/winter vibe will keep being on point until it’s rotated out in February.

Now I’d like to talk about everything that happened

Behind the scenes

There were huge changes in our workflows and pipelines. Our abstract productivity increased a lot, but in the real world we’re still struggling a bit with timely content production. It’s pretty much all on me, in more ways than one.

My decision to go for a big visual upgrade is one such thing. We’re spending more time on character positioning, light setups, post-processing stack tweaks, focus adjustments and other such things.

And new environments. Literally ones of those. This may sound like a joke, but it isn’t. For the first time in the history of the game we’ve been adding completely custom-made locations. Of course, we still mostly use premade assets, but the University interiors were built from ground up for AHITR.

It was quite an endeavour, let me tell you. We’ve remade the Headmaster’s Office at least three times, and there’s still another polish pass needed before it’s ready for the daylight scenes. That said, I really like how the student bedrooms turned out, and work on that location went much more smoothly. It still ate up a lot of my time with all the planning, blueprinting, and then all the edits and tweaks.

Still, this was an important milestone as we are no longer limited by what we have available for sale. Moving into the big leagues! Sorta. We won’t be able to justify making unique stuff for every little event, but at least the major arcs will be set in unique locations appropriate for the story.

As I said before, the need to oversee it all added to my personal workload, but we’re cautiously adding people to the team, and the general trend is positive, even if it’s not apparent from the outside yet. At the very least it allowed me to put aside some time to dig deep into the mechanical stuff for the first time in a long time.

Mechanical stuff

I’ve made a few major additions to the techie side of the game last year. The occupation change system was mentioned earlier, and one another easily noticeable thing is the quest log overhaul. All the events in the game now reside there, and I believe it’s a big improvement on the older system. It’s still not perfect, the Love Jinsei app needs a thorough update to display some relevant information instead of being a less useful version of the quest log. And the quest log itself needs some better filtering options, a proper pagination (it’s a bit shit right now) and some sort of indication when there’s no more content for the girl at the moment.

One important thing that’s totally invisible unless you decompile the game is the new way of marking the player's choices. It required a lot of busywork earlier, and as a result I only stored the most important choices. But I like to put in callbacks and references so much it bums me out when I can’t check if there was a choice made or a certain phrase said before. But now it’s easy to mark even the most minor choices and when the time is right check them. You should see many more reactive dialogue in the future events. I firmly believe that just adding a single alternate line of dialogue referencing your earlier choice adds a lot to the immersion.

I would have loved to make even more changes to the game’s core, and some cool changes like the girls’ horniness meter and them pouncing on them MC when they get too bothered are burning a hole in my backlog, but I just couldn’t get to them yet. This is partly due to the other timesinks.

Other timesinks

I’ve been reaching out to people a lot last year. We have a healthy budget reserve now, and I’d like to put it to good use. Expanding the team even more seems like a surefire way to spend all the moneys and provide more content more often at the same time, BUT. Those of you who are hanging out in our Discord know I jokingly gave myself the title of “Auteur”, but all this time I was only half-joking! Ha-ha!

So yeah, the thing is, I’m super particular about the way the game looks, reads and feels in general. Maybe I just don’t know how to delegate properly, but I simply can’t let something into the game without at least giving it a good hard look first. Things slip by, of course, there was this obvious and kinda hilarious clipping issue with one of the renders recently, but still I stand behind everything that gets added to the game.

What that also means is that it’s really hard for me to just share the work with any random person. I need to be sure I won’t need to redo everything basically from scratch. Luckily, we are now very much in sync with the second artist and our part-time environment/prop artist. The writing is an issue, but there are things happening there as well, and I hope we will see a jump in our output soon.

Yet there’s more stuff happening. As I said, I’ve been reaching out to people, and there are undertakings slowly taking shape in the background. Most of them I’m not ready to talk about just yet since they might not happen at all. Still, I can’t help but tease some of them. One enterprise is directly related to AHITR, but it’s at least a year away from just the announcement. There is another thing (or two) which is Rift-adjacent, but going in a different direction. May not happen at all.

A bit out of the left field, the folks who make furry games (again, if you are on Discord, you probably know what I’m talking about) are doing well, and we’ve been talking about collaborating on a non-furry 2D project. Do not be afraid, I won’t be involved that much, I just like the idea, think it may turn out really neat, and can provide them with the framework used in AHITR and some of my insights/expertise/super valuable opinions.

What’s to come to Rift in 2022

This is already a huge post, and I’m getting way off topic, so let’s return to our main attraction.

The January update will tie up some loose ends and will add some long-awaited events to the girl’s routes (Cait in glasses, anyone?), but to be honest it’s going to be more of a breather update. I’ve taken two days off last week and I plan to do that again this week, and there’s a lot of stuff still to be done to support the February update, so there simply won’t be time to add that much content. We’ll try to make it as good as possible, of course, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking, sorry.

Now, February is when the pace will pick up again. Blair is coming to the House. There was a way to force her in earlier, but I decided to do it all properly. She will arrive with a solid starting arc right away, the new spaces in the House should be quite neat, and hopefully we’ll even manage to add some crossover events and activities for her straight away to make it all feel as organic as possible.

Once she’s in we’ll start updating older group events and finally adding new ones since our full cast will be assembled. And, of course, this will allow us to go hard on the main story. Don’t expect it to resolve this year, but we should be able to add a solid chunk of it.

Yona’s story will pick up, too. She’s woefully behind, and I believe she’ll gain a fair number of fans once she has more time to shine.

The next arc of Naomi’s story is coming as well, and we’ll finally get to see her ship and crew.

Rae’s, Cait’s and Lyriel’s stories will get at least a few events each. At 20+ events each, Cait’s and Lyriel’s stories are now somewhat limited by the main story progression, and Rae’s personal story is getting there as well.

But that’s the beauty of it, right? We’ll get to see what happens next to the girls, the MC, and all the other characters around them. And who knows, maybe there’s something even more epic on the cards, eh?

For now, let me wish you a Happy New Year again. I hope it will be an awesome year for the game and for each and every one of you. See you soon!