Update 51

tl;dr - The demo's been generally well received and I've been thinking about the responses and what they should mean about development.

This week's image

A new take on 'kissing service'? I made this image as kind of an experiment for an idea - I think I should be able to use it somewhere whether or not the scene I planned pans out. I'll explain a little more below.

Got some more voice acting from Sacci

I've recently received quite a bit of the sexy fun time voice work from Sacci Salt, who plays Iku. She's really going the extra mile for you guys! I know she loves making the voice acting for you and loves to hear if you enjoy it, so if you ever want me to pass along any positive feedback in the comments or give it yourself on Twitter @saccisalt then I know she'd appreciate it.

I think there's only a few remaining bits of Iku's voice acting that need to be done. I am thinking I'm going to have to recast Masami again - that part seems to be cursed as I haven't heard from the voice actress lately - but that will be something I deal with when I've made up my mind how best to handle that issue.

Played around with night service responses

The structure of the game and in particular the pre-sex scene parts of the game came under scrutiny this week thanks to the release of the demo. My feelings on this were complex; on the one hand I operate on the design philosophy that players who identify a problem with the game are probably right (even if suggested solutions often aren't), so I should always try to understand and address any issues that come up. On the other hand I do feel that part of the problem is just that the full volume of sex and relationship content in the game hasn't been implemented yet, even in the alphas.

So anyway, I've played around with an idea to add another level (stage 5) to each of the night service responses. This might seem like a small step but I think it would be a decent compromise between expanding the night service system a little to be less repetitive and go a little further in sexual content, while also not being a massive redesign/rewrite problem or clashing with my design vision for the game. In my design I don't think night service training should be anything more than teasing, so I don't want to push it too far, but this solution might help a bit. It's enough work that I don't want to do a whole lot more (nine more, relatively lengthy sex responses with illustrations is basically most of an interactive sex scene) but I've got a start on it this week. The image above for Iku is from one of the planned responses.

The demo seems generally well received

Other than what I just discussed the demo seems to have been generally well received by those who have played it, and it's generated more interest about the game (which is great). I have noted that there are some technical glitches on some systems with the ADRIFT platform - hopefully we can get those ironed out before the final release and this can serve as a good stress test for those multimedia functions before the full release.

Unfortunately I can't guarantee that because it's largely out of my hands. It's up to the programmer of the ADRIFT platform, who has been rather distracted from the system lately. I've wondered from time to time whether I should try switching to a new game development system, but I just don't know what that would be or when I'll find the time to learn it.

Any thoughts? Questions? Suggestions? Suquestithoughts? If so, please drop them in the comments section below!