Release 4 Plans + Potential Benefit Changes

I’d like to start by thanking everyone for the extremely positive reception to Release 3. I’d spent a shit load of time on it and the kind words have made that more than worth it. Big thanks to you all for the support, and welcome to those you who decided to sign up as new patrons!

Potential Benefit Change

I’ll get this important meta stuff out of the way first. Part of the patreon tier benefits is poll voting, however this a benefit only for the higher tier patrons. I don’t think I approached this properly when I set it up. As it stands something like ~95% of patrons won’t be able to vote (this is also why I haven’t done any yet) which I feel is counter productive to what the polls are meant to do.

My logic with polls is they will just be a way to gather feedback from supporters as such to supplement the typical feedback. Not really to decide or dictate anything, just as a means for me to get a feel for what supporters want. From which I (hopefully) make good and informed decisions about what to do. Basically it’ll just be a way for you to help steer the ship.

Obviously with 95% of supporters not being able to vote, this doesn’t really work. So I’m thinking about opening up voting to the supporter tier at 1x voting power, and upping the voting power for the other tiers appropriately. Something like as follows:

Supporter: 1x

Point Grinder: 3x

Sunset Chaser: 5x

Wave Maker: 8x

I’ll wait a bit before I make this change, giving you all a chance to provide your feedback. If I don’t get any, I’ll just assume everyone is okay with it. Feel free to dm me, post a comment or talk about it on the discord!

I have a poll planned, but I’ll wait until this is settled. As you may know, I plan to add a number of characters to L&V, and this first poll will be a chance for you to vote for what kind of character you want to see. I already have two characters I want to add soon, and they won’t be included in the poll. The poll will be more for the longer term planning. Keep an eye out for this soon!

Release 3 Development and Release 4

Those of you who have been following the project would have noticed R3 took longer than usual. Truth is, between the stripclub, the Mel stuff and various other mechanics/code that I needed to do (a number of things had built up/been pushed back from previous releases), the workload was just larger than normal. I retrospect I should have split the update into two, but by the time this became apparent it was too late.

Whatever your thoughts on this are, I don’t want updates to take so long. So going forward I’m going to try and get them out more frequently. Obviously this means each update is smaller, but should come more often. This is more possible now, as the pace of updates had previously been set largely by Jen’s content. I’m sure you can see that releasing half a love/lewd level wouldn’t have really worked very well.

I’ll talk about Jen’s content further on, but as a quick tl;dr it’s going to be more flexible now. So now I  can pace the updates according to other stuff. I’ll be experimenting with this in the next releases.

The Current Plan

Much like R3, R4 is meant to have a rather large new system introduced. You can probably take a wild guess what this is, but I’ll reveal more when it’s actually set in stone. Now, I don’t want to pull another R3 and have this system dominate the update schedule. If I just went ahead and did R4 in one go it’d probably take 2+ months.

So instead I’m going to split it into two, likely a Release 3.5 followed some time after by Release 4. Ideally I’d like the 3.5 to take about a month, and R4 following up after a month after that (maybe a little longer, just depends). I’ll probably be working on the big stuff across both updates, so the workload is split between the two.

The following is a very rough early plan of what I’m planning for both releases. Subject to change of course, but I’m going to focus on getting them out in a reasonable time.

Release 3.5

Jen

• Events and content that was cut from R3 because of time constraints
• Some new daily action stuff
• Expansions of the new mechanics/systems from R3
• New stripclub content
• Office stuff (if there’s time, this is one thing that might get shifted to R4)
• Story Intros/Follow ups to what happened in R3

The nature of her content is changing somewhat now that the progression has reached a critical stage. I’ll talk about this more in her own section.

Mel

• UI stuff, character settings
• As much content as can be done in the time available, as a general idea of what needs to be done: story events, out of club availability, her home etc

Once we’re some way into development, I’ll be able to give a more concrete time-frame.

Release 4

Jen

• The mystery system :^)
• new story events (1 or 2 per route, not sure exactly but leaning towards 1, if theres two one will be short)
• New daily stuff and building on what will be added in 3.5

Mel

• Whatever I couldn’t get done in 3.5 (hopefully by this point there will be one or two love/lewd levels) – more on this when I talk about Mel

New char???

• I’ve pushed this back so many times. I’d really like to get this going, even if it’s just an intro so you can give your feedback on what you think.

Extra Stuff

These are some things I’ll hopefully be throwing into either update, depending on how their development progresses.

• Club → office multi job – I’ll do my best to get this into the 3.5 Release
• Stripclub expansion – Turning the club into a location you can visit outside of work.
• Club + Office Mechanic Expansion – Office in particular needs some new upgrades etc club has some upgrades that are not obtainable yet with the current caps, but I’ll probably wait until the club expansion stuff happens as they are linked. More on that in the future.

Character Content going forward

Jen

Jen’s story, once the coming events have been done, is going to be on a sort of hiatus. This doesn’t mean I won’t keep adding content for her, but the story stuff probably won’t continue after R4 until other characters have been developed. There’s also the question of endings and that kind of thing, but that’s waaay off.

For now, what this means is instead of getting new daily stuff to grind towards story events, much of what I add will be smaller content that you can do. Basically after the trip to get her to this point, you’ll just be reaping the benefits. R3 introduced a bunch of new stats for her, that’s the kind of thing I am talking about. I’ve got plenty more content I can do for her, but It’ll be delivered in smaller  chunks alongside the other characters. Obviously I can’t just keep delivering the same amount as previous releases while also doing it for other characters as well.

Tl;dr – story almost finished, time to mess around while other characters catch up

Mel

Mel’s meant to be a “side character” of sort. Tied directly to the club job. Meaning overall her content will be on a smaller scale than Jen (it’s likely no other character will have the same amount of content as Jen).

Really in practice this just means the start to finish should be a lot faster in terms of playtime and events etc. The immediate goal is just getting her some story events, and opening her up for interaction outside of the club.

I haven’t planned this out entirely yet, but I’m thinking there will be one or two story events before she becomes more available. These early story events might also work differently to Jen’s. My current idea is to just have 1 event serve both routes, but you’ll have a choice in the event to direct it either toward love or lewd outcome. This will make more sense once you know how the story is going to go.

After these early story events are out of the way, it’ll be back to business as usual. Each route having their own events. Basically think of it this way: As you progress you’ll take her in different directions, and as such the story will deviate further from each other.

Let me know what you think about this. Of course If I find it’s complete garbage I’ll just do the usual stuff.

New Character

I won’t reveal much about this yet until I know it’s actually worth something. But this will be a “main character”. Hopefully lots of content, starting off with a railroaded story line before they become more available.

Hopefully you’ll get a taste of this by the time R4 is out.

Conclusion

I probably forgot some things, but hopefully this unsightly essay communicates my plans well enough. As ever I’ll make some follow up posts as things develop with previews were possible. Keep an eye out the poll going up soon, and thank you all again for supporting L&V!