Anniversary, thoughts, secrets, and post-patch plans

Greetings, everyone. Welcome, newcomers, regulars, and bypassers.

ヾ(＾∇＾)

This is my regular after-patch post. It's a long and mostly pointless read that I torture people around here with from time to time, and you will lose absolutely nothing skipping it. But it's also an anniversary, 200+ patrons celebration, and a new year, so...here we go.

Today it's time to tell you a little story (under 3k words is still little, right? lol) about how the game started, how it was going, and where we are heading next.

The year is 2020, early January.

I had a whole month ahead of me thanks to vacation. After several days of fighting with the installation of the animation software, I finally realized that I'm dumber than a potato :( And I was thinking slightly higher about myself, to be honest. 

Internet to the rescue, I finally was able to launch a pretty decent repack and started playing with the character creation. At first, I only had the idea: I want to make a game about "female orgasm control", it's fucking hot, and it's very hard to find any. I want more!

Do I know anything about coding? Nope: never studied, only know how "if" and "else" work. Do I know anything about photoshop? Nope: launched it like 3 times in my life. Do I have any idea about lighting, posing, animating? Nope, nothing. How to write the smut? Nah-ah: read a lot, but never wrote anything in English since the MMO chatting days. Plot? Nothing. Planned characters? Nothing. End goal? Do something and learn. Fucked up fantasies? A full head of them!

The first week was the worst: dozens of Renpy tutorials, failure to start even the simplest scene, fighting with the poser, ugly lighting, not knowing how to do the simplest fucking things with anything. Then you look at what came out of it and think: "Damn... This is the absolute crap. There's so much quality content on the net, and what the fuck am I even doing?" Then starting again.

You know this first title scene, right? At first, the game was supposed to be smaller and with an optional NTR route. Check this out.  That's why Sam looks kinda like a schmuck when the game starts. Then I played with his model a little bit.

I remember telling myself: "Whatever you do, make it simple and small. Try finishing until the summer, learn from your mistakes, and start another project after a break. With how shitty everything looks, no one will bother giving you any attention or especially money anyway."

That didn't go well, as you can see （⌒▽⌒ゞ

The game is slowly turning into my magnum opus...

After the first few scenes and initial character introduction with like 2 hundred lines of dialogues, I finally started asking myself the real questions: where am I going? I want to show the "orgasm denial", "control", "humiliation, and "moral degradation" kinks, right? This won't work if the MC has kinda weak personality for one of his routes. And making two split personalities is like making two different games.

At that point I had no idea how much time it takes to create content, I just did what I could every day: discovered new features, like adding sound, looping animations properly, moving bones, making scenes and avatars change, etc. It slowly started to feel like I can at least do a simple kinetic novel - with no choices. Wrote a few awful jokes, added music, and made the first attempt to touch the interface (the stripped chat-box and half-sized avatars were a thing...). 

All-in-all the "first Chapter" took about a month to make and the first release was in February.

Then the real struggle began. Where do I put this? How do I promote myself? Do I need a Patreon, or should I be more humble with the poop I made? They want my credit card number? Shit. I need an e-mail, I need accounts, I need to learn where to put my stuff, where to upload, how to make gifs, how to make a banner. I do need to use Photoshop after all? Fuck. I need to talk to people? Oh no... ⊙﹏⊙

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I uploaded and posted the thing to f95, then went to sleep. The next day I started reading responses, and to my surprise, they were much better than I expected! And trust me - I was ready for some tough hits, I knew better than anyone that the game was pretty low quality. Couldn't even call it a "game" back then.

You have no idea how happy I was when I had my first patrons (hi, Olli; hi, Solb21).

This boosted my confidence and I quickly jumped into the wonderful world of "variables". I want to create a game, right? I need to figure out how to make the simplest routes. What are these routes gonna be about? No idea.

Now. I'll have you know a secret about me and this game...

I never had a plan for features or plot in mind other than 1 patch ahead. And even that was very vague. Not until summer, at least.

Once I figured out that I can add some neat stuff, like animated status windows and buffs, it gave me the hope that I can, in fact, do something cool, or at least decent, something not over-used.

...

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And it backfired. 

After the release of v0.2, when I started doing the next patch I was so proud of myself and thought that I'm creating a pure bomb of a game. That's when I bit a lot more than I could chew: 3 girls already, multiple stats, routes, wardrobe planned (with no idea how to do it), promised a bunch of features, more girls, and started to split gameplay into Sam and Esther perspective.

When the v0.4 was done I finally breathed out and took a look at what I have created.

People started to notice my game, I've got to my 1st Patreon goal (that I wasn't honestly even dreaming to achieve with where I started). I'm very grateful to all of you, who supported me for so long. I was able to upgrade my PC (and I had no spare money to do so for years). But this led me into a trap.

I've started promising more: "Will there be more girls? " "Y-yeah! You get a girl, and you get a girl, everybody, have a girl!", "It'd be cool if [X] fetish was in the game." "*nervously starts taking notes to add the stuff*". University setting? Soon™. Clothes change? O-ok, guys, I'll add it., etc., etc. It's hard to say No when you just start and people are nice and not really asking anything, just suggesting. Surprisingly to me, even people at $30+ tiers didn't want anything added in a demanding manner, they just wanted to support me more. I felt super guilty about that.

That was also the time when corona (bats be damned) finally hit the country I live in. Hard. And jobs started to shrink and vanish. At that point, I asked myself: "Maybe I should focus on money more? Harem games are where the easy bucks are. Sure I enjoy making gang-bang, free-use, and other content with dick-to-pussy ratio over 1, more... And I hate pure MC-orbiting harems... But I need money. I have to either switch the theme or abandon everything and start looking for a second, real job."

And I can't emphasize enough how much your (monetary) support helped me to move on, forget about stressing myself and do what I like!

Like, seriously guys... Thanks.

At this point, I'm not stopping! Unless something major happens and I lose the ability to get your support with no workarounds. Then I'm fucked xD

So. Why am I suddenly being dramatic, and writing the wall of text then?

I was thinking a lot past 2 weeks. About how many things I want to do now: learn how to make better games (programming), try to study professional animation tools (like Blender), communicate with people who are professionals in their fields (like the sound and interface design and such). I have so many games, and fetishes, and game-mechanics ideas too. My mind is driving me nuts with enthusiasm to start a new thing.

But all of that is a loss of focus. And there's one thing that keeps me from jumping to anything new - hatred. Hatred towards unfinished and abandoned projects I had to play in the past (◎益◎;)

I will not start anything new until I'm done with this game!

But I want to. Especially, I want to try figuring out Blender. I feel like the good time to start was 5 years ago, and if I'm stuck with this game for another 2-3 years, I'll be even more late to the party than I am now.

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That's where we come to the "promises" part.

I know I promised two more girls. I did this from v0.2 until the latest patch.

Initially, I was going to introduce the whole "Esther at the university" gameplay. Tie new girls (one of them was supposed to be a student, and another a teacher) to the main plot, and create something cool for the "students - slut teacher" setup.

But the more I was fiddling with the main code for Gloria, as well as figuring out how to create a "moral fall flow" via animations, the more it became clear to me that adding 2 more big variables to the equation is gonna be a nightmare.

It wasn't too much of a surprise: somewhere between 0.2-0.3 I thought to myself: "My code is a pile of shit, obviously - I'm a noob. Let's see how long until I drown in it, eh?". And it looks like the time has come. It's functioning. So good, in fact, that I haven't had a single release where it was completely unplayable. This (0.7a) version might even not need any fixes before the next development cycle. Not sure if it was a miracle or just my thoroughness.

But some core features - like, the day cycle (only morning, mid, evening) is limiting me a lot. It is, of course, possible to re-do it - everything is possible with enough time, but the amount of work... I can' imagine.

On top of that, the size of the game grew by a lot! I remember doing useless sex animations for Sam+Esther back in v0.2 just to fill the patch with something. "Hey, guys, look! My game has SEX and it's only v0.2! Unlike those other games. Am I not the best?"

And one of the biggest reasons is the scale: the whole students-teachers-university setup is such a big topic to use! The amount of degenerate and cool stuff to do is endless.

But shoving it all into one game? It's hard enough to keep track of everything already. Do I make those girls as detailed as Gloria? With "phases" and stuff.  Or do I simplify and do something like E+M gameplay? The first one is gonna take a LOT of time, and I'm too excited to start something new to properly and in detail do this for another 2-3 years. I'll burn out. The second one is kinda cheap: I'll blow this great opportunity and setup on something quick and simple. What if I decide to do another game in university? Maybe even "iNSight of you 2"! It'll be repeating myself, right? A wasted opportunity.

So. Here comes the point of writing this whole post.

The New Year Resolution.

I'll focus on making the existent content complete. 3 girls are enough.

I'll stop promising to add girls, kinks, features simply because I'm scared to lose audience.

I'll make the game finished first, then when it's done, we can talk about adding "voted", "side" or "extended" content.

I'll focus on the direction I'm going in terms of "alternative, no-sharing route, please". Once the game is complete, we can talk about this again.

I'll aim to finish the game in 2021. Best case scenario - do an extended version by the end of the year.

By "finished" I mean this:

• both routes for Maya are done (harem route is decent already)
• phase 4 for Gloria is complete (the current one is phase 3)
• Esther's gameplay filled with content (for both Maya routes too)
• all endings for Gloria and Maya are done
• the main plot is finished and the game has an outro
• game-over scenarios are finished
• all placeholders are filled with content or cleaned
• the earliest Gloria's phase (v0.2) is partly reworked
• UI updated or reworked
• useful features (cheats, gallery, content-jumping, diary) are finished
• quality-of-life (chit-chat, game tips in-game, diversified repeated dialogues) added

Once again, I'd like to thank YOU guys for making this possible. Instead of jumping to the popular harem train, instead of abandoning this project due to corona, I can focus on making what I like, and, hopefully, bring you some joy too.

I hope this was not very disappointing to read. I know I fucked up with promising more than I can deliver. But I prefer being honest, instead of making both: you, waiting for never-coming (or slowly and poorly implemented) girls, angry; and myself, burning out in a year (or two), miserable.

Does this mean that you won't see a new female face in the game ever again? Not necessary. When we get to the "making the extended version" part - it might be possible to add a quick side NPC here and there. Maybe Maya's mom will come into play and with a much stronger need for grandchildren? ;) Or maybe (as some of you suggested) Gloria's sister shows up for a quick interaction? A jealous female coworker? A super shy girl at NUAMA who had fantasies about being controlled by someone through the chip and is begging you to experiment on her? I have many ideas, but I won't make the mistake of promising anything again. We will see when we get there, ok?

Nearest plans.

With this, another humongous wall of text is complete, and I'm starting to work on the next patch. I'll post the progress from time to time to the patron-only area, as always.

I need to figure out how to make the Club thingy, add a little management system to switch girls between jobs there, and all that. I'm giving Gloria a little break: she will have to attend the first levels of events starting from her previous, more rebellious phase. So the degeneracy level of content I'm creating is gonna be going kinda backward for some time, but I'll get back to the fun stuff soon.

I'm also planning to redo Patreon tiers. The $30+ thingy - that you can commission me - is gonna go. As I said: no one actually commissioned anything yet, and I don't want to be false-signaling after today's post. The tiers will stay purely for people who really loved the game and want to give me more money. I'll remove and correct the description.

The only paid content is gonna be behind the $10-tier - cheat code that I update every patch and a link to "original quality" files.

The slight time delay (1 week for $5, 2 weeks for $10) is gonna stay as well. But as some of you know, I still do work between these releases usually. Something smaller, like Journal, or some mini-content or a feature. I want to rework the first Gloria stage in one of these 2-weeks periods.

Other than that, I was trying to look into how to make the game suitable for Android (touch screens aren't very friendly with hover-over tooltips) but wasn't able to even install the required Renpy package yet...it doesn't even give me an error message... I am the potato, after all. Maybe later.

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Have a good day and see ya next week!