Change of Plans - Merging the ALPHA & BETA into 1 Release (Patreon)

Hello all,

Just another quick update to talk about yet another change of plans. 

TL;DR: 

• I have decided to merge the 2 planned releases for December (ALPHA & BETA) into a single release at the end of this month. 
• All supporters from either November or December will be sent the link to download the build when it is released. 
• It will still be called the v0.10 ALPHA, but it will contain what was advertised as being in the "BETA" (The ALPHA build + Debra X Jeb & Barney, Tiffany X Barney & Debra Combat Scenes). 
• There will be an actual BETA build at some point much closer to the launch of the Full Release in early 2022 which will be much more complete & content filled. 

The long-winded ramble:

Alright, what is my logic behind this decision?

Simply put, & as predictable as ever, the ALPHA build planned for the 8th won't be quite ready & will require an additional delay. Okay, so why not just push the release for a few more days & release it then? The problem here is that as we push closer to the middle of the month, we're encroaching more & more on the development time needed for what would have been the BETA content (the addition of those few new scenes). 

Once we reach that point, there really isn't much value to be had in releasing essentially the same build twice in the span of 2 weeks. I'd have to go through the grueling "crunch-> polish-> test-> release-> recover from burnout" process twice in the span of 2-3 weeks. Plus, if you wanted to try them both out, you'd have to download the game and play it twice in that short amount of time. Such a short amount of time that I won't really have a chance to iterate on ALPHA feedback in time for the BETA anyway. 

So I figured, why not just hold off a bit longer? I'm sending all supporters from November or December the link when it's done anyway. It'll save us all the trouble of dealing with 2 separate but almost identical builds in close proximity. I'll be happier with what my initial v0.10 offerings are (And can suffer a few less nights of -5 hours sleep). And you guys will get a better first impression because there will actually be some new scenes, plus a bit more time for me to flesh out some of the Skill related systems & mechanics I've been getting shipable (but not quite there) over the last 6 days.

I know I literally just gave that Dec 8th date, but that was always more for me than it was for all of you. Giving myself a more strict deadline has really helped me cut fat from the remaining development items in my list and refine the final selection of things that NEED to be done before players get their hands on it. Sometimes pressure like that is a very helpful tool in overriding the perfectionist part of my brain & making the necessary and targeted  cuts to certain areas of my plans to focus on the things that matter. I wouldn't have been able to make some of these tough, but sensible decisions if I just continued to develop the game in my own time without any external pressure to release. As I've been saying, sometimes you just have to force yourself to get things done. 

So I don't regret giving a date this time. Even if it did ultimately result in a delay and means I continue to look like a fool with no concept of time. At least on this occasion, I expected it to happen. :')

I joked about wasting time implementing aspects of the Farming & Crafting system on the discord, but it genuinely is important that these gameplay systems function on at least some rudimentary level so that you can get a tangible idea of what I'm trying to accomplish & start to provide actionable feedback on the new systems after being mostly hands off for the last year as you patiently wait.

I am really happy with how all of these game systems and mechanic are coming together now and are interweaving with one another. There's a lot of good synergy at play:

This may sound like such a basic example, but I've taken the "Bottled Water" item, and added some additional functionality to it in the form of creating an "Empty Bottle" item when it's consumed. Empty Bottles can also be looted. I've then added water stations around the maps where Tiffany can fill an "Empty Bottle" to create a new "Bottled Water". 

Alternatively, when Tiffany lactates with an "Empty Bottle" in her inventory, it will start to fill up with her milk. Once Tiffany fills it with 600ml of Milk it will create one "Milk" Item. [Sidenote - I will add a Milk Pump item & scenes for all girls in a future release] 

Of course, Milk (& Bottled Water) can be consumed to replenish thirst, sold for cash, or used as ingredients in the new Cooking System. And apart from cleaning wash rags for Stealth Mode, Bottled Water is also now used to water the seeds you plant in Farming plots. And in future days, those crops will be harvested and also consumed, sold or used in Cooking. And in the future, I have plans to add Crafting recipes that use the Empty Bottles as materials too.

Like I said, this is a fairly mundane example in the grand scheme of things. But hopefully it is a useful enough anecdote to convey how a lot of the game's systems are becoming very intertwined with one another in a way that I'm really happy with and excited to continue expanding upon. 

However, forcing myself to stick to Dec 8th(or as close as humanly possible for me) would mean that the versions of these systems you get to experience would be so bare bones it would seem like I had made major design oversights instead of the truth which was just simply running out of time:

There's a "Cooking Recipe" consumable that you can loot that will unlock a recipe that Tiffany doesn't have yet. But because I've run out of time to work anymore on Items, Skills & Perks, it'd have to ship as-is with only 4 unlockable recipes making the item pretty worthless as loot once you've found & read 4 of them.

Yeah, it's enough to get the point across for the sake of an ALPHA, and it's not such a big deal that it's not fleshed out more, but when I look across the board and see a similar story with every one of these new mechanics, it all adds up to a game full of potentially interesting systems that all need about 3-4 more hours of work on each. 

Same goes for the functionality of the mostly dialogue based skills like Persuading, Policing & Whoring which have little to no functionality right now compared to the other 6 skills, which are also still kind of meek and all lacking the functionality of their Skill Rank bonuses. 

They all just need more time. Time I just don't have if I wanted to get the ALPHA out without a delay when there are still some much bigger things with the Gallery Mode & Sex Scenes that I'd still need to finish implementing before a potential release. The 4 remaining big ticket development items are as follows:

• Fixing all 10 of the game's unique combat sex scene encounters, thanks to having broken them with the new way that those scenes are now handled outside of the battle screen and on the map instead.
• Removing the old "Do you wish to skip?" prompt at the start of every scene now that the new system is in place. And then testing that all scenes can be skipped correctly without messing anything up data wise or having images left up on the screen post-scene.
• Making sure that the scenes all play & skip correctly in Gallery Mode and that data doesn't accidentally get carried over back into the game like Tiffany getting pregnant from a Gallery Scene, her kinks being influenced or messing up the tracking on how many times she's engaged in sex acts, etc.
• Finish adding all of the new RNG Zombie, Tiffany and Sex SFX systems to each scene to replace the old audio. 

^None of these 4 things are particularly tricky to do. There's no complicated design work or programing challenges here since I've already solved them all. Instead, this is just a bunch of monotonous refactoring/copy-pasting from scenes I've already finished overhauling. It's mundane & simple work, but it still takes a lot of time to do, test and tweak for all the variations that these scenes have. Honestly, I probably need about 2-3 days just for these last things. Everything else is "done", or at least done enough to be technically playable. 

But even then, releasing this build without an additional full day or two of actual play testing on my part would be a super unconscionable thing to do since I've only ever tested isolated parts of the game over the last year. I've not done a full play through in even longer. Working on v0.07-v0.09, I only really play tested the new stuff added to the Casino. But with v0.10, I've stuck my grubby little fingers into every facet of the game, meaning there are probably several major bugs I won't discover until I actually play it through a couple of times from start to finish as a player would. 

Sure, I won't be able to catch everything, there are so many variations now, but I need to at least do my due diligence and catch all of the big obvious problems otherwise I'll just be wasting all of our time by having to export and upload a third release to patch any totally game-breaking issues the "Dec 8th ALPHA" would have had. 

So yeah, the build is really getting there, but needs a bit more time, at which point, combining it all into 1 single release just makes more sense than 2 separate ones.

Thank you all for your continued patience and understanding. I'll make another post when I'm actually done with the game itself & have moved on to rendering images for the new scenes and share a first look at them. Now, after 5 nights in a row with less than 5 hours of sleep, I'm going to go take care of that. Then I'll get back to work on a more healthy schedule. But don't worry about me, I'll be fine. I did this to myself after all :)

~ Jim