Monday post #19 (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

Let’s talk 0.6 which I will call update 6. I’ll drop from now on the traditional versioning for something more understandable for everyone. The update will now follow this pattern: Update 6, Update 7, etc. Patch will still be a letter, in alphabetical order.

ie Update 6a, Update 6b, etc.

I spent some time improving my animation skills and I think it now pays off. The last scene of Update 6 will have 100% custom made complex animations. I count on you guys to let me know what you think about it when you see it. If you’re a Patriarch tier patron, check out the discord chat. I posted a preview there.

Last weekend, I took a step back to think about where the game is going, if it follows what I originally planned, if I’m satisfied with the way it unfolds and such. I couldn’t stop thinking about an ‘issue’ I had with Cure My Addiction and could never solve. It still haunts me ^^”.

Which issue? The cohabitation of free roaming and story progression.

Let me explain.

Free roam, to be fun, in my opinion, must offer a lot of variations depending on the actions you make. Ideally, your actions must also have a lasting influence over a few days. But you can’t have that if at the same time you need to progress in the story.

But also, the more the story progresses, the more the available content in the free roam becomes obsolete, resulting in a loss of content.

An easy example in The Patriarch would be when MC gets his room upstairs. It changes a lot of the dynamics going on in the house and a significant part of the content available before either has to be adapted or removed (the “evening rewards”, the girls cleaning the old cell, etc...).

The stats suffer from this issue too. Their primary purpose is to filter what you can do in a free roam environment. But the more the story progresses, the more the stats become useless because the content they ‘allowed’ becomes obsolete.

Considering the time spent on raising the stats (the famous ‘grind’), I don’t think it’s worth it. In the current state of the game, I’m not happy with how the player’s stats works. It was not what I had in mind when I planned the development.

In a visual novel type game or any game with a linear progression, you don’t have the issue. So why am I not doing that?

My end goal has always been the same, even for Cure My Addiction. I want the player to have as much freedom as possible with many opportunities during each day, updates after updates increasing the available content. In Cure My Addiction, I got caught up by the time and I realized too late that I couldn’t do it anymore as I needed the story to move on. I don’t want to make that mistake with The Patriarch.

I also want to give you guys more voting power over what content you want to see implemented. A new outfit for a specific event? A new spanking position or implement for a scene? More lesbian scenes? Anything, really. And this is typically free roam stuff.

But as you noticed, it didn’t happen much in The Patriarch so far and the reason is that I need to progress in the story and replace some of the content at the same time. It’s taking all the time I can spend working on the game already.

So, what should I do?

In order to achieve a fun and rich free roaming, I’m convinced that the story must have progressed enough to offer a stable environment for the characters. Only after reaching that point I can start filling the free roam with quality content.

So, I decided to focus on the story progression, starting with update 6, and I will keep doing that (for 2-3 more releases probably) until I can ‘safely’ add more free roam content.

What do you think about the whole thing? What is your feeling as a player? Am I wrong or am I right?

Let me know either here or in the Discord chats

It’s been a much longer speech than usual and I hope I didn’t lose too many readers before the end. ;)

Thanks, guys!