Behind the scenes: Free Days? (Patreon)

This is going to be a hard post to speak about.

I know that many of you enjoy the free day parts of the game that existed before the "reboot" because honestly, it's really cool. The way it worked was that it took place on the weekend in the game for a given day. (Saturday) Where you had six options during the morning, another six during the noon and lastly another six during the afternoon. That's a total of 18 sections, 3 sections per girl. Where the replay value for these days alone was insane! Even if you focused on just hanging out with say Heather all day. You could replay this free day five more times focused purely on the other girls if you wanted or split the focuses, etc.

I love the idea of it! It feels very fun and really gives some good choices and unlocked content to players.

But sadly... This wasn't a easy decision. The reboot will not be featuring "Free Days"... While it is true these free days would've only had a total of three in the game before you pick a girlfriend. Then the free days would've been replaced with the girlfriend route focus instead. That is still a total of 54 sections for 3 free days of content, in order for me to put it into comparison. The new reboot Days 1-5 has a total of 15 sections. If it roughly takes a month to produce 4-5 new days added to the game in general. That means every odd month instead of more natural day to day content, the game process for a new update would only focus on one new day.

Now granted even if a single free day did have 18 sections and even if we tried making each of those sections only 500 word count or very brief focus, it'd still be quite a bit of work to do for a game mechanic focus that is replaced after not too long.

What does that mean though? What do we get in return for the loss of Free days?

This means that the game is removing free day content. In return after day 5 (Friday) the game will now have Saturday and Sunday (day 6 & 7), while these days will be linear. These days will have a section for each main girl, this would look like... Day 6 (Heather, Erika, Rachel) day 7 (Nova, Bridget, Miki). This is a rough idea still.

Now that alone doesn't really offer anything new except two new days or 6 new sections after every 5 days that passes in the game.

The other added bonus is that we're going to continue making choices during the linear path game play even more fun than what's seen in the demo. Choices won't be limited to only 2 choices, there will be choices that act as affection boosting choices for girls, ones that might change the rest of the given sections events or outcomes, ones that just offer more information about towards a given question. etc.

There is also talk about trying to open up branching choices, those of you who played the game during chapter 2 before the "reboot". You'll remember being able to choose to check up on Rachel spending time with her or going with your friends to hang out with Nova instead. Same for choosing to hang out with Erika or go with your friends to see Bridget, etc. These kind of branching choices on who to hang out with during sections are being considered and the rough idea for them is that they could show up easily during classroom sections for a given day. They could also show up in sections during the weekend days. These will be just another little helpful bit of needed game play to keep players active with being able to interact.

Okay, but how about the girlfriend routes and how those work?

The girlfriend route focus should happen like this... Let's say for example that on day 21. The game will come to a point where you'll be given the choice of choosing a girlfriend. While the affection stats for a given girl will affect unlocking some scenes, ideally you should be able to choose your girlfriend without being blocked by not having enough stats. Don't get that misunderstood though, by the time the game does ask you about your girlfriend choice. You will need a little bit of stats to unlock choosing them, but it shouldn't be anything really hard like say for example if you have 9/10 possible affection to gain towards Heather that the game offers before then, it won't say "oh tough luck! enjoy starting over again to get that one missing affection point!"

This is subject to change in time still.

Now after choosing your girlfriend, the game will play out the same still during weekdays. There might be some triggering events in dialogue that are slightly different based on if your dating them or not. But the main part of the route will show up during the weekends at this point. The idea is that Saturday and Sunday the six sections in total will have each one 1500-2000 word count section for each main girl (side girls have their own thing too).

So those six sections that are normally meant as hanging out as friends. Are now seen as hanging out with your girlfriend, this will play out like... After the Friday. If Nova is your girlfriend, it will skip to Saturday and focus on hanging out with her as your girlfriend and cover sexual stuff, character story on deeper level and a few other things. Nova's section as a girlfriend will take place in a split focus, one part of her section takes place on Saturday and the other during Sunday. Then after that, the game returns to school stuff Monday-Friday before more girlfriend focus again, repeat.

This means that weekends will feel kind of small, but this is also because there's going to be sections like the above for all 6 main girls and side girls (Juliet, Lola, Zoey) are considered mini routes where you can have them as girlfriends like that too, but their stories and pacing of sex acts, etc. aren't going to end with you getting really far with them. This is intended, as they're not main girls. Look at their routes as small previews for their own addon stories added after the base game.

What if I feel like all the mentioned information still doesn't make up for no more free days?

I'm sorry if you feel that way, I truly understand and I honestly like the idea of the content. It's just too much time and focus into something that I feel can be offered and made up for in choices and branching options, plus once girlfriend routes show up in the game. Things will be getting more complex for how you wish to handle things and how those things affect everything else.

The type of game play that free days offered could still come back after the base game is nearly completed, it might be a bit more simple like I mentioned with small total word counts per section and be seen more as "I like Heather, let's go hang out with her in the morning. +1 affection, brief dialogue and event." move on to noon and repeat for stat increases.

The project is going to be a rough road ahead of us with everything already planned, with plenty of ideas set on the side to look at once it's closer to being completed. I know there's a want for more game play instead of linear story or too much reading, not enough interaction, etc. The game is considered a visual novel first with some minor dating sim elements, but that doesn't mean it'll play like a flash dating sim style game of course. I don't mean to defend not having more interaction or choices, things that are affected by those choices, etc. I love the idea of replay value and not making that "replay value" seen as "Oh let me read through Nova's stuff next... skip skip skip, new stuff, skip skip skip, etc."

I mean by nature it'll still have that sort of feel after your first play through, but what visual novels don't have that feeling? What I'm trying to explain is that I do understand the required want of choices, interactions and branching paths, game play functions. Those are being considered and we're going to continue our best to make all this play out nicely, but it should also be able to be seen as a story or even take a random day in the game by example. It should feel like a slice of life anime episode, there might be some stuff you might not understand fully if you skipped to day 23. But you should still get the feeling of "oh this section is pretty fun, has moments of comedy, drama or erotic nature, etc."