11/4 Status Update (Patreon)

On Thursday I put out the Netoria Tactics epilogue update test build. That's pretty much the full thing with the actual update coming out Friday. This update is going to be all about Netoria Tactics because there's a lot to discuss concerning post-release plans.

It's been no secret that finishing the story and the main game wasn't going to be the end of Netoria Tactics development. I've always planned to do expansion content since the beginning. People have also asked me fairly frequently to put the game on Steam so they can buy it there and support the game in a way that doesn't involve Patreon. That does have a small hitch in it in that Steam's policy is that the price that's on Steam shouldn't be undercut in other places. You can't sell a game for $50 on Steam and $5 on GOG for example. In theory, that means that charging for the game on Steam and giving it away for free elsewhere is against their policy. I use Steam for a lot more than just Apollo Seven games, so getting on Steam's bad side is something I don't want to do.

I can make the Steam release a different product though. So what I'm thinking should happen is that what releases on Steam is the game + DLCs. So the expansion content will be exclusive to these paid versions. If you're here on Patreon, that doesn't really mean anything. I'll consider the money you've spent here as money towards the game and you'll get a free Steam/Itch key if you've donated money equal to the cost of the premium version of the game. And it'll almost certainly be leaked on F95Zone anyway, so people will get it for free anyway. I don't care about that, I just want the Steam version to exist without violating any policies.

So the ways you'll be able to play the DLC stuff like the golden route will be paying for it on Steam or Itch, getting a free key from me for pledging enough, or just downloading a pirated version that for legal reasons I won't be able to distribute but don't care about. The point of this isn't earning more money, it's giving people who want to support me alternate ways of doing it.

With Netoria Tactics' main development cycle pretty much done, that narrows done my projects to:

• At the Mountains of Friendship (years of development left)
• Netoria Tactics DLC stuff (will come out periodically, can work on it off and on)
• Naked Ambition end game content and endings (will take a while, but the end is in sight)
• Futa Oasis endings (I want to just add them and deal with fixing gameplay and stuff later)

That's a fairly big list, but the last three are all projects that are wrapping up or close to wrapping up. It won't be too long until it's just At the Mountains of Friendship. So that means pre-production on something should start fairly soon. If I start pre-production when everything else is done, there will be a big gap between releases since it takes a game half a year to two years to get to being in a state for a first release.

So what's that pre-production going to be? I have a few ideas, but I haven't settled on anything. I'm leaning pretty hard toward it being another game under the "Netoria" label. That could be something new with NTR themes or a Netoria Tactics sequel. The game I've been thinking about making for a while is called Netoria: Total Retail and is an evolution of a game I called Pawn Shop Please, which was a Papers Please kind of game but about working at a pawn shop. Instead of looking over ID cards and papers, it's about analyzing items people are selling to the pawn shop. Anyway, the game has a few overlaps with AtMoF in how I was going to develop it, focusing on new girls being added fully. I'm a little worried that having two games like that going on at once is a bad idea. Maybe something with more fully-fledged characters and stories is better.

So that leans more into the idea of a Netoria Tactics sequel, but I'm not sure what that would be. The obvious thing is just to make a similar game mechanically in a much better engine, but that would take a lot of dev time. This is supposed to be a side game, so something like that might be too much work. Maybe a small-scale RPG? I've never done something like that, could be fun. Just use SRPG Studio again? It kind of sucks, but it did let me make Netoria Tactics in record time, only a year and a half from ideation to completion. I'm just not sure at this point.

That's all for this week. Less than a week until another game is complete and it's Naked Ambition time! As always, thanks for your continued support.