11/17 Status Update (Patreon)

This week I've been working a lot on At the Mountains of Friendship. It's turning out that the time it takes to make an update for the game is more than I expected (which is not really a surprise). When I was planning out the game I wanted to add a new girl once a month. Midway through development I knew that wasn't going to happen because the process of making the art and writing the character took longer than that. Well, now I'm finding that adding new features is taking longer too. 

I spent a lot of time this week refactoring how scenes work and trigger. This is to allow for a few new settings. One is autoplay, where scenes trigger whenever you meet the conditions of them, and the other is autoskip, where scenes you've already seen won't show up. These combined with a few other changes, like full scenes in the gallery, should make the overall experience of viewing scenes better and less disconnected from the main gameplay.

I've also added the new sanity mechanic. From the first designs, sanity was always a thing but I cut it fairly early on as it felt pretty clunky. But now it's back! Girls lose sanity by fighting and receiving EXP boosts. Losing sanity is now what triggers clothing changes and scene unlocks, so now you can track when that stuff is going to happen. Sanity also serves as a balancing act from relying heavily on boosting a single girl, as to regain sanity you either need to rest them for a battle or buy items for them. And lastly, sanity means I can get rid of the 4 EXP boost per turn limit that people hated.

All these mechanical changes are on top of me making BFF, so it's proving to be a lot of work. For 1.3 I plan to introduce meta-progression mechanics like unlocking abilities and improving girls, so that's going to be lots of work too. I think we're looking at about two months between updates right now which is slower than I like but I only have so much time to work on games. I think this update is shaping up to be a good one though, and I'm liking how BFF is turning out a lot.

The artist is working on the pairing scenes now, those should be pretty fun. And then they'll start the bonus scene. That poll is still up and right now Emma is in the lead. I have a pretty fun scene planned for her, so I'm fine with that outcome. Emma was actually my favorite girl for most of development. Although I have to say I really like Lydia now. 

I've started work on the Naked Ambition update as well and I honestly have no idea how long until it's finished. This is a very complex update and making all the pieces fit together is rather difficult. Especially since it's been so long since I was deep in the weeds on the game. But there are no major complications beyond there just being a lot of stuff to do. But once it is done, you'll be able to play all the way through to the very end of the game. I've said from the beginning that getting the Princess on the throne in Naked Ambition isn't the same thing as winning, and I think once .9 is out that will be pretty evident. There are a lot of endings where the Princess doesn't become queen that are a happier outcome. That's what Naked Ambition has always been about, trying your best to guide the Princess but mostly just seeing what happens. And the endings are a huge part of that.

That's all for this week. As always, thank you for your continued support.