State of the game v0.2 - v0.3 (Patreon)

In this post I’d like to talk about the game in its current form, and the direction I want it to go in. Let’s start with the v0.2 release. Patrons who hang out in the patron-only channel in the Discord chat already know that I had a turbulent May. Some of my other commitments took way more time than I anticipated, due to that I missed the planned late May release date, and the first week of June was mostly me working 14+ hour days to at least finish those parts that I already started, culminating in a 30 straight hours of work on the weekend of the beta release.

Mind, I’m not saying that golly, poor old me has it so rough, no, that was all my doing, should have planned better. But I believe it might just explain the result. I was in so much rush to complete things, I didn’t even stop to consider if I should have those things in the game at all.

Case in point: the combat system. Truth be told, by the end of the cycle I knew that it was, well, a bit shit. It was awesome when it was all in my head, but when actually implemented, it came out all janky and bad, and unreasonable in terms of challenge. And I know some people actually liked it, but for most, it’s just a meaningless hurdle, boring, hard as hell, and completely opaque.

But while I was sitting there spending precious time on scripting, rendering, and testing the combat, I was thinking “well, any content is better than no content.” But that’s plain wrong! Good content is awesome. Mediocre content can be alright if it’s not too intrusive. But really bad unskippable content that stands in the way of better content? Yeah… That brings me to the next part.

Version 0.3

I’m going to call it “A House in the Rift 0.3: Rebuilt”. Yeah, I’m a sucker for bad puns. But in essence, that’s what it would be. There are a number of gameplay mechanics that plain don’t work in the way I want them to. From the beginning, I imagined the game as a sort of sandbox fantasy romcom with some cool side stories and maybe just a bit of drama. Right now it doesn’t feel like it at all. 

Here’s a little illustration of what the sandbox game structure should look like, in my opinion.

And what it looks like in the current version.

So what does that mean? Well, at the very least, version 0.3 isn’t going to be savegame-compatible, cause I’ll be changing a whole lot of things. Sorry those of you who grinded the combat before v0.2.3, it sucks, but overall it’s for the best.

But most importantly, the game is going to become much less tangled and more content-oriented. My current List of Things To Do For v0.3 looks like this:

• Streamline story progression
  • Make main story independent from individual girls’ stories
  • Clearly show criteria for advancing to the next story event
• Decouple girl routes from each other
  • Make all girl-specific events depend only on the relationship progress and main story progress
  • Move all global feature unlocks to the main story
• Make improvements to stats and relationship progressions
  • Make RNG-dependent grind optional, but leave the hard mode for those who enjoy the challenge
  • Make it possible to level up your stats through non-randomized activities
  • Redo relationship system to make it more transparent
• Add loads of content
  • Let’s be real there, that’s the main attraction
  • At least two new girls, one from the main cast, and one from a dreamscape
  • Many more minor interactions and activities in the house
  • New major story and girl route events
  • At least two new animated scenes per main girl
  • Repeatable erotic and sex scenes

Latest 0.2 build seems to be stable enough, so I’ve tagged the release in my git repo, and work on 0.3 starts right about now. I want to get the alpha version out in mid to late July, but this time, quality first, deadlines later.

Additional content, patron-only posts and exclusive scenes

While my page is still relatively small, I think it’s never too early to improve. I will be doing a big patron-only poll on type of blog content you want to see and how often you want to see it. I have a feeling that weekly CGs are more of a spam than a feature, and some kind of development updates would be much more relevant.

Custom CG tiers are now live, too, so I will start assembling CG request packs (only if the person who requested the CG gives their approval, of course), so you can look forward to that. And from the next version on, I will start including bits and pieces of exclusive content for Friend+ tiers. There’s one scene that I’ve already started outlining, and in the future, there will be more. 

Hope to see all of you in the v0.3 (and the polls before that), and stay awesome!

And to my patrons, <3 you folks!