An Important Announcement! (+Status report on plans for the game) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! With the recent completion of the first week in the game, I thought it would be a good time to give you guys some insight into what my future plans are, and I have an important announcement to make for this month!  (You can pretty much just read the bolded parts as a TL;DR)

It’s very exciting to finally have Saturday finished and out in the world, it’s been a long road to get here! Much longer than I anticipated. In light of that extended development period, and the fact this marks a full week being finished and not just an individual day, I’m planning on taking a longer break than usual to recharge and avoid burnout! Normally, I take a week long “break” after finishing a day, which I put in quotes because usually I still end up spending a lot of time planning and tinkering with things behind the scenes, meaning it’s not exactly a proper step back from doing work. This time around, I’m holding myself much more strictly to doing nothing related to the game (beyond checking the discord and occasionally popping into the ekas thread to answer questions) for a full two weeks, starting today, before easing back into things.

Now, for the announcement I mentioned: because that extended break means I’ll be doing nothing for half of this month, I’ll be pausing the Patreon page for November. That means no one will be charged for this month! More specifically, since Patreon’s payment model can be a bit unintuitive, that means on December 1st no one will be charged–anyone pledged during October has either recently been charged or will be charged shortly for that month.

In fact, on that note of the somewhat confusing payment situation, I also have a smaller announcement! When December comes and the page is active again, I’m planning on switching to Patreon’s newly implemented subscription billing method! It’s a new model they offer that works like you would expect a subscription to: when you pledge to the page, you’re charged immediately for the current month, then again on the same day the next month rather than always paying on the 1st of the month no matter what. I think this method makes a lot more sense in general, and, while I do trust folks to be honorable and I’ve only noticed it happening a few times over the years, having to pay up front for the first month resolves an issue where currently it’s completely possible for someone to pledge, download the latest dev build, then drop their pledge without ever actually supporting the project ^^; . As an important note, nothing will change for existing patrons when I make the switch, your charge date will still be the 1st of the month.

But Patreon business aside, I’d like to refresh/inform you about my plans for the game when I return to work!

As I’ve mentioned before in prior posts, both here and on the discord, due to poor pre-planning on my part and just generally not fully knowing what I was doing early on in the project this first week ended up very bloated and way more content dense than it was really meant to be. Things were originally supposed to calm down after the first few days, but considering Saturday is the largest day of content in the game that obviously didn’t happen. All said, this first week ended up being at least two weeks worth of content packed into one, if not more ^^;

The general guideline I’ve set (as early as when I was working on Day 3, though obviously things didn’t pan out to be able to follow it this week) is that an “average” day shouldn’t have more than 5 vore scenes, as a general estimate of size. Comparing that number to anything in Week 1, you can definitely see how things got out of hand and will be noticeably lighter going forward. Now of course, not all days will be average and some special occasions will be bigger, like the Halloween party planned for Week 2, or how every Wednesday will be at least a little above average due to clubs (though ironically, Wednesday is the closest to being average sized in Week 1 ^^;), and patron suggestions will definitely add to that number rather than fitting into it more often than not. I will generally try to fit in at least one pred and prey scene that can be accessed with little to no prerequisites in every day, but given the restriction I’ve set it’s entirely possible that some normal days will end up not having anything particularly interesting happening if you aren’t on at least one of a few relationship routes as we get deeper into the game. While the smaller size will probably be a little disappointing coming out of the overstuffed Week 1, it should lead to much better/faster forward progression rather than the sort of “treading water” feeling I felt a lot of Week 1 was starting to have.

To avoid future weeks having the same issues, the first thing I plan on doing after getting back from my break is hunkering down and spending time seriously plotting out Week 2 and even making sure I have a firmer plan for how things progress through the rest of the weeks in advance. Currently I’ve admittedly been somewhat playing it fast and loose, with just a few specific events nailed down and otherwise only a general idea of what I wanted to do when I got started on a day. Going forward I definitely aim to have a strong outline of the whole week beforehand to ensure good, sustainable pacing.

Once I’m done with all that planning and plotting, next on my agenda is actually a minor, mostly gameplay focused update! My main focus here will be making a polish/balance pass on the interactive vore systems: tweaking some bits of clunky behavior, increasing the clarity of some elements, and most importantly finally implementing a proper tutorial to teach you how everything works! Unless I hit any big roadblocks there, I’ll also be designing the remaining struggle systems so that they’re ready already when those scenes start to crop up (player pred anal, both ends of unbirth). Like I did when I was first making the interactive systems, for those who have been here long enough to remember that, I’ll be releasing at least one demo for you guys to try out any significant changes/additions here!

Beyond that, I’ll also be taking a look at stats to make sure they’re having the impact they should be and progressing at a logical rate, as well as properly implementing capacity, which exists and is even relevant to a few scenes but is completely hidden right now. Finally, less gameplay related, this update will also add in some form of “week in review”/transition that addresses the time skip after you finish Saturday! I’m not 100% sure of all the details of what that will look like yet, but there will definitely be something bridging the gap rather than just having you wake up on a Monday in October right after the party without addressing anything.

Especially with my planned break before diving into it, this will all take a few months, so you definitely shouldn’t expect writing for Week 2 to begin or normal dev builds to resume until January at the earliest.

Now, I know this post is already quite long, but I just have one last thing to tackle! And that is: The Monthly Polls! (And not the results of October’s poll, that will be a different post after I’ve tallied everything ^^;)

Some of you may have been wondering after the news at the top of the post, so to confirm: since the page will be paused during November, there will not be a poll this month. That also means that any current character bans will be pushed back a month, since the aim of that is to keep them out for a specific number of polls.

Beyond that, I’d like your thoughts on a few things! First, my current plans for scene suggestions are to maintain the existing policy of allowing suggestions for the most recent two finished days as well as future/in progress days (so at the moment now that Saturday is done, Friday is now the earliest day suggestions are allowed for). I don’t think I’ve mentioned before, but my plan for the other end of that is to only allow suggestions for up to two weeks at a time, meaning that Week 3 won’t become available until we’re a few days into Week 2 and Week 1 officially becomes fully set in stone. Now, while those are my plans at the moment, someone on the discord server who seemed to get some support on the idea suggested the possibility of cutting off Week 1 for suggestions entirely already now that it’s finished. Again, I’m not currently planning on doing that, but I am curious to see what others think about that idea! Too restrictive, or would sealing it off so that we can firmly move forward be appealing?

The second point I’d like to bring up is that, while the pause for this month will help a little there, I do have some concerns about possibly building up a bit of a stockpile of scenes while I’m not making direct forward progress if the planning/minor update I mentioned ends up taking more than a month or two. In light of that, and taking inspiration from a discord suggestion from a little while back, how would you feel about potentially doing a “character Q&A” as a replacement for the scene poll in December? So, those eligible for scene suggestions would instead be able to submit questions aimed at characters from the game, and at the end of the month I’ll make a post for all patrons answering some of them in-character as whoever the question was aimed at (as a very quick example, if someone asked about Alice’s favorite color, rather than just telling you the color I would write a little response as if Alice were the one answering). This would not replace the scene poll permanently if there’s enough support to try it, it would just be a temporary measure. Though if it goes well I may bring it back every now and then when similar situations where a bit of breathing room is needed arise!

And as one final note, I just wanted to mention that I’m aware that the scene suggestions guideline post that I still link to new patrons is a bit outdated and I plan to revise it soon.

Wow, that turned out much longer than I anticipated! Like I mentioned at the top, you can get the important bits by just reading the bold text if it’s too long for you ^^; . I’ve definitely rambled on long enough at this point, so I’ll wrap this up by saying: Thank you all for the amazing support you’ve shown for this project! I’m constantly blown away by how much interest there is in the game and it makes me so happy to see so many people enjoying my work. I hope I can continue to live up to your expectations for the game!

Oh, and be sure to let me know any comments, questions, or concerns you have about anything in this post!

~Osmium <3