State Of The Game and Plans For The Future (Patreon)

Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've made one of these big update posts, but there are a lot of things I've been mulling over that I think it's important to fill you guys in on. So strap in, this might end up being pretty long!

On that note, really, most of what I want to talk about stems from one thing: Development on the game is taking too long.

That probably doesn't come as a huge surprise to a lot of people--a lot of initial reactions to the game I see are shocked by the scope and scale of the project, sometimes even assuming that there must be a whole team working on it instead of essentially just me. I'm sure many of you feel like progress is pretty sluggish yourselves too. My plans for the game are definitely quite ambitious, and it takes a lot of work to finish even a single day. And therein lies the issue that has me concerned lately--barring some unrealistically huge increase in support that would let me work on it full time, I'm already spending as much time as I can possibly justify working on SMVA, yet the pretty average sized Day 8 still took roughly 5 months to finish. Even if we generously ignore big events like the upcoming Halloween party and assume every day will take that long, that extrapolates out to ~3 years to finish a full week. And we're still less than halfway through the planned scope of the game. It feels unsustainable on our current trajectory.

Now, don't panic, I don't have any current plans of throwing in the towel! I'm still passionate about the game and excited to tell all the stories I have planned with it's characters, not to mention that I'm thrilled by the community that's formed around it and would hate to let you guys down. I'm just concerned about the current, unsatisfying pace of progress--particularly because I have other vore game ideas I'd like to get to some day--and wanted to be candid with you about it. 

With the problem in mind, lets talk about my plans to alleviate it:

Paring Down Scope

The obvious solution here is of course to reduce the amount of planned content in light of how long it takes to make. But, that can be a bit tricky since I'd really like to avoid creating any sense of the game being rushed if possible, i.e. avoiding cuts that would make it obvious even to players that weren't around for the game's development that something was cut short or that some thread was originally meant to go somewhere but got abandoned. There was an idea I had that started as a sort of "nuclear option" that I felt would be too harsh to pursue unless I was getting desperate, but as I've had it bouncing around in the back of my head it started to make a lot more sense, to the point of almost seeming like a net positive change despite being a reduction in the amount of content in the final game.

I'm now confident enough in the idea to announce it and make the change official: I'm pulling back the originally planned 6 weeks of content down to 5 weeks.

Allow me to explain: For most of the game's development, the plan has been for there to be 6 weeks total, one at the start, middle, and end of each semester of your freshman year. And because of that nice symmetry, I was really reluctant to cut things back any further than that. However, back at the start of this year/the end of the last when I spent a few months outlining and better plotting the full scope of the game, the last two weeks ended up still being fairly vague. There were exceptions and--particularly for week 6--specific scene ideas scheduled for those weeks already, but when it came to character relationship routes most were able to be "completed" by the end of Week 4 if you were fully pursuing them, and weeks 5 and 6 were left as a buffer for those that missed a few scenes and needed time to catch up, with very vague plans for those that already maxed out said relationships to get a few scenes to reward them for reaching that relationship level early.

Week 5 in particular was in an awkward spot compared to the others, where even after spending so much time outlining the game it was still kind of a big question mark compared to the other weeks, so after thinking it over and reevaluating my planning, I've decided to merge the original plans for weeks 4 and 5. 

This is, of course, a reduction in content, but ultimately the losses with this change boil down to: less "catch up" time for those that want to max out relationship routes but didn't commit from the very start--rather than actually losing much in the way of new development for characters--and limiting the time you'll get for the alt vore classes(anal and unbirth), particularly missing out on properly seeing the first day of said classes. (The latter could really be expanded to meaning less time for player pred alt vore in general, but I do intend to accelerate the early training with Cherry and Nadia you can do and have those skills be more available in Week 3 to compensate.)

Meanwhile, I think the following are pros of this change:

• I honestly feel it will tighten up the game's pacing quite a bit
• With more freedom of where to place the new Week 4, Valentine's Day will now be set during a playable week and open up new possibilities. Kind of goes back to the first bullet--I was never super satisfied with the plans for weeks 4 and definitely 5, but now having that big event to structure things around will really help bring things together neatly 
• For alt vore, the plan was always that basic competence with those skills would be immediately unlocked after your first class in them. That makes a lot more logical sense now that the first class you play is actually a month or so into the semester already
• Player pred multiprey scenes and similar "high skill" feats people have been looking forward to will come sooner now that the scope has been condensed
• Similarly, it's been seeming pretty likely that I underestimated how quickly stats could improve when I rebalanced stat progression with the gameplay overhaul, but cutting out a week honestly might correct that on its own instead of me needing to spend time re-evaluating them again

Additionally, I've mentioned before that I have plans for some special "interlude" scenes between weeks on some occasions if you have a high enough relationship with the right characters. Think the trip into town with Kayla on Saturday, but rather than being tied to an existing day you jump straight to being in the car on the way to the gym, then the scene ends when you return to campus instead of carrying on until the end of the day, as some idea of what those will look like. When I outlined the full game, these ended up only occurring after the end of the first semester anyways, so it does sort of work out in terms of overall content balance that these offset the lower number of weeks spent on campus compared to the first semester. The new schedule for the game looks like this:

Week 1(Intro) -> Week 2(Halloween) -> Week 3(End of Semester 1+Christmas) -> Winter Break Interludes -> Week 4(Valentine's Day) -> Spring Break Interludes -> Week 5(End of Year)

I think it will all come together nicely, but of course let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns on the change.

Also while I'm on the subject of reducing content, I'm not certain I've ever stated it anywhere even though it's been the plan since that big outlining phase so just to be safe and set expectations: Weeks 3 and (what's now) 5 are planned to only be 5 days long instead of 7. They're finals weeks, so instead of your normal schedule you'll have a final exam in one class each day Mon-Thursday, leaving every day that week much more flexible(especially since not all classes will even have a significant scene for the final) than usual and also making it so there's not a ton of logical sense to stick around on campus for the full weekend. Those cut weekend days are where the time to justify the spring/winter break interludes came from.

The Scene Poll Problem

Now the elephant in the room that I'm a bit afraid to address on account of it being one of the major draws of this page: I think the monthly scene suggestion polls are a significant cause of the slow pace of progress. 

Most of the time, poll scenes are adding a full new interactive vore scene to the game. While it doesn't tell the full story, if we measure progress on the game using just that metric, I usually get 2, sometimes 3 vore scenes finished in a month of work. So from that perspective, outside of the occasional months where a smaller scene or a scene I can effortlessly fold into existing plans wins, the poll scenes are functionally slowing down overall progress by 33-50% each month.

Or as another example, look at the recently completed Day 8. I was only able to naturally fit in two scenes from the poll winners list... and between the start of dev builds for that day and the recent start of builds for Day 9, there were six new scenes added to the list. So even while actively writing and making forward progress on the game, there was actually a net increase to the scene backlog of twice what I was able to knock off of it. Of course, some days will manage to fit in more poll winning scenes than others so that won't always be the case, but I think it does a good job of illustrating how the current system isn't exactly sustainable.

Now I don't want to frame this as exclusively a bad thing--sure, it's increasing the workload, but having community input like the poll allows is exciting for both me and you. There's been more than one scene that came from the polls that I ended up really loving myself even though I probably wouldn't have come up with it on my own. Heck, there have been a small number of times where I've ended up using or at least taking heavy inspiration from ideas that were suggested but never actually won in the polls. But it unfortunately can't really be ignored that even just the scenes being added are a much bigger strain on forward progress for the game than it might appear, not even mentioning the increasing amount of time I've had to spend fielding suggestions as the page has grown.

At the moment, I don't have any major changes I'm committing to here. I really just wanted to be candid with you that something is going to need to change when it comes to patron submitted scenes at some point, to get your thoughts on the matter and maybe some suggestions of what could be offered in its place if the frequency of scene polls is reduced.

For now though, to get a bit of breathing room while I consider what to do going forward, instead of the scene poll next month will have a Character Q&A again like we did last December! You can find last year's HERE to see what that's about if you weren't around for the first one, and I'll elaborate more of the details of how that works again when I post the results of November's poll at the start of next month.

Additional Writers

Another avenue I'm interested in pursuing for speeding up progress is to look for another writer(or writers) to collaborate with. Some of you will remember that back during the latter half of Week 1's development,  I did experiment with this once before--Thursday and Friday each have 2-3 scenes that weren't written by me. However, the old system I tried back then didn't really pan out. I was really concerned with maintaining firm creative control and strong consistency, so I would give the other writers a fairly detailed outline of the scene and then spend some time tweaking and touching up what they wrote myself to make sure the writing style fit as seamlessly with mine as I could manage... not to mention that I fell into the trap of mostly giving them scenes I would have otherwise cut out or even ones that were pretty much added just for the additional writers to work on, rather than actually reducing my own workload by much.

They did excellent work, don't get me wrong, but I ultimately wasn't actually saving much time myself with that method--which was the whole point--so I ended up dropping the idea for a while.

However, especially now that I have a pretty firm outline set of how the rest of the game will play out, I've become increasingly interested in the prospect of bringing on a more "full time" collaborator to share the workload rather than the old method of essentially commissioning out specific individual scenes, if I'm able to find one. If things go well, something like that could potentially improve forward progress on the game pretty significantly.

I'm not quite ready to move forward with anything on this front yet, but I wanted to get the idea out there.

Thank You

I think that's everything I wanted to cover. I warned you it would be lot! I'll try to remember to come back later to add a TL;DR, but for now I think I've written enough.

Thank you for all your support, and for taking the time to read this! If you have any concerns or thoughts at all about anything that's been said, I would love to hear from you, either on here or over on discord.

~Os <3