The State of the Game (v0.3.0, October 2020) (Patreon)

This month I've made some changes to how and what I measure, which I'll explain in a moment. For now, let's look at context-less numbers!

• Over 90,000 words (+25,000) (Note that this word count does include some scripting.)
• 4 requests (+2)
• Approximately 170 encounter scenes (no change)
• 24 activities (see below)
• 19 perks (+2)
• 56 traits (+4) 
• 22 potions (+6)
• 35 unique CGs (+10)*

*Added in v0.2.2. These weren't in the last State of the Game so I'm including them here.

Where Are Events and Areas?

You may have noticed that I've changed from counting events to counting activities, which are repeatable actions the player can perform. Some activities are available in multiple locations, these still count as one; for example, gathering or public urination are both available in multiple places but are functionally the same. Exploration and hanging out counts as different activities in each location, however. Only actions that serve some sort of content count. For example, buying ingredients and expeditions don't count, but working at the maid academy or the gloryhole does. The dungeon in total counts as one activity for the sake of ease. 

While it was nice to be able to post big numbers, the event counts were really not helpful or really indicative of how much stuff there is to actually do. I've also removed the area count, because the difference between an area like the forest, which basically only allows you to do two things, and uptown, which has half a dozen or more things to do plus the maid academy which has it's own handful of activities, seems hard to rectify. The maid academy and dungeon probably have more to do than some full-fledged areas, but aren't accessible right from the hub menu, and so don't count for this. I could determine that sub-areas count too, but at some point, I have to ask myself if this metric gives users a good indication of how much stuff is in the game. I think activities as a replacement for both events and areas is a more useful metric.

This Update Was a Bit of a Mess

I didn't plan very well, or rather, I mis-planned this update. I underestimated both how much content I actually had planned (when I actually wrote the story content, I found I needed extra scenes and tasks to smooth out my plans, and I didn't account for how much work some of the branching content really was) and how long it would take to implement several of the planned features. For example, in the puzzles you solve in the maid academy training, I initially wanted the phrases to be in a word bank and for players to click-and-drag them them over into some blanks or boxes in the text, but this quickly became impossible to realize in a way that didn't totally break mobiles and touch screen support. Likewise the expeditions system was much more complicated to implement than I expected. 

Some of this is expected stuff. You always will bump into problems, and you should always try to be realistic in how much work you give yourself to do in a given time frame. The issue is I had this problem--underestimating how much time and work something would take--on almost every front in this update, on two of the three mechanical systems and on most of the story/request content. It also didn't help that I spent a lot of time in the first two-ish weeks of the month on CGs. I've come up with a plan to ensure this doesn't happen again.

1. I can always do more story if I have time. I think instead of having "get to X point in the story" be a goal, I'm just going to make sure that every update meaningfully advances the main story instead. Any extra time I have after everything else is done will be spent on getting further along in the story.

2. I need to do better at accounting for branching paths. One of the requests in this update is basically the length of all three other requests in the game combined. Actually playing it, it's not abnormally long, but it has a few branching points and secrets, and that makes it much longer in terms of writing. This is also true of the story content. This version has a significant branch in it that added a lot to dev time. From now on, when I know an branch is coming in the story or requests, I'm basically going to consider it like multiple requests or multiple story tasks when I'm planning out the update. So for example, everything dealing with Wimbol in this update is basically just three tasks on my outline, see Carol > deal with Wimbol > see Carol. However, there are three branches in the deal with Wimbol task which narrow into two in the second see Carol task. In my notes I have this as three tasks; it's actually six in terms of writing it out! The point is, if I had been thinking of this as six tasks instead of three, I'd have given myself less work to do; like I probably would have had the foresight to push back expeditions until the next update or something.

3. I'm limiting myself to one major mechanical "thing" (gameplay system or new activity type) per update. Adding lactation, expeditions, and the maid academy puzzles all in the same update was way more work than just adding the consequences mechanics. These are three unrelated systems, each with their own challenges, and each one could have easily been the subject of its own update. I need to be more disciplined and only include one major mechanical system in each update. The more time I spend messing with implementing mechanics, the less time I spend on actual content, and I know that for most players, they would prefer content.

4. Instead of trying to do everything in every update, I'll set aside some updates to have more of one thing or another. So in one month, maybe we'll get a bit less content and no real new systems, but I'll add a bunch of CGs. Maybe in another month I'll focus mostly on filling in the event lists above all. There will also be months where I'll want to focus on working on the mod support I intend to add. In short, September saw complicated new gameplay systems, a lot of new story and side content, and 10 brand-new CGs (though I did start on those in August, and a few were done by the release of v0.2.1, for the sake of total transparency).

It's not so much that I want to significantly change the amount of work or content; it's more that I need to focus and really make sure that when something does go wrong, I can give it the time it needs. Anyway, this is mostly talking shop, but I wanted to make you all aware that I might be deviating from the precedent of the first two updates here and how they were made. Expect updates in the future to focus more around a single thing at a time. For the next few updates, I think I'm gonna mostly focus on the story, though, as I feel pretty good about where the gameplay is for right now.

Anyway, this is getting way too long, so for now I'll wrap things up. Expect a postmortem on the update and a patch to bring Honest Work to the free edition and add some content I didn't finish in time in the coming days. See y'all then.