Development strategy updates (Patreon)

Hey guys - gonna try and spell out our development plans more explicitly in these Patreon posts - some of this is reiteration for the benefit of newcomers, and some of it is a bit more transparency about how we're going about ToA development.

In a later post we'll talk about our future plans for battle subsystems and battle balance, which'll be meatier and more exciting.  For now, just wanted to talk about high level stuff.

We're trying to balance content generation and system build-out so that there's new fun content to play around with, we're generating assets at a good pace, and we're expanding the feature base as quickly as we can.  If we were developing in the dark, we might do things a little differently: namely, we'd be prioritizing things like UI assets in accordance with what was necessary for development, and on the implementation side of things we wouldn't be building out encounters as anything other than basic proof of concepts, rather than the semi-standalone and written encounters that we've been dropping.   Since we're doing transparent development, though, we've been trying to make sure that anything that gets included we'd be (theoretically) willing to release as part of a final product, mostly to give you guys a decent idea of where we're going.  This has the unfortunate side effect of creating an illusion of "doneness" - that is, the result looks like it might be the final result, but it likely isn't.  We've posted a few final assets, mainly character art, but aside from that, nothing is really finalized yet at all - not the animations, the sounds, the music, the encounters, even game mechanics or UIs.  As we start to roll out each of these things in a finalized state, we'll let you know, and a real, concrete roadmap will form.

So, as a result of this, we're taking a very breadth-first approach to it.  We're trying to build up a library of assets, including character art, animations, backgrounds, UI elements, and fonts, as well as to replace some of the placeholder art like the world map assets.   The main goals of the other side of content generation - the scripts and the layout for various encounters, is to showcase (and test) new features, lay some groundwork for each of the characters that will be built on later, and to provide the kind of textual accompaniment long time fans of our work are familiar with, akin to the captions that we post under our art on Hentai Foundry and elsewhere.

For that first goal, showcasing new features, that means that we're trying to include in the encounter survey only encounters that we feel we're ready to build out - either their associated features are already in the game or could be added in a reasonable time from what we've already built out.

In the next feature survey, we'll ask how you guys like the pace of content generation and feature/system build-out.  Our goal is to make sure that we're keeping reasonable pace with the asset generation, but ideally we'd be able to shift from more writing to more implementation - getting us closer to what the game will be like, rather than having more words to pore over.  As it is, we're providing the cookie dough, and we'd like to get to a point where we can start providing the fully baked cookies.

This month has been heavy on the dough - we've got three "new" encounters, only one of which was voted on, mostly to increase the variety of male content.  :D