Allergy April (Patreon)

Hello everyone! It is April, and that means that allergy season has begun. Well - not entirely true, I've been having issues with my own allergies since the middle of February - but we can make it alliterate this month, so, let's just pretend that's the case.

Allergies suck! Luckily I am in a position where I can avoid getting too sniffly. Working from home and not having to travel through a pollen storm on the daily is a wonderful thing. On top of that I have all of my medication ready - nasal sprays, antihistamines, lotions n' potions and all that. On top of that I just changed all the air filters in the house too, so... we should be golden. Pollen protected.

Fun fact, though: I am mildly allergic to cats. Despite this, I own two cats. Why? They are worth the pain. So allergies are more of an inescapable all-year-round thing for me... not that I'm complaining. They're worth it.

Anyway! If you're prone to allergies, I hope you're prepared for them. This post is not about allergies though... despite the title, it's about much cooler stuff! Every month I do a post that's kinda like a sitrep wherein I tell you roughly what I'm planning to do in terms of content output.

A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Plus v1.2

This month, I am hoping to have A Tiny Furry In A Huge World v1.2 finished completely. If you haven't been keeping up with the preview builds, then v1.2 is going to add:

- Two new characters
- Several new areas
- Over thirty new scenes for characters old and new
- New backgrounds for half the school
- More than 100,000 words of new content total

I say hoping because there is still a fair bit of work to do, but I'm pretty confident that I can get it done. The only thing I might slip on is updating the in-game guide, but, that's fine, it won't take much time to do if I end up finishing it in June.

It has quite a big update - which makes sense because it's been in development for a good few months now - almost six if not a little more, I believe. I think it might have been in development longer than any other Tiny Furry update. Part of this is because I have been doing other things and making other games and generally just putting time in on other projects, but...

The reason that this happened for the most part really is because of scope creep. When I initially planned to add two new characters to the game I didn't really take into account how large of an undertaking that would be. Bellus isn't too much of an issue by himself and neither is Lucas, but when you combine the two of them you're suddenly adding quite a lot of scenes because they're independent characters. 

I figured it wouldn't be much different than when I did Miles & Andy but what I didn't take into account is that Miles & Andy were in their own exclusive area and all of their content was in that area. In the case of Bellus, he has a quest that stretches across the entire game. Lucas has different scenes depending on where you interact with him. This added up to more scenes than I anticipated writing, which means that the update took longer to make than intended, etc, etc.

To try and avoid this in future, I'm going to... be better at planning, I suppose? For v1.3 already I have laid out a very rough plan - the bones of things, so to speak - and I have broke it down into three big but doable on the monthly chunks. This way I know beforehand how many scenes I'm adding into the game and get a better understanding of the scope before I leap into things.

Hopefully this means that version updates won't take as long to come out. I would still like to get both v1.3 and v1.4 out before the end of the year, and this means managing my time properly - especially when I am juggling a bunch of other projects. v1.3 will be less of an undertaking than v1.2 at the very least - it adds two characters, sure, but they're both in their own self-contained area.

Hungry House Goin' Public + 'Premium' Version

It's been a bit since I've talked about this. If you're not familiar, The Hungry House was a weird sorta Halloween-themed text adventure that I made last year. Here's a link to the Patreon post for it if you're curious!

I will be launching this game publicly this month - as in, I will be posting the currently existent version that has been available for the past few months onto textadventures.co.uk. I will be removing a feature from it - which is the Patreon exclusive scene skipper thing which will obviously remain Patreon exclusive because it's a Patreon exclusive feature, you know?

The reason I say currently existent version is because I am also working on an expanded 'premium' version that will have sounds and a couple of extra scenes, areas, and plot stuff. I mentioned this back in January and I have been quietly working on it since. I will hopefully have this 'premium' version ready in next month or so - so, May, Juneish, sometime around then. It'll be Patreon exclusive for a couple of months and then I'll upload it to itch.io (around August)

The reason I keep putting 'premium' in parentheses is because premium implies that it will cost something to download. It won't - it'll just be the version that's available on itch.io. I wasn't sure if I was going to give it a price tag but in the end I decided not to, mostly because I'd like more people to be able to play the game, which is personally more valuable to me than making a little extra money.

The 'premium' version won't be going on textadventures.co.uk - mostly because it won't be able to fit on textadventures.co.uk. It'll have too large of a file size with all of the extra background images and sounds and stuff.

Anyway, that's a thing I'm doing this month. I haven't launched a game publicly in a little while so I think it's time and I'm honestly pretty pumped to do so.

Polls

Last month we decided that one of the characters that will be added to v1.3 is a female cheetah track star. I'm really looking forward to writing her, honestly! I have some fun plans for her that I'm excited to unveil, but... let's get v1.2 out first.

This month we'll be deciding the specifics of the coach character that I've decided to add alongside her! I'll have a post up right after this one to decide their gender.

We'll also have the bonus ending poll! This one is pretty exciting because every character in the game will be an option. It's like an ultimate showdown!

Commissions

They're coming.

Something Else Cool

I might have something else cool this month. Something game-related. Something old but also something new? A taste of the future™? We'll see, we'll see...

Mental Health

I'm doing great honestly. I have some personal disappointments (commission backlog still existent, mostly) but I feel like I am in a really great state of mind regardless.

I think that's it! I'm excited to tear into another month and I should have lots of cool stuff to show off - quite a few irons that I've been warming in the fire are almost ready to pull out now. See you in a few minutes with a poll!