Development Update - An unusual month to come. (Patreon)

Hello,

Some of you may have noticed the game becoming more unstable over the last few updates. Adding major features continuously is certainly starting to show its downsides!

The truth is, I’ve been on the grind to produce well-marketable content updates since the very first release. Obviously, there’s a direct correlation between how ‘’interesting’’ an update is, and its performance in terms of new players.

Anyone who’s read my recent Offer can probably figure out what I’ve been prioritising at almost all costs. It’s a win-win, right? Interesting features, plus the game has better numbers.

I think that approach has been mostly for the best, but now I have to pay its costs.

For anyone who doesn’t know the term, Technical Debt is a term for (often shortcut) code/decisions in the past creating a time/effort ‘’debt’’ for the future.  While I’ve tried to remain in-scope and only add modular systems that wouldn’t affect it, the technical debt the game has accrued over the last 35 major updates mean that every bugfix is slowed down, and every new feature has a lot more considerations to keep in mind regardless of my efforts. 

For example, the chastity system is an absolute horrorshow; so many different potential states during endings. Any cleanup and optimization efforts inherently has its risks to introduce bugs; on a 1 month release cycle, that means a lot of things get deprioritized. Features that might be likely to introduce bugs due to this jank are quickly filed under “eh maybe someday”.

Things are getting closer and closer to being unmanageable. Every change is exhausting.
I could keep slogging through it and pumping out new features, but the game is performing the best it ever has. To be fully transparent, if there is to be a time where I’m comfortable not caring about stats and marketable features, it’s going to be now.

With this in mind, (hopefully only) this month I will be taking a different approach to the last 35 updates. I’m going to focus on cleaning up the game a bit, and if not making it more stable and reliable yet, at least make it more feasible to work towards that. I cannot even promise that you’ll see immediate noticeable change, because there’s so much cleanup to be done.

The game’s Discord has been reworked, it now contains forums where I can have separate discussions about suggestions, feedback, and bugs. You’ll also find some feedback requests and noteworthy bugs listed.

It’s a lot cleaner and more manageable for me, and hopefully should mean I can engage more with everything mentioned in there without losing track.

I hope you all enjoy today's update.