Weekly dev blog: more hypnosis for everyone! (Patreon)

So, I added two more random scenes to the dreams(?) you get after Beatrix gets her fangs in you, worked on placing the two previous scenes in the game properly (I feel like I should start to work more on voluntary scenes, as the night events list is starting to get way too long), I added a new scene related to the Outcast pendant (I reworked one of the inhabitants of the slums to serve a more exciting purpose for this), and I did some work on another idea (still in the slums, involving the temple there), but that's not quite complete yet.

I am considering adding some changes to the way time flows in the game. I brought up this topic before, and I think the best approach might actually be to keep the day/night cycle, but remove the day/month tracker in the menu. I feel like it just feels "unnatural" to track the time so precisely, but do nothing with it, and all the ideas I have for making it relevant are kind of a waste. Instead, I'll introduce a new mechanic were you can take some time off after exploring one of the temples, to compile your notes and observations and that triggers the advancement to a new "chapter" of the game. This way, players can do all the quests before moving on, and I have a simple system to gate content and "tick" time forward (for example, this way I can always know for certain quests which one you did before, or I can make the works near the Zanti farm be finished at the start of a new chapter, etc).

I would still keep track of the moon cycle, and show it in the menu, I feel that's enough info to play around with that part of the game, without requiring months/days to be in.

Do you think you guys would be okay with this? It seems like a good way to still have free exploration, while giving me some breathing room on having to worry about sequence-breaking and similar issues which come from a completely open setting. It would also work toward making temple exploration more important in the game, but let me know what you think.

In other news, this is actually the first month of non-growth for the donations (overall they shrunk a bit, actually), hopefully the support didn't peak here, as I'd like to fund some more content for the game through it. Maybe I'll try to think of something to make the project more enticing (maybe write short stories and make them available only beyond a certain tier?), because I believe I can do a little better on that side.

This month we'll get 2 new artworks, after all (Redjet managed to find the time to work on the second commission this month as well), but one of them is a new title screen, and that needs some additional content to it before I can put it in the game (I'll post a preview for it anyway, though, so people can see what we are going to get in the future).

I hope I am not forgetting anything (as usual), but do let me know if I did. See you next week! ^_^