June 4 Update (Patreon)

This has been a busy week and TLS progress has been slow. One thing I want to note is that the causation doesn't flow that way. I scheduled more busyness for this week because I knew TLS progress would be slow.

Planning is a tricky exercise, because you get diminishing returns on quality the more time you put into it, but sometimes you really want those small returns. Right now I'm setting up the entire structure of the war, two or three updates worth of content. It involves so much of the content in the game so far (characters, decisions, investments, variables) that it's a major task.

Zero time for planning... well, that's not possible for me creatively. But I could have spent an hour on it and made a mediocre war - it would have had all the good moments I planned, but it wouldn't have hung together well. Spending several hours planning increased the quality by a lot. Beyond that... to increase quality I start doing things like writing an outline, taking a while to reflect on it, then rewriting. Shifting early parts of the war in such a way that makes the later parts more complex. That kind of thing.

This war will be the single most complex event of the game. There will be complex events in the future, but I think later events will be better served by focus. So this event is my chance to do maximum breadth in TLS, and I want to do it right.

On the other end of the spectrum, it's possible to spend forever planning and never actually finishing. You see this sometimes with creators endlessly reworking their creations. This can actually harm quality in the end, because the completion and feedback process lets you improve quality in a way that an infinite amount of planning simply can't.

Fortunately, you guys have been very supportive about me picking what I believe is the best balance of quality and speed. But since I don't want to say "I spent most of this week thinking about stuff" I've also been doing other things, like promotion and the $10 release. These are productive things I can do while my mind works on the broader issues related to war planning.

If you didn't check out the release of Kingdom of Deception while it was patron-only, the first version has now gone public. We also got an article featured on Lewd Gamer, feel free to check it out:

https://www.lewdgamer.com/2017/06/02/hreinn-games-follows-up-noxian-nights-with-kingdom-of-deception/

Speaking of the $10 release, I continue to welcome feedback. Though I will eventually put out a version 1.1, don't expect it immediately. I need to make some progress on other things and get some issues straight in my head first.

That is the situation for now. Next week I hope to report that serious progress has been made, see you then!