Update - Feeling up Shizu on the train (Patreon)

This week's image

This pic relates to the discussion about PAT I've got below - specifically the vibe of it. I thought it turned out pretty well too, though.

I've decided I'm also going to reveal this girl's name is Shizu. In the game you won't discover her name for a while, but it doesn't really hurt for you guys to know she's called Shizu. She's still a mysterious character.

Pervert Action: Timelapse

I wanted to talk a little about PAT here and the difficulties I've had in being able to convey the idea of it. I feel like I haven't done a great job of explaining why the game should be interesting, mostly because of the way I like to tell stories about characters. Normally in a Pervert Action game I'll create a setup for a character (Misato from PAC is a bitch and a bully, Fumi from PAL is crazy and acts different depending on the day of the week) and then I'll have the relationship progress to a point where you kind of 'discover' the sexual kinks of the story. 

I feel like that makes it more fun and interesting when it actually happens - you get more of a payoff from it if you don't know what's coming, because that means almost anything can happen in the game and I as a writer have the ability to slowly build a context around the sex that makes it more appealing. Misato could have turned out to be a bullying dominatrix in her sex scene, but instead it goes in a much more tsundere direction that I think is more fun. The scene doesn't function by being massively kinky, it just does its job through narrative tension and pay-off.

So anyway, the setup in PAT is fun, I think; Shuji is single and lonely, then one day wakes up and finds a month of his life has gone but now he's got three amazing girlfriends at once. That may not be enough, however, to really get people on board. I can also show you character designs (which hopefully you like) and give you a sense of the aesthetic I'm going for (which is kind of a subtle thing to show) and maybe even talk about some features, but beyond that I can't really say too much without revealing a lot about the story and the character developments.

This is a clash between story-telling and advertising that you often see. I hate it when film trailers tell me the whole plot of a movie, but I understand why they do that because it gets people to see the movie, apparently. Still, maybe I could thread the line a little better. I am, after all, asking for support from you guys to develop the game so I shouldn't expect you to do that just on the basis of my previous work (although honestly that's still my main argument).

So anyway, I want to tell you a little more about where these character stories are going without giving too much away. I just have to be careful what I say to avoid spoiling the fun. I will probably post a kind of public project outline at some point in the not too distant future in order to reveal some more details.

Attack of the Nega Maids

I've decided that the best approach to the first AotNM release is probably to do something like what I did for LMO, which is to put out a public release and a patrons-only release at the same time. The public release will have some cheats (although I'll keep those private for patrons) and also some art improvements, but otherwise it will be the same as PAL v1.0.0. The patrons only release will have that stuff, plus some new content, although I don't know exactly what yet. (Whatever's ready by then.) By the way, I don't mean this as a cynical tactic, it just seems to make sense to have a patron-only release available when I get the publicity for a public release. Let me know if this seems out of order or exploitative, though!

Anyway, toward the goal of making these new updates I've been working on improving a bunch of art in the game. I'll show you some more of that soon, I think, both on here and on my Tumblr. Do follow me there if you use Tumblr - I have so few followers/notes it's disgraceful. :)

Also AW Freyr and I have been working on the writing. We're mostly doing separate parts of the project right now; I'm focussing largely on the new Hiroshi bits, plus some random ideas while AW has been focussing more on the responses to when you molest the maids as they go about their daily chores.

So there's quite a lot to chew on there. Do you like the Shizu picture? Do you have any opinions about the kind of secrecy I've had around PAT? Do you think the AotNM public release is an okay thing to do? Let me know in the comments!