Update - Kim and Rio wake up Kenji (Patreon)

Now that we're finally about to reach the 2.0 release for PAL and I'm moving on to Timelapse you might be wondering if this is the end point for PAL. The short answer is yes, I suppose; the game is complete and there's no need to add any more. Furthermore, I expect that my time will be very dominated with PAT work going forward and PAL isn't really paying the bills quite as well as it used to for me anyway.

All that said, I have a vague suspicion that I might feel like occasionally writing a new scene or two, here and there, for the old game. Therefore, what I'm thinking is that I'll allow myself (if that happens) to make short scenes & images and just collect them over the months until (and IF) I have enough to justify a 2.1 release or something like that. If I do get a few scenes worthy of a little update, then I'll put that out free, but I won't be following any kind of schedule or deadline with it and I won't be putting any more versions behind the pay wall.

You could consider that a bit of a hobby for me, if I feel like I want to write something different for a change, or return to these characters for just a bit of fun. Do NOT consider that a promise of more content - I may never decide I want to do that and I really just want this to be an option for myself if the mood strikes.

This week's image... and the type of scene it's from

In my process of turning this into more of a dev log and less of a dull news feed, I thought I'd talk about the scene that I made this picture for.

Something I've been very happy with over the course of the 2.0 upgrade to Pervert Action: Legacy is how I've been able to develop the design of the game so comfortably and how well the core of the gameplay has held up for expansions to the content. Basically, the core of PAL is a daily loop of working out the household schedule from day to day, managing your time for the training and building relationships. 

What's worked really nicely for me, however, is having a set of regular character interactions that crop up at different times of the day and under different circumstances, like for example every morning you'll be woken up by one of the maids. Then there's night service, combat and moving around the mansion during the day. That's great because with all these kinds of interactions I've found it easy to just use those moments of required character interactions to come up with extra little moments like this one. I mean, the initial setup required hostile, nicer and then blowjob wake-ups and I had to make all of those, and I could have left it there and not done any more work on those scenes. As ideas have come to me during the expansion, though, I've occasionally had other ideas of how to develop those moments, largely by putting characters together that didn't already have much going on together.

This is great because it's usually quite easy to do; the scenes don't have to be long, complex or self contained. I can write a short scene within the context of what's already happening, just based on whatever idea has occurred to me, then make a picture or two in sets and with characters that I've already got set up, then generally program it in pretty quickly too. (Depending on the scene.) Having a strong skeleton of a game makes it simple to add more - actually, ditch the skeleton metaphor; think of it like a Christmas tree to which I can keep hanging ornaments again and again. I can keep these short scenes to one idea and they don't have to be really heavy on sex descriptions, because they aren't carrying the game like the centrepiece scenes are. If I have any follow up ideas that could expand the concept, then rather than extending the scene I can make them into follow up scenes.

By doing that I wound up with a collection of short scene "series" in there, like spying on girls in the hot springs, seeing maids stealing wine in the cellar, Rio getting involved in the wake ups and so on. This is a good way, I've found, to develop ideas over the course of the game and give players something to look for. They're each like their own short sub-plot that develops and they can go however it feels right for them to go according to how the characters would behave. It puts less pressure on me, but perhaps more importantly these little moments, rather than long scenes, feel more natural and like they flow well with the daily schedule gameplay. Adding small moments might be one of the biggest changes from PAL 1.0 to 2.0, in fact.

For Timelapse I'm hoping to be able to have some kind of a rhythm like that as well, although the story doesn't actually lend itself to doing this sort of thing quite as much - at least not at the outset. Having the maids around to be trained all in one house really created a lot of natural situations in which characters would interact; PAT isn't based on all the characters being stuck in a house together, so I do have to more consciously create circumstances for them to bounce off one another. That's something I'm working on and I'm optimistic it'll fall into place.

And have you noticed how I've developed these little sets of character scenes that play out through the game? Do you like them? If so, do you have a favourite series of connected scenes? Perhaps Masami being bathed? Kim and Fumi in the cellar? Rio teaching Iku blowjob lessons? Let me know in the comments!