Update - How far have we come in 2019? (Patreon)

tl;dr - Wow, it's been a whole year already?

This week's image

This is a close up of a shot I've shown a long time ago - rather nice in the close detail though, I think. :) This shot will be part of a new Shizu scene in the January update.

How far has PAT come in the past year?

I think with the new year coming up it's worth looking back for a minute and thinking about how the game has come along in that time.

In some ways, for a year having past, it feels like little has changed. After all, a year's a long time! (And it adds up to a lot of work...) But I went back in my post history and took a look at what I've done on the game in that time and really it has changed a lot, both in some big ways and some little ones.

A year ago the game was only an intro. I'd got the story up to Shuji arriving at the apartment... but that's it. What are the key things I've added since then?

Most obviously, Emi's story and Nobuko's story are now complete up to their present-day sex scenes, each with four date scenes and four flashbacks. I've implemented the conversation system with a bunch of options for everyone now (I do plan to expand those, mind you) and I've started on the Shizu scenes now too.

Perhaps the biggest achievement from my perspective, though, was implementing the dating system. This was a huge task for me - I didn't know how to do it when I set out, so I had to learn how to program a complex system, with days and nights, dating the ladies, jealousy fights, sleeping and more. Doing this required me to skip a release month along the way - I took about seven weeks just focusing on that task. It had me really intimidated going into it, but I worked hard and if I'm allowed a moment to be proud of myself, it'd be for that.

I got a lot of great suggestions from you guys, too. You've helped me with suggestions for characters' costuming and scenes, the user interface and of course bug reports. One particularly cool idea that was suggested by patron Vervalsen, for example, was to represent the character flashbacks in the subway as stations on a subway map, which resulted in this:

That remains one of my favourite elements of how the game works.

It hasn't all been easy; the game's been beset with technical issues that I've been ironing out and some of the process of rolling this out to the public hasn't gone the way I've wanted it to. I've sometimes been a little more sluggish in my work than I would have liked too, although in my defence there I feel like I had a bit of bad luck with minor health issues (the flu, migraines and such) that took out more of my time than usual this year.

But all that said, I think if I could go back a year and play v0.12 back then I would be really pleased with how it's been turning out.

The future

That fact makes me confident that in the upcoming updates I'll be able to continue to push the boundaries of what I've done and I'm eager to try new things and really come up with clever, interesting new ways to tell the story. I feel like what I've done so far has taught me a lot and shows that there's a huge array of possibilities. I'm also still holding back some big surprises that I've planned from the start! I can't wait to reveal the next big stage of development. :)

And I've got other things in mind too. I rethought my long-term plans a bit this year, which is appropriate since it's about five years now since I started - time for a new five year plan! (Not that I ever had one in the first place.) I can't really get into all that right now... but it's good news and I feel positive about keeping this going all the way until the game is complete, which is really all I can ask for.

Thanks for supporting me in 2019! And I hope you have a very happy new year!