Weekly preview - Nobuko and the plug (plus phone messages in the gallery) (Patreon)

tl;dr - The phone messages will be accessible in the gallery in 0.50 and I'm curious if that seems like a good major feature release.

This week's image

Here's a use of the new butt plug toy during the Nobuko toys sex scene!

Okay, you may have more or less seen the image already except for the plug part, but it's hard to feature these images otherwise. As I think I've mentioned, the plug will be usable in the Nobuko toys scene, plus the Mika and Emi toys scenes.

Adding phone messages to the gallery

One regularly requested feature has been to add the phone messages to the gallery. I didn't do this from the start because while adding other scenes is generally pretty simple, adding the phone messages required some extra thought and more work.

The way the game is structured in the engine, it's relatively easy to make a whole "scene" accessible in the gallery; I just have to copy/paste a few lines of code at the beginning and end of each scene and then make a menu option in the gallery to call that scene.

The phone messages, however, are designed to be called in the midst of the apartment scene, so I had to structure it quite differently to call those assets up without having them loaded into the menu screen from the start (which would slow loading times for opening the game).

I also had to structure the newer shops messages differently to the older apartment messages, because they appear in a different way in the game. Surprisingly for me, even though I felt the shops messages were set up better for the game, they turned out to be harder to adapt for the gallery.

Oh, and one little tip - if you've unlocked the messages in v0.48 or 0.49, I believe they should be unlocked in the gallery, because in 0.48 I already had the flags set up to track whether you'd seen those messages. Before that I didn't, so if you only saw them in earlier versions you may need to re-unlock them.

Are the gallery unlocks a major feature release?

One thing that troubles me a little as a developer on Patreon is whether you guys will accept something like adding the phone messages to the gallery as a major feature release for the month. The thing is that it took a decent chunk of work time, so I do kind of need it to be one of the main features of the 0.50 release, but it doesn't involve adding new content.

Other than that, the release will have some new content (the short Shizu butt plug interactive scene, plus using the plug in those other three scenes) but none of those are a big, impressive new sex scene.

Now, I know that patrons are the most supportive players so you guys will probably tell me not to overwork myself and that the feature sounds fine, but I would really like to know if it seems like an underwhelming release feature compared to other months.

My reason for hope on this front is that players don't necessarily judge features by how much work they take to implement, but rather by how much they affect their experience with the game. Having the phone messages might be an important feature for a fair few players and affect their enjoyment of the game, so if that's the case then maybe it's a good one?

Let me know what you think in the comments below!