Weekly preview - Shizu in the Cakehole (Patreon)

tl;dr - This is from a new set of Shizu scenes coming in April.

This week's images

These are from one of the new Shizu scenes coming up in the next release. Yes, in addition to the Nobuko DP - it's a packed release!

It's a pretty straight-forward scene, but it's one of a series that I more or less plan to culminate in the Shizu ending. They set up a couple of elements that will pay off later.

That said, you won't need to track down these scenes in order to get the ending; it'll work regardless of whether you've seen them. I've done that because these scenes can only be found if you explore the shops district, which is an optional thing.

Breaking the scene into multiple parts

I've been looking to make more scenes that I produce in the future into smaller chunks of scenes that are spread out over the game. This isn't to frustrate you or anything; it's basically because I think:
a) it's kind of more fun that way because it gives you more to find,
b) it's somewhat easier to write a lot of the time, and
c) it means I can more content available in the early game.

That last point is one of the issues of game development like this - it's easy in the later parts of the development cycle to heavily concentrate new content in the later parts of the game, thus making it largely inaccessible to newer players or just players who don't play the game very frequently.

That's bad because a lot of the newer stuff can be amongst the best in the game, since I know what I'm doing with it now a lot better than when I started. It can also create the impression that the game isn't making much progress because players who are only dipping in and out don't see a lot of the new stuff very easily.

I'm actually surprised it took me this long to get to this style of broken-up subplots, because I started including them a lot in the latter stages of developing PAL as well, although the big change I'm slipping in now is to push some of it to the early game as well. (A lot of those PAL broken-up stories were mostly a harem-mode thing.)

Do these new Shizu scenes look good to you? What do you think of the idea of breaking up sub-plots into sets of little scenes instead of individual big scenes? Let me know in the comments below!