Preview - Emi's facial; and I need your opinions (Patreon)

tl;dr - I want to make the focus of November a revision of the intro with new variations added, but I need to know whether that would be okay with patrons.

Important note about the November update

I wanted to start today by running over something I'm planning for the November update, on which I want your feedback.

I am making revisions to the introduction sequence of the game, which involves improving some of the art, tweaking small things here and there, and adding a variety of small changes to the sequences based on whether you've unlocked the endings. The game's made for replay and things are a little different when you retry it, but they should be more different.

All of this has turned out to be a lot of work and I think it's going to take most of a monthly update's worth of effort just to do the stuff I need to do now.

Now I know that this is often seen as the kind of polishing you do near the end of game production. It's also the kind of thing that players and patrons sometimes get annoyed about, since it's not "new" content and it's all stuff that they've seen before. This is why I wanted to bring it up early to gauge responses and see if this would actually bother you guys.

See, the thing is in this case I think there's a compelling narrative reason for this stuff to be in there, and I can't go into great details without spoilers, but it's based around the Shizu ending and what will unlock once you get that. I kind of think that needs to be in place before, or at least beside the Shizu ending. But it's enough work that fitting that and the Shizu ending into one release is somewhat too much work for one month.

Put simply, you are going to be expected to replay that sequence after the Shizu ending so I figure I might as well combine the changes that I need to make for that with other variations and improvements to the art while I'm at it.

I do have a few phone messages I could probably throw in to the release as new content, I'll have some new voiced lines for Shizu and Mika in some existing scenes, and I was going to tweak how the Hirai content works on replay, so it's accessible faster if you've seen the branches before, so in terms of new stuff I think it would make a pretty good release, but it's also the kind of thing that I've seen other devs get pushback about.

The features list for v0.58 would therefore be something like:

• New variations in the intro based on your unlocks.
• Redone and improved art for the intro.
• New phone messages.
• New voice lines for Shizu and Mika.
• A tweak to the way Hirai stories play out to speed it up on replay.

Please let me know in the comments if this would be the kind of thing that would bother you, or if on the other hand this is something that sounds fine and reasonable to you as the focus of an update.

This week's image

I put the other thing first because it was important, but I think this is a pretty good money shot from the upcoming sex scene in the October update, right?

Let me know your opinions about my November plans in the comments below! If there is a problem at least I'll maybe know in time to do something about it.