Long-Term Development Roadmap (Patreon)

With the first chapter completed last month, I would like to give an outlook into the farther future than just my usual project plan posts for the current months. And while we are at it, also talk about my project management strategy I use for planning the content of the 1.0 version.

Version 1.0 and 2.0

Those who have read my posts in the past or in some other forums probably know this. Those who are new probably haven't. I have a two-stage approach for the game developement focusing on first creating a completable game (1.0) and then adding further choices/variations in a follow-up (2.0). The reason for this is that in adult game development, there is a huge trend of developers overscoping their game and eventually abandoning it. My primary focus right now is to prevent this for SKA and reach a point where it becomes a game that you can play from start to finish.

The main paradigm of 1.0 is depth over width. That means focusing on making the game completable while pushing content that potentially generates feature creep, lots of variations, or otherwise increases the project scope significantly to 2.0. That's why for 1.0 I have only planned 2 main endings:

• Good ending (Aura beat Richard before the corruption process finishes)
• Corruption/NTR ending (Alicia finishes the corruption process)

For 2.0, on the other hand, the planned focus is width over depth, basically adding more choice and outcomes to the game. The main story is completed at this stage. So planning more endings and choices becomes far easier as I can exactly see the impact on the game and how much work would need to be done. 

Examples for 2.0 content are for example additional endings, the often discussed evil route for Aura, giving Alicia more options in the mental world, additional bad ends, etc. None of these are necessary to complete and enjoy the game. However, not having them makes for a less indivdual experience. So I definitely would like to add them down the road.

The exact content that would really make it into 2.0 is up in the air. Incidentally, the name 2.0 should also not be taken too literally. I might later decide to split it up into further smaller releases.

There are also certain content elements where I am not yet sure whether they are 1.0 or 2.0. For example, I would love to add a Maid Bad End to the Festival storyline. Typically, such a bad end would be a very good example for 2.0 content. However, in this special case, this ending could provide a nice exist point to get a bad end and start an NG+ with some score bonuses. So there is a chance that such a bad end could already be a part of 1.0.

Long-Term Schedule

I initially estimated the full development time of Star Knightess Aura to be around 40 months, which is a bit less than 3.5 years. These 40 months of devtime I distributed over 3 chapters, of which 1 is finished as of last month.  10 months to Chapter 1, 20 months to Chapter 2, and 10 months to Chapter 3.

As you can see, the planning worked roughly out. We are 1 month behind schedule, which I think is a reasonable amount of delay. In terms of game completion, we are somewhere in the area of 20 - 25%. 

While this may look really nice - just a 1 month delay! I should note here, that I have merged a couple of future plot lines, reducing the total number of needed locations since during dev I had noticed that some parts took longer than expected. So it kind of sounds like everything is going as expected, but in truth I have been reducing content scope in order to counter my missplanning. Expect one of the future updates the contain a reduction of world map size in the southern part to go along with this.

Note that the game completion and the time investment don't match up 1:1 (otherwise we would be definitely at 25%). This is because the development of Chapter 1 also required a lot of one-time initialization costs (planning the game concept, defining the main characters, making the initial prototype, setting up the systems, searching for an artist, and so on).

If we extrapolate the current development velocity, it would put the expected real total development time of the game at 44 months. Or 33 months of rest development time. 

Extrapolation of lewd scene count

I would like to use this opportunity to also give an estimation of the expected lewd scene count for 1.0. Using 0.11.0 which has 11 isekai lewd scenes as a base, I would roughly make the following estimation:

• With 20 - 25% completion this would mean 44 - 55 isekai lewd scenes.
• In the real world, lewd scenes will start at the absolute latest at 50%. If we assume the same nonlewd:lewd content as in the Isekai, then that would mean 22 - 27 scenes in the real world.

In total: 66 - 82 lewd scenes. That's about the number I would expect going from the current progression speed.