Mid-term Roadmap Update 2 (Patreon)

Previous roadmap posts

• Early Roadmap Post
• Mid-term Roadmap Update 1 Post 

Current State

With the last update of 0.24.0 we have reached the 50% milestone completion, mostly following the estimations of the last post. In that one I had mostly recapped the current state so I won't be talking too much about that here, I will just update the time plan by locking in the complection of Chapter 2-A and the start of Chapter 2-B.

We have currently a total of 4 months delay, or about 20%, which is not good but also not terrible. On my day-time job we have the rule of thumb to apply a 20% margin to every estimation, so we are kind of barely in the acceptable range. Coincidentally, 24 total dev months also means 2 years of dev = 2 year anniversary of SKA development, yay!

Chapter 2-B Outlook

We are currently in the in-between state where a lot has been developed and at the same time, a lot is still awaiting us in the future. But it's also not that terribly much. 

• Going North: Plot focus on the demon side and reaching Richard's Anchor (Hunting A Demon King).
• Going South: Plot focus on the human side and ultimately obtaining the Open Domain III spell (Of Demons And Curses). 

We have one last major city in front of us, Verdeaux, which will also feature a new hub for lewd events. I will just throw out some keywords here: Magic Academy (Slimie Club and Mind Mage) and Brothel Job.

Winterfall on the other hand will function more like a dungeon and focus more on the curse side. But reaching it will take some time as the upcoming content will more focus on her travels there via the two methods mentioned in the quest log. The path of securing a ship will have quite some money checks that of which quite a few can be lessened / circumvented via lewds. While working on this content route I also plan to generally fill the above-ground city of Nephlune step-by-step with additional content.

There will be content focus week polls in the upcoming future where you can influence whether I will prioritize the North/Winterfall or the South/Verdeaux plotlines.

On the corruption side, I won't be commenting too much as I feel like that would be too spoilery for this kind of post.

Chapter 3 Outlook

Chapter 3 content is generally designed that you can go to the final dungeon at any time after you have completed Chapter 2 (=Of Demons And Curses and Hunting A Demon King) and all other quests serve as side content to gain the necessary power to clear it OR influence the final dungeon.

There are also two major quest lines dealing with the Demon General of Pride and one with Lust of which I keep ping-ponging of whether they will happen in Chapter 2-B, Chapter 3 or maybe even be completely moved to 2.0. The reason being that I don't want to scope down on them since they are both thematically important. and I want to do them right. However, narratively they don't actually have a signigicant impact and can theoretically be developed whenever.

Not adding the dungeons for Pride and Lust would narratively just make them appear in the final dungeon with a major buff, without the option to clear them in their side quest. 

Of course a lot of these decisions depend on the development velocity I will be able to obtain after my full time transition, so I don't want to make any promises right now.

Time Plan

But talking about the full time transition: Let's talk a bit about the further time plan. I am quite confident that the additional time from going full time will prevent me from adding further delay months. So I would propose the two goals:

• Minimum Goal: Prevent further delays in the time plan.
• Ambitious Goal: Decrease existing time delay to 0.

I think completely getting rid of 4 month of time delay within 20 months might be a bit tough, but I think a few months should work out. I also got asked if the full time transition could maybe lead to a end of 2023 release, but I think I can say that would be definitely too ambitious.

Investment Plan

I have already talked about this a couple of times in the past posts: After the 5k full time goal the re-investment rate will go up from 100€ per 500€ to 300€ per 500€. This will enable us new options that were previously not worth it due to the small investment increments.

To put this into perspective: From 1000€ to 5000€ the game budget increased from 1000€ to 1700€. Going from 5000€ to 6000€ would give a total budget by 600€, so nearly as much as the entire budget increase from 1k to 2k!

Now, of course, whether we can significantly rise above 5k is questionable. We have reached a very successful status and become bigger or equally big as many other long running games. For comparison, Sierra Lee (The Last Sovereign) which is also a very story-focused RPGMaker adult game tends to sit in the range of 5k-6k. So whether we can actually significantly further rise from here is a big questionmark. However, the total number of patrons we had at any time is 1600 right now, so if magically everyone joined in at an average of 6€ per patron we could make it to 10k. 

Magically being the key word, so lets just pretend we are in Magical Christmas Wonderland and talk about what-if options on magical road to 10k.

Investment Plan (Magical Christmas Wonderland)

In the past, after getting our artist Emubi to a decent productivity level, I had mostly focused on investing into freelancers that could help content production speed, e.g. writer & mapper. I feel like we have hit a limit here, maybe one more investment round could be useful for the assisstant writer to have some more play room with the word count, but in general we have reached a point of production speed where I  feel like there is little point in going faster.

The reason for this is that any freelancer commission also requires significant input from my side and also feedback on their produced content. The total amount of time I spend on briefing, giving feedback, etc. has grown quite significantly, to the point where I didn't have the time to properly talk with our assisstant writer Absurdity last month to get the planned Rosemond storyline into development. Also, as a second issue I have noticed to be quite significant: New content also creates new potential bugs, performance issues, and so on, and the accumulation of these is starting to hurt the development velocity going forward. So rather than focusing on speeding up development, the focus will shift a bit more to eliminating development slowdowns.

5500€ Goal

Which links me to the 5.5k investment goal: An assisstant RPGM developer, mostly focusing on clearing bugs, technical debt and other technical issues. Basically, what I do in Technical week. I believe a lot of the work here can be done without my express input, basically by processing player bug reports and by auditing the code base. And while I believe a second investment round into the assisstant developer might be useful, going further than that I think wouldn't yield too much benefit.

6000€ Goal

And that brings me to the other major investment front: Increasing art production. The bad thing about art is, that it takes a lot of money and time to do. The good thing is: It taking a lot of time to produce also means it has a very good ratio of my time investment : freelancer production. Therefore there will be several investment rounds in the future dealing with funding a secondary artist. Let's assume we could obtain a second artist perfectly capable of imitating Emubi's art style with exactly the same prices, we are in magical christmas wonderland after all, and lets say they would only focus on creating character art work, no H-CGs.

Then already the 300€ increment at the 6k mark would mean 2 * 150 € (Price for one knee-high character) = 300€. In other words, as long as we don't go for expensive H-CG commissions we could double our art commission speed! (In Magical Christmas Wonderland where said artist also works with the same speed and reliability as Emubi :'D) That would allow us to easily replace the default artworks for the party member with art style fitting drawings, give Veronica and Patricia standing images, and do various other cool details like having a Star Knightess costume for Aura (So she would then switch to the current, lewder one after getting collared).

Investment Plan (Magical Christmas Wonderland Summary)

So, in summary: For the magical goal of 10k, 2 investment rounds would go to the RPGM assistant, 1 would go to prior freelancers such as the writer, and of the 7 remaining investments at least 3 would go to the secondary artist. I have not yet decided what would happen with the remaining 4 rounds, maybe we could broker a short term deal for additional art commissioning slots. Alternatively, we might also look again into the possibility of investing into a pixel artist.

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Damn the post grew pretty long again. I always feel a bit dirty talking so much about money, especially after just reaching a big full time milestone (or being close to reaching it again),  but I can't help but feel excited over the possibilites that are opening up due to the larger investment increments. 

There are also a lot of minor other details I wanted to talk about, but my hand is starting to hurt from the typing and I feel like I have created a bunch of walls of text :'D

So yeah, let's see how things play out, next year in August I will be doing another of these roadmap update posts and update my estimate of the time delay.