Chapter 3 Roadmap Update (Patreon)

Previous roadmap posts:

Roadmap Post Collection 

Current State

With the 0.36.0 update, we reached the end of Chapter 2, and with that the 75%+ completion milestone of the game. The roadmap post series I mostly want to look back a bit and kind of update everyone where we stand and how the plans are looking for the the future. Those who have followed the game for a while probably know which graphic is now going to follow this introductory post. :D

No more red! We have finished the first three quraters of the game and the remaining one is Chapter 3. In the Chapter 2-B development we got a total of 2 months delay, brining us to 6 months in total or 20%, which is overall not quite where I wanted to be but also not that bad. 

Those who remember the last Roadmap update post, there I was strongly hoping that with the full time goal fulfilled with could go to 0 months of delay. While I believe it would have been theoretically possible, I would now in hinsight say that the goal was only realistic because I assumed I would mercilessly cutting content as I did during the development in Chapter 2-A. While I of course had to make many compromises and not go as some dungeond and events were in my head, I overall didn't have to make cuts that really hurt the game. In Chapter 2-A for example I had to majorly cut down the Mountainreach Eteneral Day of Repeat arc which would have potentially caused another ~2 months if I were to carry it out according to plan - when we are already 3 months behind! In many cases, cutting content can be beneficial, since it allows to identify "fat" and remove it, but in this case I believe I had to cut into the point and actually hurt the story arc. 

Overall, I believe it was worth the trade-off, but the good news overall here is that we didn't have to make these kind of "bone cutting" trade-offs during Chapter 2-B production. In fact, we are able to invest additional time into things that were in my opinion a bit underdeveloped in my original plan. Examples here are the Luck Professor debate event which was a simple check in my original plan and the Elizabeth scenes which ended up getting more screentime. Little things like this I think overall led to an overall increase in quality that's worth the delay. The post might get a bit long, but since production time is a topic that comes up often I would like to give a quick overview of some of my project management philosophy at the end of this post.

Release Date Estimation

Now, that we have looked at the past, let's see what that means for the future! For Chapter 3 I had also scheduled 10 months. Based on how all the past chapters have gone and what I learned during the Chapter 2-B development on how I spend my extra development time from going fulltime, I would say we should expect 12 months of development. This gives us an expected 1.0 release date at the last Friday of October, that is 25.10.2024. Should we hit one more month of delay and end up with a November release it's very likely that I won't officially call it 1.0 and wait with that for some months. Since 1.0 is just a name, it won't have any effect on you as players, but it would for example delay the steam release and the 2.0 content production. The reason for this is very simple: I have observed in the past that November/December are terrible months to release something if you aren't AAA because people don't have any money from spending everyhting on sales like Black Friday, steam winter sale, etc. 

So in order to not get into this, I really want to release in October 2024 by latest. In order to achieve that I am mentally still trying to work with the original 10 month plan, even if I know based from the past experience that it will be too tight and 12 is more realistic. I hope however that this mentality will help us officially reach 1.0 before the winter months of 2024. Then I don't have to deal with all these sale issues happening at the same time and we can just go to 1.0 at the logical fitting point. But a lot of that is of course not up to me, for example, I can't predict on the month when the artwork will be finished. 

Rough Content Plan for Chapter 3

So I hope the last section could give you some insights on the upcoming challenges in the Chapter 3 development, but maybe the sections here are the main ones the readers are interested in. :'D We have through the development of Chapter 1 and 2 pretty much committed to the minimum following story arcs that need to be handled in Chapter 3 Roya part:

• Final Dungeon / Richard Domain
• Mansion of Lust (Lewdness focused dungeon)
• Judgement of Pride (Vice focused dungeon)
• Lord Trademond (Comes after Mansion of Lust, has high lewd events while Mansion will mostly be low to medium for Aura and will have the full range for Paulina)
• Crystal Caverns (min. Vault level)
• 3 intermediate adventurer quests 
• 2 Expert-Rank adventurer quests (Judgement of Pride being one of them, the other involving Clockwork Forest and the Artificer)
• Entertainment Den (Will contain lewd events for Charlotte / vice events for Aura where someone who got pissed off by her will give you money if you write some things into her soul contract. Not sure if said person will be a Lumerian Noble or a visiting merchant originally from Trademond.)
• Remaining Magic Academy floor(s)

There's of course more I would love to do, e.g. content for the desert region in the south and other smaller things, like more customers for the brothel and so on. For those we will need to see what we can fit in. Some comments I added to the points in the plan may sound a bit cryptic because you don't have the full knowledge I have and writing it out would take a bit much space. You will of course learn more about them during the usual devlog posts when I get to the implmentation step.

For the Mind part, I'm not going to list the storylines in detail since I believe that would be too spoiler and I plan to discuss more details anywas in this Friday's devlog post where I will be writing about the mental rooms. Instead of focusing on the details, let's keep the focus on the bigger picture and disucss a bit on how I plan to structure the development of Chapter 3.

I plan to split Chapter 3 development off into 3 sub chapters:

Chapter 3-A

The first development phase will work very similar to the development up till now. I will spead my focus evenly among real world corruption events, Roya main content and Roya side content. A typical week would look like this:

• 1 week real world corruption content
• 1 week Roya side content (lewd and non-lewd)
• 1 week main content (Mansion of Lust -> Lord Trademond, Final Dungeon/Crystal Caverns setup, Judgement of Pride setup)
• 1 week improvements / bugfixes / side content / backlog clearing on wherever I'm lagging behind plan

I plan to keep this up until I have finished the Mansion of Lust and Lord Trademond storylines. Ideally I also want to setup some Judgement of Pride stuff since it will involve Charlotte, and Charlotte would also be involved in some planned Roya side content in the Entertainment Den I would like to tackle, but we will see about this. The point is, that at the end of Chapter 3-A we will have dealt with the most important lewd events on  the Roya side. Once we are there---

Chapter 3-B

---we will change up the schedule structure. The goal of Chapter 3-B will be to reach the corruption ending and with that complete all major lewd events in the real corruption storyline. The average monthly project plan schedule would then look like this:

• 2-3 weeks real world corruption content
• 1-2 weeks Roya content (main, side, lewd, non-lewd, whatever, depending on how far we got in Chapter 3-A and where we might be lagging behind)

The overarching goal is that by the end of Chapter 3-B we will be done with most lewd scenes requiring new CGs. From that point onward, I want to only add CGs into the art queue if they are really needed to finish out a storyline, or if they are only a matter of creating some small variations but would to add a lot of value to a storyline.

Chapter 3-C

In the final phase will obviously then shift to completing the good ending, which mostly involves finishing Judgement of Pride. and then the final dungeon. I am not sure how the schedule exactly would look like in this time frame as it strongly depends on what we finished in the previous phases and what was left unfinished. 

It also strongly depends on the speed of our artist Emubi since this phase will go on at minimum until he has finished the art queue that we filled up the previous phases. Note that even though lewd content production will go down in this phase as I want to avoid increasing the need for new CGs, corruption content will still be produced in the form of Vice content.

Finally, note that all the criteria for switching to a new phase are mostly dependent on logical milestones rather than me saying we will do it in X months. There are just too many variables to make a reasonable estimate here, especially since it also heavily depends on the output of our freelancers. ...Of which our artist is currently busy with family matters until November 10th, Trihan has a sprained hand, and apparantly our mapper got pregnant a couple months ago. Soooo, I already expect this to be a bit of a rollercoaster. :'D

Project Management 101

Alright, I wrote a lot and I think the post is already getting too long. I hope you had some insights on what's going on behind the scenes and where we will be steering over the next year. Finally, as I mentioned above, since production time especially with patreon projects is a topic that comes up often, I would like to give just a quick excurs into the kind of project management I learned (professionaly on my day job) and what kind of key philosophies I hold here.

In principle, you can break down most factors of a project into three core variables. Those who maybe already know a bit about project management know what's coming now - it's the holy triangle of

• quality
• quantity
• and time

with the area of the triangle somewhat corresponding to the amount of resources input into a project. And most decisions are basically trade-offs where you need to sacrifice one variable in order to increase another. In most cases, the trade-off is very straightforward: Scoping down and reducing quantity in order to reduce time delays. But sometimes, as I mentioned above for example with the Mountainreach arc, this can also affect the quality. 

So sometimes it's better to just take the delay and not decrease the scope. In a game like this, which is all about having a lot of small deltas to show the corruption of Aura, there is of course a certain limit where downscoping will start impacting the game negatively. For example, I could have avoided gathering more delay by cutting real world story lines, but then it's kind of the question: 

What's the point? 

Corruption scenes are a core identitfy of the game, so cutting them out and removing the core experience kind of renders the game a bit meaningless. Likewise, I could have saved time by making the Reverse Summoning Ritual very simple... but then what would be the point of the previous build up and a story? Likewise, a story without some major climax points lacks isn't quite as interesting and at the end of the day, making an uninteresting story is again not really meaningful since we aren't reading or playing for the sake of reading or playing but in order to read or play something interesting. Okay, I spent aa paragraph on something really obvious, where I want to get with this is the following:

None of the three variables are invariable to me. 

If an important element needs the time, I take the time and do it. On the other hand, I don't subscribe to the philosophy of "it's done when it's done" or "as a creator I will never sacrifice quality". In my opinion, nothing is truly "perfect" or "truly done". You could always spend more time to edit text, improve the narrative design, better balance fights, and so on. However, there is a dimishing point of return and certain "quality standard". Once the standard and a point of dimishing returns have been reached, I will mostly move on to the next item to work on. And the same goes for quantify, I focus on the highest value items, mixing in some "lower" value detail items to give some more life to everything, but if we are behind in time, lower value items get cut. 

Alright, time for me to cook some lunch and then get started on some Chapter 3 mental room setup. Usually I would also update our Investment Plan, but since we have been mostly stuck since half a year, there aren't any major updates to report on here. Again, I hope this gave some insights into the project development and see you latest on Friday for this week's devlog post.