0.9 Retrospective, Part 1 (Patreon)

Greetings! Progress continues on the MZ conversion; I've finished the part of my tool that will convert the bulk of the plugin commands; I'm now at work on the part that will convert scripts (it's much shorter.) There's a lot of little stuff to fix by hand after that, but that will be done in MZ, which I'm excited about, honestly. I'll put out a test version once I get everything worked out and complete a playthrough, but that's still probably a week or two away. 

I've also become aware of an issue in 0.9.1 that may prevent pre-0.9 saves from loading, and that's probably important enough to get out an update for, so I'll issue 0.9.2 soon, which will contain only that fix. (In the meantime, if you had that issue you can check the comments in the 0.9.1 thread for a fix.)

0.9 Retrospective, Part 1: What Took So Long?

The main point of this post, though, is to look back on the 0.9 release and release cycle. What went right? What went wrong? Where's the game going?

The first thing to address is: why did it take so long? This is a question I asked myself often. I can't really think of a time when I wasn't doing something on the release, but it still just never seemed to get done. The release was quite long - far longer than I thought it would be - and that's part of it, but not really sufficient to explain it. There are a lot of little reasons, but if I had to cover most of them with one word I'd say: "burnout."

The 0.8 release cycle was fairly acrimonious, and I pushed quite hard to get it done, especially the last couple of months. The conflicts I had with people toward the end had started to sort of sour my enthusiasm for the project. Added to that, I really, really liked 0.8! I thought it was some of my best work, but... it wasn't as financially successful as previous releases. This stung a bit... I shouldn't have, but I took it a little personally, and this further eroded my enthusiasm. 

That was silly, of course. It wasn't a dispassionate judgment of the quality of my work, it's just that the most important thing in a project like this (revenue-wise) is momentum, and I'd lost quite a bit in the long 0.8 release cycle. People want to see regular releases, which is quite understandable. But I took it at the time as a judgement.

Being a little dejected, I decided to work on parts of the game that wouldn't require so much of my... well, soul. New features, H-scenes, refinements of character models, that sort of thing. Transmogrification, character view, a Clothing States plugin I didn't even use - and you don't want to know how much time I spent working on the Bunnies' hair! I figured I'd get back to the more meaningful story stuff once I was feeling more enthusiasm for the project. But... the longer I stayed away from the story, the less I felt.

I didn't stop writing completely, but it was in disjointed bits widely separated in time. Most of it was awful, of course, and much of what wasn't awful was wrong for the game. I threw away almost all of it. 

I'm not sure exactly when it was, but at some point I started going back through my original notes, the ones I made when I was working on 0.1. I began to remember what I was trying to do with the game, my vision for it, and that started to get me excited about it again. After that - and I'm not sure which happened first - I worked out a lot of the long-term plot and did a complete playthrough of the game.

The playthrough helped a lot. I didn't remember most of what I'd done very clearly, so it was almost like I was playing someone else's game. And I loved it! It made me appreciate that the game really is something special, and it deserves to be finished. 

I also worked out the plot. Prior to this, I had some vague, general ideas about where I wanted it to end up, but no real plan of how to get there, or even exactly where "there" was. This was a problem; when I sat down to do something on the story, I didn't really know what it was I ought to be doing. Strolling around through the subplots is nice, but eventually you need to head somewhere - preferably somewhere interesting. So I looked at my original ideas, thought about the themes I wanted to explore, looked at what had been done so far in the game, and came up with something I actually feel pretty good about. I don't have everything planned out in detail - nor do I want to! You need to leave a little room for serendipity, after all - but I now have a map.

Reinvigorated by these two projects, I got back to the work of writing. It was rough going at first, but I eventually managed to find my groove again. It took a bit of time - especially with the recruiting quest - but eventually I ended up with something I was happy with.

Now, there were other issues, including some personal ones I'd planned to get sorted out (which were put on hold by the lockdowns,) but if there's a narrative to be told, that's probably it. There's a number of things left to say about the release cycle - including how to keep it from taking so long in the future - but this post is long enough, so I'll end it here.

I want to thank you sincerely for your support, especially those of you who stuck with me all this time. I'm sure many thought the project was dead - and it did almost die - but a huge part of what kept me going was thinking of all of you who continued to support it and wanted to see it succeed. Thank you.