Hermit mode (Patreon)

Howdy! First of all thank you all for your nice comments, feedback and bug reports, we’re already working on the "bugfix" version. This post is an explanation to my recent decision to become a hermit for a while and to our rework in general.

Life as hermit is tough but pretty peaceful, that said I think it’s pretty obvious that we still needed more time to polish the game, v0.4.6 is playable but it still has a lot of issues, including random crashes.

We’ve released the game in this state, because in my mind, we could not afford to delay it anymore, and I went into this “hermit” mode (offline) for the same reasons, every time I’ve checked our patreon - we were losing blood, you, our supporters, and the questions on discord didn’t help the situation either, since I had no new information to give. My online presence became a distraction, and it was slowing the release down, due to me being emotional about it, so I’ve decided to completely ignore everyone and focus on the work itself.

Like I’ve said, I’m doing this game because that’s what I want to do, it’s fun for me, and this rework was a miserable experience, to put it lightly. Thankfully, it is technically over and what’s left to do can and will be done at the same time as our new content, all systems are in place and we won’t need to break your savefiles. What’s left to do is for Moana to optimize the game even further, and for me to finish drawing the artwork of our systems - gropings, outfits and etc.

It wasn’t enough to just “replace” the art and some text in the game, for this thing to work we needed to manually transfer everything into our new framework, and oh boy did we miss some things!

I wasn’t of much help with this issue, so I was doing something else - I was further improving the artwork, step by step, event by event (you can see how I’ve changed the artwork if you’ll compare the teasers I’ve shown over the course of this rework and current ingame events).

It wasn’t as important, but I still wanted to do this - improve the art where I could, either it was just a simple poster on the background, a male partner or Kira’s pose itself.

We did a ton of backend stuff to ensure that our systems will work, and I think we’ve succeeded with their implementation.

So why did we do this rework? In two words:

Without it the game would break in the future, and we’d have no way of fixing it, due to its potentially big size.

In a bit more than two words (347 words to be axact, if you were wondering):

Almost a year ago we’ve noticed that our game will become unplayable at some point, if we’d continue developing it “randomly”, we needed a structure and we needed to know how much we can potentially change Kira’s appearance.

The initial plan was just to develop a system that would support future changes and add in existing changes to the game, unfortunately for everyone - we had no idea how to do that.

As time went by, the system grew, and at one point we’ve decided to do absolutely everything we could imagine, because why not? This would mean that future us will have less work, more dev tools and your saves would not break. Win - win for everyone.

While we were at it, I’ve decided to redraw her art completely, we’ve changed her character art - because her initial one was useless for what we had in mind, Kira’s nose was basically just two pixels and there would be no way for us to show you tattoos, piercings and etc. with that amount of space.

The events were redrawn just because we needed to layer them, and I was going to edit them anyways, so it made sense at the time to redraw them entirely while I’m at it. I wasn’t supposed to redraw all of them, only the older (ugly) ones, but I did them all for the sake of consistency in art.

I understand that some people think that we didn’t need this complex character art system, maybe to them Kira was fine with her initial default look, but her customization is just half of our system, the other half - is the ability to use this art in dialogue or events.

Say we’d want Kira to keep writings or cum on her body after the event, give her some wearable sex-toys, lingerie or even make it so that the npcs whould grope her if she’s dressed provocatively. Without this system there would be no way for us to do it.

On top of all of that, we have dialogues, the only part of the rework that went as planned, without any complications. That said, it took us some time to include them in as well.

In conclusion:

The rework was 100% necessary, due to the nature of our game and what we already did with Kira and her story - we had only two choices: Abandon it and start something else, or do this rework, obviously I couldn’t just drop this project, as I am emotionally invested in it and I want to see it through, so here we are.

I believe that this whole game overhaul would not be possible in the future, because the game has proven to be too big for us to change as it is.

My only regret is that I didn’t know that it would take us this amount of time, because I would have warned you in advance and avoided a lot of stress. I mean, in retrospect I think it was insane for me to think that we could redo a year of work in a month or two, but I had my reasons to believe so.

You see, I already did something similar, this is actually the third time I’ve redrawn the game. Before I went public with it, I was developing it alone for half a year, and right before the initial release of v0.1 I’ve changed all of the art completely.

That’s why I honestly thought that with Moana on board we could pull it off (You can see the initial design of Kira and other characters in our currently available artbook).

Of course the fact that we were constantly adding new stuff to our systems and decided to include new content on top of it did nothing to speed up the development either.

But I think that our constant deadlines have pushed us and speeded up the development, even though they were stressful and were never met.

To fully take advantage of our new character art system I need to actually finish the artwork for it, which I intend to do each month little by little in addition to new content, the groping system will be finished when the “residential area” content will be added, because with it we will spawn a bunch of random repeatable events.

“Layering” the events to support physical changes - I’ve redrawn all events the right way, so I did my part for them to work, the rest is up to Moana, I do not think my skills will be needed that much for this aspect of the game. That said, we will gradually layer events with each update.

Character art for the npcs - another thing that we will gradually add in with each update.

And that’s all we have to do from “backend” stuff, everything else is already in. When we will actually finish doing all of that, we will be able to do even more interesting quests and events, and you will have a wider variety of options and choices to make.

I want to learn from my mistakes, and so I will distance myself from any mentioning of dates, that said I think the updates should become more regular from now on, as we no longer have the need to do huge chunks of work at once, we had this need only because I didn't want to break your saves with each update and now we won’t break them because everything is already in.

Instead, at the end of each week I will post a progress report, and you will be able to determine yourself how much time is left before the drop of another update.

This week I intend to do quite a lot of stuff. I want to update our artbook, our page, figure out fetishes for remaining two hypno sessions and upload a bugfix with them, I also want to return to conducting the polls. And, if everything goes as planned, we will begin working on the new content next week.

Thank you all for your patience and your support comrades! Things should go much smoother from now on, and in a day or two, I will post detailed information about our fetish system and will ask for your opinion on it.