Heads up! (Patreon)

Howdy! so there’s been some significant changes since the last time we talked. I’ll talk more about it all in my next progress report, but I wanted to give you a head’s up.

The release is still scheduled for the 31st, and unfortunately I was too busy working on it this month to make any polls/teasers.

And here’s a bit about the content it’s have:

Remember I mentioned that the upcoming “Modest Proposal” quest had a problem (it had too much plot and not enough “plot”)? Well, I believe I fixed that.

First of all, the quest itself has a lot of text (over a hundred of pages) and it previously had very few interactable moments. So, I added more places where you can pick how Kira will respond and trimmed some fat.

I honestly think that the addition of new dialogue choices made the entire quest more enjoyable, but this addition bloated the whole script to roughly 200 pages. I hope that now it won’t come off as just a “wall of text”, but the option to just “space out” will be available anyways.

While the new choices are there primarily for immersion and to give you more control over how your Kira feels/behaves, they do have some consequences - they determine whether or not the NPC’s Kira talks to like her or not (we’ll use it pretty soon).

Then, I reshuffled and altered some of my plans to add a new H-event. I previously struggled to come up with something that would feel organic in this quest, but I believe I’ve found it.

The new H-event has two different branching versions that have the same meaning, similar art, and yet they are drastically different. So, this is a “duplex” kind of event, two in one - which is something we have never done before.

The reason I did all of this is simple - we started implementing this quest, I didn’t like how it turned out, so I made it better. All these changes took time of course, so we had to make some alterations to our plans.

The v0.5 will be cut into pieces.

First part (v0.5a) will have the first half of the modest proposal (100+ pages of script) and will end with a surprise branching H-event.

Second part (v0.5b) will have a second part (100+ pages) and will end with the repeatable prison pole H-event.

And the final part (v0.5c) will have Moana’s quest. Her quest is in the last part, because it’s the shortest one (around 40 pages of script) and because we thought that for v0.5 we should focus on the main plot first.

There will be no “system” updates in between. We’ll release all of the content as soon as it’s ready and only then will we begin our work on v0.5.1 that will be more “system” focused. In v0.5.2 we will return to our work on Vivarium. That’s our updated plan.

Overall, I hope you don’t mind our change of plans and I hope you will like what v0.5a brings to the table. This is the work in progress and changes like this are bound to happen, but this unfortunately means that we had to alter our plans and I feel uneasy that we deviated.

However, I honestly think we’ve made both the quest and the game better. The upcoming H-event is also really cool, but I don’t want to spoil what happens.

Previous plan for v0.5 had 100 pages and a pole event, this plan has 100 pages and a different event. The only real sacrifice we had to make is to cut out Moana’s event from this version. But it’s all worth it, in my opinion.

I’ll give you more details and we’ll return to character art polls in my next progress report. Right now, in order to implement all of my changes, we’re kind of in a “headless chicken” mode, so I just wanted to give you a quick head’s up.

That’s all I wanted to say today. V0.5a will drop on 31st as announced, thank you for your patience and support, the end is near!