A wall of text. (Patreon)

(The pic above is not related to "SC34", it's the Aladdin drawing I did for the secret extended ending of "PT:GOLD").

Hi, guys.

So, as we are getting closer to the release of the episode 02, I have a bit more free time on my hands. A rather odd sensation... But thanks to that I have time to write this post and finally play some Persona 5 and do a couple of other things that's been on my to-do list for way too long now. Just the other day for example I helped "Censored Gaming" design another t-shirt. It was nothing special and didn't take me long, but I am still very happy that I had time to do that.

Also the actual release is probably going to be hectic as fuck for me, as usual, so I think I will use the time I have now to write about things I would normally write in the release post.

First of all let me reflect on how long this episode took me to develop. The idea was to create a very simple and easy to update game, and here we are almost 10 months later and only now I am ready to release the next update. I am such an idiot. I am sure you are tired of hearing me say this, but I really want to say this publicly again and again to be more countable when I will be working on episode 03, to insure that I make it way smaller and shorter!

OK, with that out of the way, let's talk about few changes in the game itself. The first thing you will notice right away is that there is no "mastery system" for the episode anymore. Some people complained that 10 points to master a show's episode that basically does nothing is way to high of a number. While I was working on episode 02 I had plans to make the new show's episodes in such a way that it would make more sense to level them up to mastery 10: the plan was to change the animations slightly so that for example the girl is not being embarrassed performing a certain activity anymore if it's mastered, or so that an additional scene is added to the episode if it's mastered, showing the cumshot and whatnot. 

About 3 months ago I had a change of heart though. I will not go into the details and reasoning behind that, since there are a lot of them. Believe me when I tell you this: I spend a lot of time planning these things. I try to take a lot of things into consideration, and even if the final result ends up not working the way I intended it to work, it is never because I didn't put enough thought in it but because I am an idiot :) 

So, yeah, I decided to get rid of the mastery system altogether. This does will not affect the show's of SC34 episode 01, but starting with episode 02, all new shows will have no mastery. Instead the episodes themselves sort of level up as you progress through the story. 

So, if you unlock new show, it will have only episode 01 in it. If you keep progressing through the story at some point the episode will change to 02 with episode 01 going into archive. As you keep on playing episode 03 will unlock with episode 02 going into archive (I am talking about show's episodes not "SC34" update. (This is getting so confusing)). Episodes in the archive can be reviewed at any time but they don't spend time, don't generate income, they are just recordings.

I was never good at explaining my thoughts in coherent way... So I am sure all this sounds confusing as hell to you guys. But just trust me, the way it is now, the show's episodes make way more sense both gameplay and story-wise.

Another thing I tried to do with this update is tp give you a chance to be able to play events and quests of every character more or less independently. So that if you feel like progressing through Ashelin's story-line first - you could do that, or if you want to start with Lola, you could do that as well. 

Now, I said "i tried" to do that. It sort of worked out well, but sometimes you will still have to play a few event's for Lola to be able to proceed further with Ashelin, and such. It's tricky to tell a coherent story without continuity issues when you try to give the player the freedom to progress some arcs of the story before others... Oh, and I already talked about this, but I cut all the Jasmine content so there will be no new event's or quests for her. (Otherwise development would've taken even longer -_- ).

Wow, that's a lot of text... I think this will do for now.

The game is on the final stages of development but it is still going to take some time to iron things out. Thank you for your support and patience.

Your supreme leader. 

P.S. I am trying to get back into streaming so make sure you follow me on https://picarto.tv/akabur