PHOENIXES v17 peek #3 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, this is Agang, here comes more information about v17:

We’ll greatly advance Kemuri’s storyline in v17. I know many of you who like her have been waiting for a long time, and I hope I won’t let you down.

Right now I’m spending most of my time working on her story and have paused the development of what-if chapters. I realized that I made a serious mistake when I first designed Kemuri’s character – I made her most important trait a deep tragedy (her eye issue caused by disease). This kind of tragedy is on a completely different level from “the succubus curse” or “the cow curse,” because this is something that could truly happen in the real world. It doesn’t seem wise to remind players of real-world cruelty in an adult game.

As I brainstormed how to continue her existing storyline, I realized I was heading straight into a dead end. Her story was very likely to turn into a classic Korean-style melodramatic romance driven by her disease. It might be a moving story—perhaps even bring people to tears—but it’s unlikely to turn people on sexually. And for an adult game, that’s a problem.

So I decided to change the direction of her story while there's still time and set it on a new course. She will be the same ill, blind girl, but her health issue will no longer play a key role in her story. She will still show vulnerability in front of you, just like the other girls (which helps highlight the MC), but not by emphasizing her own tragedy. Instead, we’ll introduce new elements to create narrative conflict — her family issues.

With this change to her story, we’ll be introducing a new character in v17 — Kemuri’s mother, Lady Shiomihara.

This beautiful widow has appeared in the game before, but without an actual image because well, she was not in the plan. But now she will play an important role in Kemuri’s story, and she will also have a not-long but complete romantic story with you in the future, just like Theophano (likely in v18).

Now let's talk about some gameplay improvements: We’ll add more guidance to the game, for example, a page that tracks the trigger status of harem events (the UI is still very rough and not final):

Also, we are exploring ways to further improve the player experience. One common complaint I receive is that it is grindy and frustrating to "constantly refresh the map and trigger the girls’ short bubble events to advance the story." Unfortunately, we haven’t found a good solution for this yet, since those short events are also a part of the story.

But I guess we can improve other aspects first, such as the experience of “earning money” and “gaining club exp.” These actions aren’t tied to the story, yet people still have to trigger the same content repeatedly in a grindy way.

Our current attempt is to introduce a minigame. By achieving certain scores in a game, you can earn both money and club exp rewards. These rewards will be fairly generous, so it should be quicker and easier for people to get all the resources needed to unlock club upgrades and raise the club level.

A Suika game, yeah, why not~ (the UI is still a mess, please ignore it):

And of course, you can choose not to play it and gain money/club exp in old way.