Happy New Year (Patreon)

With the month and year coming to a close, I'd just like to say that a lot of progress has been made with the overall project.  Day 1 is nearing completion with only a few scenes left to be rendered and added.  From here out, we'll probably do major releases once each day is complete with minor releases as each scene within a day is complete for the days that have a lot more content (like Day 2).  The story starts with a LOT of choices, more than you should expect through the bulk of the story as it's meant as more of a way to gauge what the player is interested in.  Also, each decision has some minor effect that will add up to determine larger options later on, but by having these micro-decisions, it means that there is a lot more flexibility in the game.  Meaning that if you make one big decision that effects a character one way, you can balance it out later by making enough minor decisions in the opposite path.  

For this game, I've pulled a lot of inspiration from other games that I found to be both good and bad, adapting the positive aspects while learning to avoid the negative ones.  For example, a great game is A Wife And Mother which is told from a third-person perspective but the main character is decidedly the mother.  That said, there are moments where you make decisions for the son.  Likewise, The Adventurous Couple, while having a male protagonist, will have scenes where you choose to follow the husband or the wife to view their separate escapades.  What they both lacked, in my opinion, was being able to view BOTH forks of the story.  They took the time to make both paths but only let you follow one.  In Next Steps, We do a pixilation effect to indicate going back in time to show what other characters were doing until the timelines meet back up.  This way, you get to follow all the characters without missing anything.  The other negative aspect I found in other games was, in the same spirit, being forced to choose one path over another --  The main character can go on a date with Character A OR Character B, but not both.  One of the things I like about the sandbox-style games was that each romance path was separate and you could usually follow each of them to the end on your own time and never miss out.  But the endless grinding of repeatable content always drove me nuts.  So the plan is that while you can only do one activity at a time, the activities your choose to NOT do, will be available later.  Like if you want to go on a date with a character, it doesn't need to be a specific day, so the option will be there until you choose to accept it, giving you the ability to explore more paths while from a resource perspective, not wasting content on divergent forks.  It really sucks in a game when they post a long-awaited update just to find out that there is ZERO new content because all of the new content was for a forked path you didn't take.  On the other end of the spectrum, I don't want the harem-style game where the goal is to create a relationship with EVERY character your meet and then have to try and balance all of them.  Try playing one of those games and try to reject as many people as possible and see what the game plays like.  I've found a few where the plot is a lot more forced than you would think, where both the positive and negative response ends up at the same place after with just a higher or lower score provided and where lower scores simply mean that future content gets blocked.  Plus the whole harem aspect is unrealistic.  While some people may be into sharing, others definitely won't be and you will have to pick and choose.  In order the make it fun to replay the game, you want to make sure that there are enough unique paths that open up different options to give the player a reason to replay it.  

With that insight, I hope to provide a game where you can control enough of the characters and there personalities where you don't find a situation where you're sitting there thinking, "Why is this character so ______!"  Where it's not just one sex scene after another, but you also don't have to wait for two years before a single sex-scene is released, where the plot line is somewhat realistic but still dabbles in the realm of fantasy, where morally and ethically wrong decisions are punished and not rewarded, and where you are not locked into a linear plot nor forced to miss out on half the content.  

Happy New Year everyone, and I look forward to the next release.