July check-in (Patreon)

Hi everyone! A quick checkin for this month. I'm gonna try to be brief, which is not my strong point.

June and July votingI'm sorry for missing last month's vote. I can give you an excuse, and I do have one, but I won't bother. To make up, I will post another open vote right after this post and the top 5 will (eventually) get into the game.

DatesI've been wrecking my mind trying to think of ways to make the new date mechanics more achievable. As discussed last time, I had let feature creep take a hold of everything. Unfortunately, I still have issues with this. The problem is that I have introduced so many variables into the game that I keep thinking of things I have to take into account. Personality types, sexualities, monogamy, relationships... It's pretty tough.

I did change from a full-on long written description of each interaction to a more brief "overview". First I'd write full conversations and such, but that was just too much work and way too chaotic coding-wise. Now I just kind of "describe" what happens.

I'm trying to center the dates and sex around player choice. This means my current version creates branching paths and you can choose your own little adventure. For example, on the coffee date you might get a path where you get a choice to flirt with the barista. You may want to do this if you're having a cup of coffee with an open-minded friend, but you'll probably want to skip if you're with your monogamous wife. Although even then, it might open up a conversation about your relationship. This is still a lót of work but it is also a lot of fun so far.

SexThe new sex mechanics are similar. I've removed about half of the variables I was tracking to simplify and have decided to base the scenes on location. Here too you will go through a branching tree of choices. Will you kiss her or go straight to eating out? Will you go rough or be gentle? These choices will have to be made based on your partner's preferences, or they might either cause a fight or if you're lucky open her up to something new she didn't know she wanted :)

This will take a lot of work and writing, so the game might ship with not every scene filled in. I aim to make it code-functional first with some scenes just having placeholder text describing what happens.

Personality typesI've been struggling with personality types. So far I've allowed the new character cards to give girls multiple personalities. This means someone can be friendly, flirty and money-obsessed all at once. But I keep running into walls when I have to actually implement this because it means they have multiple reactions to things happening.

It'd be easiest to go for a more Animal Crossing approach where each girl is simply one of several personality types. They're either shy, mean, quirky, funny etc. This will diminish the fluidity I had in mind, but sometimes I have to accept that what I had in mind simply isn't possible for one person to code and write.

Thoughts on development / July releaseThis update has really confronted me with that. I want to do too much and it's catching up with me.

At this point I just want player feedback again and not be stuck in my solo feedback loop I've been in for 18 months. So I have decided that by the end of July, I will just upload what I have and let you all back into the loop. It might not be how I wanted it to be but if I start waiting for that I probably won't be releasing until 2030.

For now I will be focussing on making everything as code-functional as possible and tie in the main business storyline with the brand new one. Writing will have placeholder text here and there, but I always tag passages that I need to get back to so that'll be dripfed in later.

From there on I want to go back to smaller, frequent updates based on your feedback. I needed this big break to rebuild some stuff from the ground up, but most of those things are done now and I've just been postponing out of perfectionism. It's time to quit that and have fun building this game together again.

So I'll see y'all in two weeks or so.