March 8 Update (Patreon)

First, I want to share some fanart Annikath made a while back, and you might not have seen if you don't follow social media.

The art was her idea, but the numbers originally came from me when we discussed character designs, because I want to keep characters consistent (I suspect you all know how character models tend to inflate in some series). 0/10 would be a character with no visible breasts and 10/10 represents "too much" in terms of the TLS aesthetic. Some exaggeration is fine, but the 8-9 range of this is about as far as I stretch before things seem more silly to me.

Introductory things addressed, let's talk about my work this week...

For the most part, I think my task-switching between projects makes me more efficient: I can produce more of what I love in the long term because I stay motivated, avoid burnout, and can leave a project on the back burner if the ideas need to simmer a little more. That isn't to say there's no cost to multi-tasking, however, and there do come times when I think I need to take a step back and focus more.

This last week was one of those times, and unfortunately Omnipocalypse was the casualty. That's not to say that I didn't make some progress on it, but I intentionally dedicated less time to it in order to put more focus on other tasks. I feel bad about this, because I really wanted to get a new build for everyone.

Was I unrealistic in my thinking on how fast I could turn 0.1.0 into 0.2.0? Yes, perhaps. Someone posted that the first version was already as complex as Ouroboros, and that makes me feel a little better; it's true via multiple metrics: many more characters, more switches, more systems, etc. But still, I've said one thing to patrons and not delivered as quickly as I want.

My time has instead been taken up trying to get Don't Save the Princess over the finish line... and I didn't quite make it this week. Very frustrating, but this isn't really on me, as I'm basically sitting on my hands waiting for the programmer to tweak a few numbers for balance. =/

In place of that, I've been spending more time on Slave Rehabilitator. It has previously been a back burner project, but I've been working more with the artist recently. We've been finishing both more content and more of the supporting assets like UI. Here is a new WIP of the management screen:

(Don't take the characters on this too seriously, as most as placeholders just to test the systems. And of course the details of WIP screenshots are certain to change.)

This is another one of those processes that just takes longer than you'd think it should, but iterating on mechanics is a critical part of game development. It feels lazy since you're just fiddling around with ideas and doesn't have a straightforward output: with writing you can say "I wrote X words today" but there's no concrete metric for game mechanics.

Still, I feel as though I'm making meaningful progress with everything, so I hope that people will both be patient with me and enjoy the final products.