DevBlog: Spring 2021

Hey guys,

We are nearing the first third of the year and I wanted to share with you some updates and thoughts on the project's development.

1. Roadmap and Targets
(tl;dr: end of the year goals are on track, some changes to order of milestones)

When we last talked about the roadmap in January, we laid the goal of having a mostly complete Chapter 2 by the end of the year, with more detailed goals and milestones for every 4 months.

First of all, I am happy to report that the overall roadmap for 2021 is staying on track with good progress being made in these first 4 months. That being said, we have rearranged the order of some of the milestones due to the organic needs of development.

Originally, we were targeting end of April for "Complete loop and win condition in Chapter 2", with consecutive goals of improving the story links between Chapter 1 and 2 in order to better transitions player choices and account for more consequences of your early decisions. Another later goal was filling in Ch2 with more side content, just like there is in Ch1.

Around February it became apparent that we really wanted Chapter 2 to have main story branches that follow-up on your choices from Ch1, most notably in regards to Felicia and Elise. For this reason we decided to tackle this first, implementing the permanent choices system and starting to build upon the consequences of these choices.

While playtesting in March, it was also obvious that having more things to do and explore as a succubus is key to really enjoying the flavor and fantasy of Ch2. I think Ruxandra was a great example of this, and we are certainly not done with her yet!

===> As a result, while these goals were originally planned for after Ch2 loop is tied, they were moved ahead in order to follow the organic growth of the story and development;

===> The current target for "closed loop ch2" has an approximate ETA of end of July 2021.

===> The end of the year goals remain unchanged and overall progress is on track.

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2. Changes to Patreon stretch goals
(tl;dr: based on your feedback, romance and customization first, sound later)

We want to thank everyone who took the time to fill the last development survey - this sort of feedback helps us to stay on the same page with all of you and gives us the confidence to know that we're on the right track ... or sometimes the knowledge that we need to make adjustments.

Many of your answers have been more or less aligned with our expectations, but there has been one clear outlier that we immediately new we had to address: 

When asked for our next milestone above the $700/month we need to sustain the core development process, only 7% of you chose sound. The remaining 93% were almost evenly split between "more romance options" and "advanced character customization".

As you know, we had designated sound as our next goal to tackle, but this result shows such an overwhelming opinion to the contrary that we could not ignore it. 

==> Because of this, we have re-arranged our stretch goals and resource allocation to include be as follows:

======> Stretch goal 1- Romance + : Many of you have requested  romance paths with Mihai or the Werewolf to provide an alternative to the Elise/Felicia paths. While this was not planned in the original scope of the project, we are more than happy to expand the options based on popular requests.

======>Stretch goal 2- Character Customization + : Another very popular request and something we're excited to do if we have the resources for it. At this point we will probably need another coder to help with managing this, but it's certainly something we're very excited about.

======>Stretch goal 3 - Sound: We still want to do this eventually, but it has been moved to the back of the queue based on your feedback for what is most important. If we reach this goal, we'll hire a sound engineer to work with us.

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3. How this month is going
(tl;dr: working on Ch2 and fixing bugs in the engine)

As I'm writing this, this month I have been focusing a lot on "stitching" in Chapter 2 and making sure that story branches and events play nice regardless of the order in which they're triggered. This involves a lot of "trivial" passages and connections such as entering and exiting locations, triggering dialogues and looping back to the appropriate "track" after death. It's not the most glorious work, but it's absolutely essential for Ch2 to achieve the level of freedom that we want.

Of course, we are also working on the good bits as well - you can expect a new illustration to Sabrina's training, as well as new art and scene upgrades to a certain spider-related body mod ;)

Other than that, I've been heavily replaying Chapter 2 and trying to really coin the succubus fantasy feel, and working on weaving together a sense of empowerment when Alex manages to take control over things using her supernatural powers, with a sense of loss of control when those powers end up controlling her instead. You might notice some changes to dialogue and scenes here and there, with more to come - it's not always a quick process, but I want to get it just right.

Depending on how the "stitching" is going, there may be some more content for you to see in Ch2, but we'll see what makes the cut. There are some other things in the works as well, but I don't want to give away everything ;)

On a final note, the notifications system has been a real pain to deal with. It's working in theory, but since it's injecting javascript on top of the normal capabilities of the engine, there have been a lot of issues with browser cache and the way save files interact with this. In short, if you are a fresh user just launching the game it usually works without any issues, but if you have a previous version cached on your browser, there may be conflicts. I have lost about 1 week dealing with the mess, and am keeping a close eye on it. If you encounter any errors with undefined javascript, please let me know.

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Thank you for reading through this DevBlog - if you have any comments or suggestions going forward, leave them below!