Friday Update #34: That Time of the Month

Hey folks!

I am currently beginning my writing this Friday Update as I keep one eye on the game's Discord server (invite) as a passionate argument wages between the girls about whether trans women should assimilate into cis woman culture with the goal of indistinguishably passing, or if they should remain separate and distinct from cis woman culture and take pride in their trans identity as a different form of womanhood.

As a cis male, I honestly don't get the argument unless I frame it through the lens of the African American Civil Rights Movement with the sides of equal integration into American society via peaceful reconciliation and acceptance (largely viewed as the MLK's stance) or firmly maintaining a separate cultural identity as a "Black Nation" within America because the wounds from White America were too deep to repair (largely viewed as Malcolm X's stance up until near the end of his life). I still know that's not exactly correct, but it's the best way I have to understand this.

Either way, my role in that debate isn't as a judge but as an enforcer, so I'm going to keep an eye on things as I write this. Unlike the poll results I'll be discussing today and its effects, it's not nearly as unanimous of an opinion, and it's my job to step in at the right time to prevent a

I actually haven't seen a MCU film since the first Captain America and the way the theater landscape changed from Disney's monopoly worries me, but this edit took all of 3 minutes to make and the coincidence of the argument was the best segue I cold make for introducing the topic of this Friday Update. It sure beats the heck out of trivia about PMS.

So most of you likely saw the poll for re:Dreamer switching to monthly releases instead of once every 2 weeks and the reasons why I considered this change (I hate that bimonthly can mean either twice a month or every 2 months; likewise, biweekly can mean twice a week or every 2 weeks).

The results were, uh... pretty overwhelmingly in favor of the switch (the Patron poll was in fact unanimous with 79 votes). While I was hoping for the approval to move to monthly releases, I was also hoping for some debate, so I'm still left feeling slightly disappointed.

Shit, maybe I am a tsundere redheaded anime girl after all?

Honestly though, after this poll went up, I was told how much of an idiot I was being by some of the girls in the server who didn't realize I was doing releases every 2 weeks (nobody in the trans girl slumber party/transbian dive bar actually plays the game nor knows the release schedule). These opinions were expressed pretty strongly, so I was like, "oh, maybe that is a dumb idea fraught with risks." I'm pretty sure that had my health not declined, I could have kept that up indefinitely and not burned out, but it relies on me never getting sick.

Anyways, the game is moving to a monthly release release schedule; specifically, the first Friday of every month.

I still feel a bit dickish for making this switch, so I'm financially shooting myself in the foot by giving so much time between a release and the next charge that I'm pretty much guaranteeing a lot of people would at least consider cancelling their pledge before the end of every month.

I've been told by people who don't like the subscription model that I should consider a permanent license option or another platform like Steam Early Access, but the first would be a mess to set up beyond my programing capabilities and the second would have to work with an even more restrictive system than Patreon which constantly and unpredictably changes their rules to be more or less hostile towards adult creators (also, the issue of the placeholder assets makes this basically impossible).

Patreon might be going down in flames in the near future given that it just laid off its entire security team (possibly because of some fucked things being allowed to stay up on this website), so this game is almost certainly moving over to SubscribeStar if that happens (a Kickstarter campaign was discussed, but it likely wouldn't work). Espeon (the producer of re:Dreamer) just recently got her Patreon page for funding commissioned translations of gender bender doujins/H-manga permanently shuttered and has moved over to SubscribeStar for the foreseeable future, but she's still in the approval process for it.

So, what is this move going to mean for you (the person who reads re:Dreamer)?

• A release on the first Friday of every month instead of every other Friday (duh).
• A Friday Update every third Friday of the month instead of every other Friday.
• Larger releases and more ambitious plans for each release. One of the things I've noticed as I've worked on this project is that I tend to be a bit "episodic" with the releases to fit a nice scene in the 2-week development period, which can lead to (dare I say it?) "inconsequential" updates that don't necessarily move the plot forwards. I largely treat character interactions and information gained from that (and any character development that happens) as plot progression, but this game needs to pick up the pace with larger steps of plot progression or else we'll have more moments like Zach and Britney languishing in a mall date that lasted a year (starting from 0.8.9 on 09/17/2021). I ultimately think that writing turned out very well, although the arcade date having playable games was a time-consuming mistake. I say this while thinking that every game met its intended thematic goal: Zone of the Zombies 2 captures a small bit of the hectic shooting energy of House of the Dead 2 and is meant to make a player realize that the accuracy doesn't mean anything when you can counteract that by making a hailstorm of bullets (the subtext being Zach has a way to get on a near-equal footing with Britney but he has to think outside the box to do so), Mrs Puck Man made the player sad for not being able to play a game Zach was really hyping himself up for (and the broken joystick was a rather blunt metaphor for Zach's lost masculinity that he had only a slim chance of seeing restored; there's a smaller potential subtext of the inverse were being a woman is a bit disappointing for Zach as it proved to not be all he had cracked it up to be), Tower Topper is an exercise in how Zach's stubbornness is both one of his best and worst qualities (and the only way he can actually get a win over Britney is by taking advantage of it before Britney loses patience with him), and Dance Uprising is meant to show how a man suddenly turning into a woman/having a his male body changed into a woman's body would be an awkward transition period as you got used to how basic things he would take for granted, such as muscular coordination, would become much harder than expected (this point was made perhaps a bit too well as the charts for the songs suck as they were generated via a program instead of by hand). While this subtext is cool, it doesn't advance the plot of the game in an obvious way, which longer, better-planned updates will.
• Overall, less proportional work done per release for the next 4 months over the next 4 months (I estimate that while I take my oral steroids, a 6-month course I am 2 months along with, I'll be capable of 75% of my normal output). The release will have twice the development time, so it'll be 150% the amount of content of a release from a development period of 2 weeks. After I fully recover (aka, can get off the medication which makes my PD symptoms worse), this will return to the normal proportional level of output, meaning double-length releases.
• Less time time spent distributing those releases. Getting a release out there is a very time-consuming but overlooked portion of the development process. I first have to test the release, and if it is good, I compile it, then I upload it to MEGA and MediaFire, post it here on Patreon, then increment the releases on Patreon, TFGames.Site, F95zone, itch.io, DeviantArt, and occasionally Farhad's Forum. I also post this game in the game's Discord server (and sometimes various related Discord servers). There's also the online changelog with relevant data in a txt file in every release folder, making the diagrams.net flowchart and adding it to their Dropbox folder and every release folder, and adding any art miscellaneous art assets (official art, fan art, dumb memes I or some community member made) to the Art folder on Dropbox. I'd estimate this takes 90-120 minutes every 2 weeks. Nothing is more heartbreaking to me to have a release fully written and coded but to not the energy to do all those steps required for it to be considered complete. This happened with the recent 0.10.12 release, where everything was "done" at 1:30 AM but I did not have the energy or mental cognition to test the game and had to sleep and make everyone wait until the following morning to do everything required for the release.
• If something goes wrong with a release, distributing a bugfix update is going to be a lot harder. Backwards patching an older release is frustrating as I have to download a rewound version of the Git repository at that time, fix the issue, decide if other quality of life bufixes since then are worth implementing as well, re-test everything, compile the release, upload it, and replace all the old download links with the new one. I lint check and playtest every release thoroughly before uploading anything, but I'm only human and the complexity of the C.H.E.A.T.S. system means I am liable to miss something. I have to rely on Sustainers to be bugtesters where I cannot, a role they likely don't know they have, and it's happened often enough that an older release of the game had a major issue that was only discovered when it went public.

I can't claim this will be a change without any negative consequences, but I hope this does a good job of explaining why the positives outweigh any negatives... for now, at least. Based on the overwhelming feedback I received in the polls and elsewhere, I am considering making this a permanent change, but I'll see how this experiment goes and reevaluate in 4 months.

So... what will be the first re:Dreamer release following this new schedule?

re:Dreamer (0.11.0) is releasing on the third anniversary of the game, Friday, October 7th, 2022, as a free update for everyone with no password system. I've done this for the other anniversary releases after asking permission from the Patrons to do it, but as oblivious as I can be, even I can read the room and understand that it makes me look like I lack confidence in this game to ask for permission for something I already got permission for twice right after asking for permission to change the release schedule.

A lot of the previous release was preparation for this Zach-centric update, such as the dozens of new World Info entries and having a professional editor look over the entire game script for errors.

Last night, I got done making the reference sheet for Zach's facial expressions and a comparison sheet with matching Zoey expressions and the expression parts they were derived from (Zach's sprite artist, who has asked to remain unnamed given their focus on all-ages art, did a fantastic job translating Zoey's expressions onto Zach by making keeping their look nearly identical outside of making them a tiny bit more masculine).

Now that boring stuff is out of the way (and the Britney and Keisuke routes are left in comfortable spots), I can focus on Zach, and because of the longer development period, I can the whole day in Zach's life before he found re:Dreamer instead of just the afternoon.

As a funny meta-narrative joke, and as a finally need to actually set a firm year for the game to have a calendar (something I had previously avoiding doing as I wanted to avoid dating the game beyond <current year>/202X), that date will be Friday, October 7th, 2022, the same date of the release.

Honestly, Zach's freshman Mechanical Engineering schedule is something I would have killed for in university taking the same major...

Do not read on if you do not want spoilers for the contents of the next release.

Zach's morning routine is simple: a small breakfast of scrambled eggs and a big black coffee. There's definitely a good moment for foreshadowing subtext of Zach having an odd feeling of premonition as he watches the line cook crack an egg onto the griddle, but the highlight is how much of a zombie Zach is until he shoves a worrying amount of coffee into himself. As a woman, he won't need that morning coffee nearly as much for some reason.

As the 0.10.12 World Information briefly mentions, Zach is a borderline prodigy with math. He doesn't pay much attention in the Calculus 1 discussion as he already knows the material, and he finds his T.A.'s insistence of his students showing their work annoying because he does most of the calculations in his head. If anything, his illegible handwriting causes him a slight bit of confusion as even he struggles to read it. Still, he's enough of a teacher's pet that he complies with the requirement.

Zach generally treats his Friday gap period as an excuse to chill in the commons on the southeast corner of the quad, have another coffee (the caffeine addiction is meant to be concerning), and maybe have bagel or something. He only ate an hour ago and isn't very hungry, but the commons have a policy of kicking anyone out who doesn't have food in front of them for taking up space other students might want. Besides the coffee, Zach's chief reason for visiting the commons dining hall is to play gacha. The lack of direct sun glare in many areas, the climate-controlled HVAC, and the good Wi-Fi connection make it the perfect place for him to catch up on the weeklies from the many games he plays.

Like the intro psych lecture from Keisuke's route, Zach's Friday lecture will be drawn from the Open Yale course. In a nice coincidence, the lecture preceding the Keisuke Monday one, "What Motivates Us: Sex," is "Why Are People Different?: Differences." Zach greatly prides himself on his intelligence and he's developed a personality that always assumes he's the smartest guy in any room (something that might often be true but requires the definition of intelligence to be strictly confined to "book smarts"). While this lecture won't be as long as the one on the Monday in Keisuke's route as it's not something Zach (and the player) has the option to tune out of, it'll bring up some interesting lines of thinking about how people are shaped by their experiences and they people around them. Zach is in a highly malleable state right now being fresh from returning home from his year-long sabbatical, and the strong implication is that he can be shaped into a new person through his experiences and the people he associates in the coming months. For Zach, the thought is a lot more literal than his professor realized.

Zach's last class of the week is a Chemistry discussion incorporating concepts from the lab and lectures of the week. As Walter White said in its iconic first episode of Breaking Bad, "Chemistry is the study of change." Much like that first episode, Zach's discussion will be over ionic bonds. It's a short lesson about this being a special type of bonding from attraction between opposite pairs, how such bonds generally create exothermic reactions with a higher state of energy, how such a bond only occurs if the overall energy change is favorable for the reaction, and how it is impossible for a clean ionic bond from an atom or molecule to completely transfer an electron over to another without any sharing. This is rife with subtext about Zach's attraction being towards the people who are different than him (the AGP brainworms notwithstanding, although it could be argued that a female version of a person is just "the opposite" of them as a male), Zach becoming more energetic from being in a bond with another person (and vice-versa), the bond with another person only occurring if the pair is more stable than the parts and the activation energy is low enough, and how the bond can never be purely one-sided (which has the additional subtext of Zach's change to Zoey can never be a complete transfer from one state to another).

Filled with these notions, Zach returns to his dorm room, alone, like he has done for weeks. On the way back, he gets a text message from his mom that puts him in a sour mood and makes him anxious about what he views as a poorly thought-out attempt to find himself that made his life worse, which is where the story as we know it begins.

This entire sequence of events is eventually going to be called back to on the Friday next week in every route of the game to show the differences between Zach and Zoey (after she has been adapting to her new life for a week). Some things will be different, but a surprising amount of things will not... except in Rich's route, where Zach shows up to classes as a transfer student named Zoey because of forged admission papers from Rich, but that stark contrast itself will be interesting.

I'm genuinely excited to write this content as it really grounds Zach as "a genderswapped guy" instead of "a girl with a backstory as a guy" (sorry, girls self-inserting as Zoey!) and I hope you're as excited to read it as I am to share it with you.

Until next time!