Good day,
I've had a lot of conversations with patrons over the past week because of the way the discussion is going in this thread it came to an extend that I spend more time talking then I was actually working on the game. I have always taken critique very serious which is probably the reason I had so often trouble finding sleep over the past days.
This is a difficult one as I don't know where to start and it's even harder to give satisfying answers to everyone.
Let's begin with Tia's last bonus scene and then go to bonus scenes in general. I am sorry the scene was underwhealming. that upfront. But the reason for that wasn't that I also did an ntr part for it, the reason was that I did an overhaul of how Tia's dialogue images look and also how her dialogue images are shown ingame. If you are familiar with rpgm you know that you can select a face for every dialogue. For tia now I have replaced that in all of her dialogues around Rumah (and the plan is to do it for all dialogue with her in the future) with a script call which will load a picture depending on her clothes/pregnancy state.
So I was working ahead for future updates. and this took a lot of time (I also reworked all her position images around all scenes in rumah so that the correct dress is shown).
And I understand that at the moment this isn't really exciting content. if you see something like that you might wonder what I did at all as it's not that visible. Then came the new animations for her. I badly wanted to improve the quality of the images, and also tried something new with animated shadows. also something that took more time and again something most people don't care about. In the end I ran short on time and had to finish it as it already had taken way longer than planned. Did vanilla content came a bit short? Yes, I have to admit that it did. Something I will try to make better in the future when doing bonus scenes. I also have learned that I have to tone down my ambitions a bit as they get in the way with content.
About bonus scenes in general and the story progression: The bonus scenes started with a single additional animation (a new doggy animation for Maui at the time) and now we have small stories which are an update by themself. Julia's date night for example took me more than a week to make. and that's it now for pretty much all of the bonus scenes. this is all time that I then don't have to make the content update. I've realized that and talked about it on patreon and discord. with the conclusion that I didn't make a bonus scene this month and also plan to reduce their scope in the future to be able to focus more on the actual story updates. I've also even before all this discussion here started decided that I from now on always want one option on the content poll that will continue the main story. And yeah Tia is currently at the top again, but her story is now almost complete with the final chapter to be done in the coming update.
That said Anya's and Helena's update brought the main story forward already and I will draw it closer to a conflict between the two Kings.
Polls in general: As zARRR pointed out, I decide what options are added to the content poll. so eventually it will lead to a completed story and I'm not adding in options that don't progress the story in some way. the pre vote on discord is always with a limited amount of options and only determines in which order new vote options are added. at some point all options are picked and I offer a new set of options for the stories that aren't complete yet. I see no problem with that, as I only give my patrons the option to choose which content they want to see first this isn't slowing down the developement.
ntr vs vanilla: It's true that I pretty much get bombarded with ntr ideas, on discord and in pm's. The main focus has always been the vanilla content with some ntr scenes at the side for those who like them. For the current update I worked on 4 reworks for Lyvia/MC, 8 new animations for her and the MC + an animated version of the party scene images at the camp. and yeah also 1 scene where the MC shares Lyvia with a merc. To say that I'm focussing more and more on ntr just isn't true. But I also have to say that the people who like ntr aren't the one with hateful messages (which I also got a lot of in the past).
Performance of the game: It's true that there are a lot of parallel events which slow down the client. Aside from the performance mode which is in the options menu I have plans to reduce the amount of parallel events in the next rework update. I can't say if that will really improve the situation on older pc's but I will try what I can to improve the situation. (on my pc which is now also 6 years old the game runs fine, but I don't use that as a standard)
Stress in general: Ever since I started working on this game I didn't go on a vacation/visit firends for more than a few days and around christmas. When I started I worked pretty much from morning till midnight every day after the first release. This couldn't go on forever as people in my surrounding started to get worried and so I stepped it down a bit. I put myself under pressure a lot to get things done. I live by the sentiment that if someone supports me for a month then I also want to give something in return to that person. While to some degree this helps me to get things done it also can lead to not fully tested releases which bug out. Also something I have recently talked about on patreon. Finding a good work/life balance is still something I'm working on. Problem is for every patient patron, there is also one who get's angry if they don't get at least XYZ new scenes or XYZ amount of content. I put myself into that, I wanted to make games and I don't regret it. It's still my dream job, there are good and bad moments.
This is my first solo project of this scope. I'm doing as good as I can to get it completed. But of course that doesn't mean that I only make good decisions during the developement. I'm learning by doing and I had to start somewhere. I could have made a small short novel as a start, but that's not what I wanted.
That said, I'm now going to continue working. The original goal was to get the 0.5.1.9 update done today, but with all that has happened over this week which also caused kind of a writing blockade yesterday I will probably need a bit longer.
