TK 8000 posted
Writing something while uploading House Arrest ...
Hey!
Finally I'll upload the latest version of House Arrest. It's a short version with only three scenes. It will be the last version of the game that I will make available here at Patreon!
The project that saved my Patreon
As my oldest patrons must remember, I invented House Arrest as a way to justify a higher tier in my Patreon ($ 6). That's because I did not have enough support back then and I was running a serious risk of having to quit everything. House Arrest was the project I did to save Solvalley and I was successful at it.
In addition, House Arrest turned out to be a fun game. Some of it's proposals didn't work at all (Alanna's training, for example), but some characters ended up getting interesting, like Alanna herself, a useless and unscrupulous little redhead who ends up taking a redemptive course during her interaction with Joel.
The first images and animations are still low quality (but superior to the first images and animations of Solvalley) but the whole sandbox mode was already done with "modern graphics", much more enjoyable.
Learning from mistakes
Unfortunately, not everything was a marvel in the development of House Arrest. When I finished the main story, my idea was to just do Alanna's "good ending" and that's it. But I ended up expanding the game with "sandbox mode".
The problem is that at one point I did not see any reason to do the sandbox scenes and work at House Arrest started getting painful for me. In addition, this game began to delay the other projects (Solvalley and HS Tutor).
The last scenes of House Arrest were the most difficult because of a total creative blockage that I had. The thing came to such a critical point that I got to spend more than 6 hours to write about 10 lines of text. In fact, it took me longer to do these three short scenes than to do the entire Solvalley School update!
To be honest, the "ending scene" I did for Alanna in the update I'm going to post soon did not please me. I didn't find it a decent end to the character that is special for me. However, I know I couldn't afford to spend another day working in this game. In fact, I spent the last three days to be able to review the texts, which I would normally do in 3 hours!
End of stress, better conditions to come
Now with just two projects I will have much more peace of mind and the quality of my life and my work will improve a lot. I'm excited to finally go back to HS Tutor and do the night scenes with Mila and make progress with the other characters.
Things are going to be much better going forward! And I will never work on 3 projects simultaneously again. In fact, as soon as Solvalley comes to an end, in a few months, I'll dedicate 100% to HS Tutor until I finish this game as well. If I decide to continue making games after HS Tutor, I will always work on a single project.
As soon as the upload of the files is completed, I will post the links to download here on my Patreon.
Bye!