I missed this post until now, The Morgana post obscured it.Ah, good question... My feeling is that he has a strong worldbuilding, plus a clear idea of the direction of the game and the story, with most things mapped out, but not the step-by-step details. And we also know by experience that he tends to get a bit sidetracked and carried away by his ideas (most infamously the bunk bed conversations with the LIs). For example, I have no clue on how he'll manage to fill up the 90 days your training is supposed to last (and that covers the 2nd chapter), at this pace.
In the last year, except for the last couple of months, he has been rather regular in his updates, and he published a roadmap of the monthly updates with their content, so he must have some sort of medium-term plan. How far it stretches into the future, that's unclear.
And yes, I agree that the guest devs strategy wasn't really viable...
The thought that he doesn't have a detailed storyboard doesn't fill me with confidence. Something this complex really needs one,
unless I've completely misunderstood what kind of game he's going for. I mean if it is just a VN with a few branches then fine he can probably wing it, but if all these stats and vast array of kinks actually affect the story then I can't see how he'd manage to tie it together on the fly.
That filler week seems like a terrible idea to me, in a game that tries to encompass so many kinks you shouldn't be able to experience it all in one playthrough.This has been my impression as well. I feel like a lot of the basic story ideas and the general plotline had been developed way back, probably before the development even started, but most details had changed along the way. I skimmed through the earliest Patreon posts a while back, it seems like there has always been influence from the polls and fan feedback on the course of the development, even as far as the very beginning, with character designs and names. There were also some story changes influenced by how popular some of the characters were. Sam was supposed to die at the end of Part 1, for example, but this was rewritten after he became such a popular character. Some of the characters like Ayewn, Krathi, and Chad also had their roles expanded over time.
As far as the planned structure of Part 2 goes, I know that all of the primary love interests are planned to have morning shower scenes that will cover an entire week, so with the number of PLIs we have right now there should be a minimum of 6 in-game week's worth of mission content. Every other week is planned to be a filler week in terms of the main story, so that bi players will be able to catch up on all of the content, while strictly gay/straight players will just get prompts to increase stats instead.
When he was asked about when he plans to start Part 3 on Discord, which I think may have been around last December or at the start of the year, Ranli said that he is currently aiming for Winter 2025, iirc. Not to be too negative, but, at the current rate of one in-game day every six months, even with the filler weeks, this is a bit too unrealistic, lol.
But again I might have misunderstood how complex this game is intended to be.