The next major update will take longer than originally planned while I restructure some core parts of the game to improve pacing and development workflow.
Progress on the game itself — particularly the writing — has been becoming sluggish for several reasons, the primary one being pacing issues caused by the way I originally planned the game. Instead of continuing to force myself through a monotonous process that could eventually cause me to give up and abandon the project, I’m going to address the core problems to improve my workflow.
I know some of you were expecting the next update fairly soon, so I’d like to explain my reasoning so you can understand this decision.
The first problem is the pacing of the main quests. The main questlines suffer from pacing issues due to several factors. The main quest girls have too many planned scenes, and in some cases (specifically Loxley’s first quest) the pacing of the dialogue and the quest length are off. This has led to me trying to pad out dialogue for characters who have had little to no interaction with the main character, which makes the writing process frustrating and difficult.
My plan is to go over all three questlines and rearrange some of the scenes while reducing the total number of scenes each quest girl has. Currently, each has nine scenes across three quests, and I plan to reduce this to six. The upside of this will be better pacing in scene transitions and pregnancy variants.
The second problem involves revisiting existing gameplay systems and bringing them to a more complete and coherent state. As I discovered while working on the battle system over the last month, updating gameplay mechanics in small bursts is a terrible approach.
When I first released the initial battle system, it was incomplete, with plans to add more features as the game evolved. This made enemies overly difficult, so I nerfed them based on feedback and moved on. In the next update, I fixed the party skills and gave them a boost, which in turn made the enemies far too easy. This “kicking the can down the road” approach is slowing development because I keep having to spend time readjusting systems instead of building them properly from the start.
The third problem is that certain features keep getting postponed indefinitely because they are always pushed onto the back burner. NPC dialogue, optional scenes, random burglary missions, important NPC time-based relocations, and expanded dialogue are all things I want to implement, but they keep getting delayed while I spend time trying to pad dialogue (problem one) or rebalance mechanics (problem two).
My current plan is to finish the forest dungeon and the quests linked to it, and then release a larger update with a substantial amount of better-paced quests that will help establish a stronger baseline for the game.
Of course, I’ll continue posting updates to show progress. However, if I release builds for playtesting, they will likely be distributed in a limited capacity through the Discord rather than as official releases on the various platforms and sites.
Thank you for your time!