...And we're back!

Happy New Year, everyone!

2023 is going to be huge for Missy, so in the first post of the year, I'm going to go over a quick rundown of some of the stuff I have planned for 0.6, then in later posts, we'll look at some of it in a bit more detail.  We'll also talk results of the poll I ran before Christmas.

The main quest for 0.6 will be Poppy's story part 2: Avenging Angel.  I've updated Angel's profile in the background wiki, but this will be an ongoing thing as I reveal more about her character and we see how her story unfolds.  

The first thing that'll be going into 0.6 (after the main quest) is the Strip Poker minigame that had been intended to be in 0.5.  I ran out of time in the end as I wanted to get that update up before the end of 2022, mindful as I was of how long it had been since 0.4.  Now that it's in the wild, I have a little more breathing room to get caught up.

I mentioned this briefly in the Discord chat, but the other thing I'd like to do, or at least start in 0.6 is greatly increase the number of repeatable daytime events.  The most regular criticism I hear about the game is the repetition of events, and the defence that the game is still in early access is beginning to wear thin 20 months in!

Therefore, there will be a larger number of new events in this and hopefully the next several updates, though some of them will be relatively small "placeholder" events, consisting of only dialogue, which can be made fairly quickly in order to pad out the school day.  I am also hoping to get a new system in place for balancing the frequency with which events turn up, which should further minimise repetition.

There will also be some more remastering later on in development, maybe while beta testing is happening.  Up top, we can see a picture I recently re-did, the very first one you see in which Missy is explaining the game right at the start.  Better lighting and the re-done bedroom map make it look far better than the original.

I'm going to break down the results of the poll I ran three weeks ago by category as this will allow for a more meaningful discussion of the results.  As usual, the Patreon votes are in blue and Subscribestar in green. (Though the green is a little hard to make out this time for some reason.)

Aww, thanks you guys.  28 out of a total of 104 voters, just over a quarter, thought that the chapter was perfect  ^^

For this section, I regret not including a "punishments were about right" option so I could have seen who thought that.  But at least by making you all come down on one side or the other, I learned that a massive majority of you are perfectly content to see even worse things happen to our girl in the future.  Oh dear. Who's going to tell her?

Yeah.... no real surprises here.  Subby players have always formed a large majority of the game's base, which is why I take pains to remind the rest that I've not forgotten about them.  As I've long suspected, the more of a monster Jessica acts, the more we love her for it.

This one was interesting though.  Far closer than the other groups.  Of course, we don't know what Jess is using yet to blackmail Miss Paris, (and thus, to what if any extent it is her own fault,) so everyone has had to form their opinion without that knowledge,  After it's revealed, I may run this poll again to see whether it changes attitudes.  For now, the split breaks towards sympathy, but not by a huge margin.  Also interesting that fewer votes overall were cast one way or the other here, indicating that many people are reserving judgement.

Reinforcing the results on the severity of Missy's treatment (and thus perhaps providing my answer on how many would have said "about right") a clear majority are unconcerned about the tone of the chapter, with most happy to see things get darker still.  Chapter 4 is about as dark as I'm planning on things getting, at least for now, but it's good to know that for most people, I have some wiggle room.

Thanks to everyone that took the time to contribute to the poll, as always, it's useful background information for me to know as much as I can about my audience.  But enough about 0.5, I'll be back next week when we'll talk a little more about 0.6!

Trinian