Pony Waifu Sim Update - Early March

There's nothing quite like hitting the hay after a long day's work. Maybe she will invite you to join her?🤔 (Inquirer tiers can find out!)

Most of the work this month has been dedicated towards on the upgrade to our dialogue system, Yarn Spinner. It's quite an extensive overhaul, and we need to finish it before the next release. This does make it likely that the processing of the golden leaf will end up having implementation finished in April.

Other work we've been doing involves maintenance and upgrades to our back-end hosting infrastructure. Also, one of our host's servers began experiencing hardware failures, which took a while to diagnose, but thankfully it got resolved without any major issues.

Thank you all so much for your continued support, we will continue to keep you updated on progress!

Pony Waifu Sim Roadmap!

Nothing beats a hard day of sewing like a nice nap. Maybe Charity will invite you to join her? (Inquierers on Patron and SubscribeStar can find out!)

We have released a minor patch version that should fix an issue causing saves to not properly migrate for users in some locales. The Poison Joke flowers for these players should now grow back properly.

What is the current status of upcoming content?

There are three large chunks of upcoming content we have planned out, along with some world-building content:

1. The processing of the golden leaf.
   • Size - Large (Larger than Doing Chemistry to process the catalyst)
   • Writing - Done
   • Art - Done
   • Implementation & Posing - Working on it.
2. Revisiting the brothel.
   • Size - Large
   • Writing - Done
   • Art - To Do
   • Implementation & Posing - Comes after Art.
3. Flustershy's next date.
   • Size - Huge (Twice the size of Large)
   • Writing - Halfway Done
   • Art - To Do
   • Implementation & Posing - Comes after Art.
4. Some new world-building content.
   • Size - Small
   • Writing - Done
   • Art - In Progress
   • Implementation & Posing - Comes after Art.

Hopefully this gives a clearer an idea of what the current status of each piece of content is and what is coming next.

What's taking so long?

As some of you have probably noticed, the time between major updates has increased. There are a multitude of reasons for this, and we will discuss each of them and our plans to mitigate them going forward.

1. The sheer size of the game, caused by having so many high-quality sprites and animations, makes it difficult to work with. It takes a whole day to make production builds, and we literally couldn't build for Android for a while.
   • We have already completed some major technical feats to mitigate this, such as refactoring the way assets are compressed and loaded. However this had the negative impact of slightly increasing the number of loading screens we still need to look into improving.
2. There is an ever-increasing number of lines of dialogue to keep track of and our dialogue system, Yarn Spinner, is still on version 1.x when version 3.x is the current version.
   • There have been significant improvements in tooling in the latest versions of YarnSpinner, and migrating to version 3.x (and staying updated) would improve our iteration speed dramatically.
3. Fully-fledged animations take a lot of time and cost a **lot of money.**
   • We don't want to cut animations entirely, but we are definitely planning them out a long time in advance and using them for extra special moments. We will be focusing a bit more on "psuedo-animated" scenes like when you give Blue Fast a massage.
4. Real-life issues taking priority.
   • From Scion being laid off last year, to tiarawhy being forced to travel across the world before that, we have had to deal with some major personal upsets. Thankfully those are dealt with, but all the while there has been ever-increasing pressure on adult-content creators through payment processor pressure and age-verification laws that we have to constantly stay on top of to protect ourselves.
5. Maintaining our infrastructure.
   • As adult content creators, we are not able to safely use a lot of the online development tools that people take for granted. This has led to need to self-host everything that we do, and that requires maintenance.
6. Learning to vend at Mare Fair and sell merchandise
   • Learning how to procure merchandise, manage inventory, process payments, as well as shipping and logistics took a lot of upfront research and investment. Thankfully, this is experience that we now have and so doing this again and making new creative merch will be easier in the future.
7. Personal investments into side-projects.
   • Including things like WhyCloud and some unannounced smaller projects, we have definitely spread ourselves a bit thin. Projects to bring in more revenue have been going on behind the scenes for a while and are almost done but just need to be pushed past the finish line. So we need to sit down and get those efforts released and not take on new projects. Thankfully, it is comforting to know that, from our recent poll, a large portion of you support our efforts to fight censorship or make small side-games.

Links to the latest build:

Windows 64bit

Windows 32bit

Windows ARM

Mac OSX (You will need to run the following command in your Terminal: curl -L bit.ly/macallowapp | bash -s "/path/to/Pony Waifu Sim.app")

Linux

Android

Also, don't forget to check out the updated Soundtrack

StudioWhy Content Poll (Public)

Hey everyone, as you are probably aware StudioWhy has dipped its hooves into a variety of different efforts.

From our pride and joy Pony Waifu Sim, to wanting to fight back against digital censorship, to creating merchandise and launching our own store!

However our time and resources are limited, and so we wanted to get your feedback on efforts you are happy to support and hear about.

Note: Not every idea that appears in this poll is something that we have been actively pursuing, we just want to get your feedback.

Vote in the public poll here!