Hi all, and thank you for joining me for today's public update!

Last week, a record 164 of you were kind enough to give your verdict and feedback on Best Frenemies. Today I'll talk about the results of that poll and reflect a little.

If you're just here for the status update, we are a couple of days away from the big reveal of the headline quest of 0.11, so that will be in next week's post. I have done a little remastering with my downtime and started writing some sexy new events and scenes. Soon, the school council will vote on what else they'd like to see in 0.11, including which of the characters' ongoing progressions will receive attention and where my efforts will be focused in delivering new side content.

So, onto the dissection!

Nearly a third of you that voted had no notes. This is a big vote of confidence and higher than previous such polls, so I'm very pleased with that. I'm happy you're happy!

The traditional temperature-check on the tone yielded broadly similar results to previous polls, with a small minority thinking I went too far, about 30% happy and most thinking I should have been a much bigger prick to my unfortunate characters. These are numbers I'm broadly happy with as while I'd love to be able to move some of that bottom box to the middle, it also risks filling up the top a bit more. I offset the isolation, terror and hopelessness of the girls' situation with humour, and hopefully that worked.

I'm actually a bit glad that this didn't go over all that well as it definitely won't be happening again. 60% of respondents thought the sequence in the slaver base was too long, though some qualitative feedback suggested that a save point midway through would have helped, as the decision was coming up. This is easy and will be in the next update. However, given that this mega-scene added so much to the development time and wasn't that well received gives me something to think about in some future quests that contain lengthy sections in which Missy is at someone's mercy.

Broadly good numbers here with well over 3/4 pleased. Many of those that weren't happy did offer qualitative feedback on why and while I'm grateful for that, I am leaning towards this being a case of not being able to please all the people all the time. Each of you will have had an idea of where you wanted Jess's story to go in your minds and this will have been closer for some than others. To the doubters, I should remind you that this isn't the end for Jessica, and she'll be getting new scenes and content more or less constantly. She is, after all, one of the most popular characters in the game with only Poppy running her close. We're just moving out of the "she's your bully" phase and into the "she's your girlfriend as well as your bully" phase ^^

I fucked up here. I can't believe I forgot to include one of the options, and once I had, it's not possible to edit the poll options. I can however extrapolate what the numbers who would have voted for the missing Romance option might have been. 10 votes were missing from this section, though that number may be a little higher as a few double voted, checking both the willing slave and defeat mode boxes, so instead a better indication may be the Discord snap poll that asked the same question and revealed 18% did romance. Since the rest of the numbers are more or less bang in line with that, we can assume that about 30 people would have voted for Romance.

I'm actually a little surprised more people weren't playing Defeat Mode, but there's also a lot of willing subs out there, and as always, between them, they were by far the most popular choices.

I'm not really sure what information I hoped to gain by asking this question, but it was interesting to see where people's minds were with it. If anyone wants to provide additional feedback on what kind of other choices you'd have liked to see, the comments section is below. It'd just be interesting to know.

Thank you to everyone that provided feedback, and I hope you enjoyed Jessica's relationship quest!

Trinian

Hi, and thank you for joining me for this public post.

I usually try and do this straight away, while it's fresh in people's minds, but, you know, life. Today I'm going to do the retrospective on Best Frenemies, Jessica's relationship quest, which was released just before Christmas. If you're just here for the latest news, there isn't much, the School Council is currently voting on the headline quest for 0.11 and we're expecting the final result a week tomorrow. Before you go, please do feel free to fill in the usual customer satisfaction survey at the end of this article and if you'd like to leave qualitative feedback, you are welcome to use the comments section.

A Match made in Hell

Going into this quest, I knew two things: It would be very important to get this quest right as Jessica is such an important and popular character and that it would need multiple endings as the range of relationships players want to have with Jessica is... wide.

Applying the lessons I learned between Bad Girls Bitch/Down with the Bad Girls and Avenging Angel, I delayed the decision until near the end so that everyone plays the same quest before experiencing the outcome they want. This did mean creating three different versions of the end scene, but there was some crossover.

How the quest played out went through a number of iterations before I arrived at a final version. I played with the idea of having a longer escape sequence from Slaver Base II, perhaps involving Missy having to attract the attention of the slaver boss so you could steal the key while she slept after having her way with you, but in the end, I wanted to keep the focus on the relationship between the two girls. I also abandoned an early idea to have the player temporarily take control of Jess as this would reveal the existence of the player to another character, and one who doesn't have her mind wiped afterwards.

That super-long scene which begins at the moment of capture and doesn't end until the beginning of the escape is most of the reason for the long development cycle, but as I discussed when explaining the creative decisions that led to Abbie's adventure in Fivaviana, there isn't really a lot of gameplay to be had from being a slave - particularly not one that spends the entire time chained up. So whereas in that instance, I opted to have the player do something else and keep checking in on our girl's torment, this time we stayed with her for the whole time but had no control. I think there's merits and penalties to each approach.

But why involve the illegal slavers and do that whole sequence at all? We already had the counselling sessions through which to explore the girl's growing relationship. Well... first of all, because it was hot. I mean come on. That scene was like 45 minutes of pure gas. This is reason enough on its own in a game like Missy where titillation is the whole point.

But there was another reason: it acted as by far the best relationship development out of anything I could think of. Putting the girls in this extreme and seemingly hopeless situation (and of course chemically removing their inhibitions,) meant that the relationship was forged in fire. Remember Lola's relationship arc where we had to get past her mothers first and it was that much better for it? Well this is that on speed. In the gloom of that dungeon, love blossomed. Unless you chose the rejection ending, I guess.

I am quite pleased with the way this quest came out - from an early idea to have the girls captured together to something which I feel did quite a good job of bringing their feelings for each other out into the open all while doing humour and sexiness. (I hope you liked the sequence where they're talking nonsense at each other as the drugs take hold as much as I do.)

But anyway, now's the time for you to have your say and tell me what you think! I'll probably do another one of these soon for Rise of Poppy as that too probably deserves some creative postmortem.

Please select all options in the poll that apply.

Until next time!

Trinian