Hi everyone, welcome to this week's public update.

Progress in Chapter six is good, mapmaking and coding is proceeding on schedule and rendering will start soon.

Last week, I asked you to participate in the public consultation for the first round of the combat overhaul. As is traditional with these kinds of larger surveys, we'll go through it section by section. I haven't weeded out votes by people that selected "I play narrative mode" if there are any, but most of the responses are fairly unambiguous anyway, so there doesn't seem to be much to be gained there. So let's get into it.

The headline here is that nearly 3/4 of players do not play combat at all, which helps inform me on how much priority to give to this particular project. I would like to get combat working properly, creating something that simulates girly scraps and feels different to classic stand-in-a-line turn-based combat, but with so many players ignoring it altogether, it's not as high a priority as it could be. For those of you that don't play combat, I have a follow-up question for you at the end of today's piece.

On the question of RNG, the majority think I'm going in the wrong direction. Interesting, to say the least, though nearly as many believe that it's better or still not far enough the other way. This is an impossible circle to square, so I'm going to have to think about how I respond to this one.

Here, however, all respondents expressing any opinion are in complete agreement. A change intended to rebalance grapple actually made it too powerful. The sample size is small, but the unanimity of it makes me think that perhaps the grapple changes should be reversed in the next stage and something else tried instead.

On a more positive note, half of respondents did think that the changes created a greater diversity of strategies, while the other half think grapple/guard spam is still the best. It could be that those second half didn't find the same things as the first half, or it could just be a matter of opinion. It's possible for both to be right, of course, but there's still clearly work to be done.

Balance-wise, most players are agreed that combat is fine. This is the result I'd expect here, as it's likely that players who found combat boringly easy or frustratingly hard would have just turned on Narrative mode instead, so I'm not reading too much into this one.

And the same is true to a lesser extent here. I would expect players bored of slogging through overly long combats would stop playing them. So for this reason, players who have turned on Narrative mode, I have a follow-up question: Did you do that because you just don't want to play combat at all and prefer a more narrative experience, or did something about combat put you off and you'd turn it off again if that was fixed? This again is all for my own research and to help me gauge how much of my valuable development time should go into this particular area.

Thank you all for reading!

Trinian

Hi everyone, and thanks for reading this week's public update!

Progress-wise, Chapter Six is proceeding nicely and writing has started on that other stuff I mentioned last week.

Today I want to talk about how you think the first stage of the combat overhaul went. To remind you, the changes I made in 0.7 were:

- Grapple is now guaranteed, but no longer does poison damage. When grapple is applied, it has a 65% chance to also apply a new effect, demoralized, which does the poison damage grapple used to do.
- If both combatants attempt to grapple in the same round, neither will be grappled.
- Rip Bra/Panties have had their rolls tweaked.

I also introduced narrative mode, so if you no longer do combat, please just select that option as it's also good for me to know how many are doing this.

Thank you for participating in this important research!

Trinian

Hi everyone and thanks for joining me for this week's public post.

I want to talk a little about Chapter Six today, and then in the future, we'll hear more about what changes are coming once this story is over. We've also got a just-for-fun poll. Chapter Six will end the Reign of Jess arc. By the time you've played through it you'll have all the answers and I hope they will do justice to your expectations! 

Abbie is running out of time, it's Day 2 and the ferry home to Sapphory City leaves tonight. It's time to throw caution to the wind and get into Elizabeth's house any way you can!

In this chapter, we'll be exploring a few new places that we've not seen yet. Walk the cavernous and intimidating halls of the Governess's mansion, Meet the quirky inhabitants of Old Town North and see what they've been hiding in the port area. You'll need to call in some favours from some of the women you helped the day before to unravel this mystery.

But will you even make it home? I've kept saying that Fivaviana is a dangerous town, and so in a first for Missy, this chapter will feature the game's first ever bad ending. Yep. You can lose and get game over'd! Best keep that save file to hand. Losing the game on purpose to get the game over scene also won't be necessary as it'll unlock in the gallery on quest completion.

Avoid that though and you can finally learn the incredible truth about Miss Paris's secret and how Jess has used it to control her. I'm sure many of you have a theory at this point, and I'm also fairly sure that no one will guess what the real answer is. But it's still fun to try, isn't it? So in today's just-for-fun poll, I've put some of the sillier things I could think of (and who knows? maybe the real answer as well just to throw you off the scent...) but if you have your own suggestion for what you think our little brat has on her teacher, let's hear it in the comments!

Have a great week

Trinian