Hi everyone and thanks for reading this week's public update. Today's agenda is to discuss a new feature coming in the mini-update to help those of you that struggle with where to go and what to do, and then we'll talk poll results from last week.

Being a game dev can sometimes be an enlightening and frustrating experience, and one thing I consistently find is that as easy as I think I've made something, there are always questions about it. This is coupled with the fact that so many people today expect their games to be made in Ren'Py, many simply do not have the patience for the RPGM interface and aren't interested in the exploration and discovery element of the game. Over time, I've tried to introduce a variety of things to help, but now I've gone the full hog and made a mode that will lead you by the hand through the whole game. Introducing Quest Hints!

Like Narrative Mode, Quest Hints can be turned on and off at the start of the game or from Missy's laptop. Maybe if I can figure out how later, I'll add it to the in-game menu, but for the time being, that's how it's going to work. Switch it on and wherever you go, there'll be a handy big pink arrow or bubble marker telling you where to go and who to speak to next. I really couldn't make it any easier if I tried.

It will always show you your current active quest. You can change this yourself in the menu screen, but the game will also select the most relevant quest for you if there isn't one currently tracked. In the mini-update, it will only work for the main storyline, as this took a bit more setting up than narrative mode, but every new quest I make will now come with them and the existing side-quests will soon be compatible too.

For those of you who really just want to be playing a Visual Novel or get to the next scene quickly, this mode is as close as I can offer you. And for everyone else, if you're stuck at a part and don't know what to do next, switching it on temporarily could be a godsend for you. I hope you find it useful!

Last week I asked you for your feedback on Chapter Six and the Reign of Jess arc as a whole. As this was a mega-poll, I'll break it down into relevant sections to discuss each in context.

There are spoilers below, if you haven't played Chapter Six yet.

17 respondents thought the chapter was perfect. I appreciate the ego-stroke, and am happy you're happy.

Consistent with other recent releases, there is, as usual, a large majority that would be happy to see the game get darker (than four of the main characters being sold into slavery for life!?)

Once again, this is about as dark as it gets for the time being, and while I'm happy with less than 4% for too dark, I don't want that number to rise too high. I feel like we're about where we should be at present.

A significant improvement on Chapter Five, with the majority happy with the length and a couple even thinking there was too much of it. I was a bit concerned after that last poll, as this time around, there wouldn't even be the element of exploring Fivaviana, at least not as much of it. There's a few things to see in Old Town North and at the Governess's Mansion, but not enough to take up a lot of time. Still, it seems that with the puzzle elements and dungeon, plus the punishing Jess minigame and everything else, this chapter provided a decent chunk of game time.

On the subject of the puzzles and bearing in mind what I've said above, I was frankly amazed that I didn't get more questions about the clock in Elizabeth's house. Well done, all of you!

I'm pleased with this result. A nearly 75% majority liked running around Scarlett's base. Again, I wasn't sure how this part of the chapter would be received, but I worked hard on it and was pleased with the result, especially the chase sequence on level 2. Did you manage to find all four of the things you can throw at her? I bet a lot of you got caught accidentally-on-purpose a few times though didn't you? ^^

 Several of the upcoming stories have scope for adding more content like this to them, so I'm glad it was mostly well received.

I added this out of curiosity, and again, it shows progress on the results from Chapter Five. It's clear that a majority are still looking for more of a choices-matter experience, and one of the main (and fair, at least in context of what you know right now,) criticisms of the ending are that in the end, nothing mattered with everyone's memories getting erased. I'll decline to comment further on that, and just leave you to ruminate on the cryptic part about "what you know right now."

But I digress, this, I think, is why Poppy's story remains so much more popular than the main storyline, the payoff is immediate and the effects of the choices obvious. And the good news is we'll be seeing more of that in some of the upcoming side quests.

Nonetheless, this doesn't seem to have stopped the overwhelming majority of you from enjoying the Reign of Jess. Even some domme players have remarked that they didn't mind seeing what Jess did to Missy and took the story in the manner I intended it - just a bunch of really hot stuff that happens while doing the business of telling the story.

Some of the feedback I've received (and again, I'm grateful for all constructive feedback, good and bad,) has criticised the big undo, but again, it seems the majority were still able to just enjoy a good schoolgirl blackmail/submission story for what it was. I'm pleased you enjoyed playing it, because I really enjoyed bringing this long-awaited tale to life!

So on we head into Act Two, and in the next public post, we'll learn a little more about that. There most definitely are going to be consequences from the Reign of Jess and Act One in general. You're at a super-strict school and there's been a lot of misbehaviour! Now the other shoe is about to drop...

Have a great week!

Trinian

Hi all and thanks for clicking onto this week's public check-in!

Today I want to concentrate entirely on the results of last week's poll as they were very illuminating, more so in fact than the mega-poll the week before. Let's start by taking a look at them.

Almost 75% of respondents who don't currently play combat would play it if there were more sexual elements to it. This is a clear message, and shows that making a change in this direction will have far more impact than tinkering with the balance of the existing system, which didn't come up as a major issue in either poll. 

Slightly more people felt combat takes too long, but this too is not the way to persuade people in large numbers to switch off narrative mode and give it a go. H-elements are the key.

So, in the next stage of the combat overhaul, I will introduce these elements. I can't tell you when that'll be - definitely not in 0.8 - but I will start putting some ideas together and put it out to a consultation with at least the school council, but more likely all of my paid supporters, with contributory public polls too. I want to get it right this time.

Hey, don't grab me there!

The good news is that there are still only 12 non-wrestling fights to find in the game (rising to 13 in Chapter 6,) so modifying the existing ones isn't a particularly onerous task.

The other initial thought I have about this is that it's the ideal use for the game's "traffic light" combat system that I introduced in the initial release (remember how slapping Stacey could get you punished?) and so making you think about what level of lewdity you can get away with is also potentially a way to go with it. For instance, while you can (and should) rip Jess's clothes off and sit on her in the orchard fight, doing that in the school yard may attract some unwanted faculty attention...

So our course is set for the second part of the combat overhaul. Watch this space, and have a great week!

Trinian

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 welcome to this week's public post! The progress report is pretty straightforward - Chapter Six is currently at the writing and structuring stage, the earliest stage of the development cycle. Next comes the mapmaking and coding stage.

Last week I asked you what you thought of Chapter Five. I've had some really good qualitative feedback from people about this chapter, but it's also important to gauge sheer numbers. So let's look at what those numbers are saying.

19 respondents had no notes. Thank you! 

This is a bit of a drop from Avenging Angel, but as we'll see below, there are reasons for that.

The consensus opinion is that the chapter was over too quickly. This is a fair criticism. This was always going to be a danger with splitting the story in two, and as I have something of an aversion to padding the game with any sort of grind, it proved hard to create the length of gameplay that I needed. My hope was that having a big new city to explore would ameliorate this, but yeah, if you just go straight to each objective, it's not that long.

One point that was made is that other quests are mixed in with the school day, which is fun to play in itself, and this artificially spreads them out. It's a problem I'm going to have to think about for future quests that take place outside of school (including the one currently under development.)

The last chapter to take place outside school was Chapter 3. It's a similar length, so what's changed? Are expectations just higher now, or did the sandbox of being able to "play" with the slaves in the base help I wonder?

Either way, I expect this will actually change in the future, as Fivaviana continues to develop, you'll find there's more to do on arrival than just play through Chapter 5. A big chunk of time developing this expansion went into map making and those maps are now made and ready to be filled with even more stuff.

A rerun of the result we've had for this part of the poll the last few times. And that's fine. I'm not planning to make the game any darker than the fourth chapter was, as the humiliation and slavery elements are necessarily offset by the humour.

This would appear to vindicate my creative decisions at least. Obviously taking control of a new protagonist and leaving the city we've been in since the beginning is a change of pace for the game, but it was well received. It's even been suggested that sticking with Missy as she was tormented would have been enjoyable, but I fail to see how I could even have made any meaningful gameplay out of that.

This is the part I really wanted to talk about. By a large margin, players expect choices, even when the story itself is proceeding towards a predestined conclusion. It's going to require me to go back to the drawing board a bit on a quest later on in the game, since Act 2 finishes on another large multi-chapter arc, similar in scope to Reign of Jess.

This is another problem that arises from my decision not to use the more traditional combat-focused RPG elements of the software. When you think about it, some of the best RPG games out there have no choices, but the skill element stops you from noticing. Missy is more like an AVN, and lives and dies by its writing. Since I compared it with Chapter 3 earlier, it's fair to say that there were some fairly significant choices in that story.

I'm grateful to everyone who has submitted feedback on the newest quest, whether it be filling in this survey or through some of the excellent and thoughtful contributions I've read on forums. It's a reminder that Yuri game enjoyers are a more refined breed and your contributions genuinely help me to understand my audience and hopefully make my game better.

As we look ahead, I am now trying to give this story the satisfying conclusion it deserves. I wrote the scene the other day in which all is revealed, and I am absolutely fascinated to see how it's received.

One last note, the Sapphory Wiki has been updated with information from Chapter 5. These updates are:

Added Scarlett Raine
Added The Mulligan Corporation
Added Governess Kisimi
Added Cordelia Kisimi
Updated Abbie
Updated Fivaviana
Updated The Nobility 

Have a great week!

Trinian