Hi everyone and thank you for joining me for today's public update.

Supporters, I'm sorry about the lack of radio contact recently. I've been flat out at IRL work where an emergency has occupied all my attention for just over a week. Not that there'd be a great lot to report. Early development of Charity Begins at School proceeds nicely, the writing is well underway as is some of the preparatory work on some new generic images. As we move ahead, you're likely to see more and more classroom conversation scenes rendered in full even when everyone is fully clothed and not doing anything sexy. It's all intended to increase the immersion and give a more VN-like feel, which hopefully it will.

I will also be shortly unveiling my plan to overhaul the school day and take a massive bite out of the repetitiveness problem. A small but significant change to the algorithm will allow the player to focus in much more on the active quest, with lesson events taking a smaller role when there's something more interesting happening. More on that once plans are finalised, but the intention is to have it rolled out in 0.11 so that Charity Begins at School can be the first quest to benefit from it.

On then to the poll results from two weeks ago. Over 100 of you were kind enough to share your thoughts on Rise of Poppy and while this game is one-and-done, the data is still useful, both for Missy and for other such games I might make in the future.

32 people, somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of respondents thought the game was perfect. While a slight drop from Jess's relationship quest, this is still very flattering and in line with what we've seen in the past. Thank you ^^

The fanbase was split nearly down the middle on whether you'd prefer me to spend my time on projects like this or focus it all on the main game. Of course, there's no way to please both camps, so my compromise will likely be to keep doing what I've been doing - mostly work on the main game, release one of these every 1-2 years.

I'm going to be completely honest with you, this one was a test of how realistic people's expectations are. And over 80% of people's expectations are indeed reasonable, which is good.

If you checked the top box because your answer is "I want these games to be bigger even if that means they take 6 months to make with no progress on the main game in the meantime," then fair enough. But otherwise, understand that I'm only one person working part time on this. Rise of Poppy was made in about 3 weeks, and is the size of a medium length quest in Missy. I worked flat out on it to have it ready before Christmas. It doesn't get any more efficient than this until I retire!

A pleasing set of results here, I'm glad to see that the new arrivals captured the imaginations of most players. Big interest in seeing Celine and Isabelle again, with respectable showings for everyone else too. The good news is that every single one of these girls has content planned for Missy, and following a snap poll on Discord in which it was also established that a majority of players also now feel either somewhat or very invested in Poppy's relationship with Isabelle, I am delighted to announce that this subplot will return in the concluding part of Poppy's story (working titled Popularpocalypse,) in which the player will have some say over how things end up between them.

 Celine meanwhile will be appearing in the next part of the strip club progression, (you may recall that this is what became of her after high school.) Has her experience at the hands of Poppy changed her? Hopefully not.

Sheryl and Charlotte are still fifth years at Saint Alancia's and while they are now more focused on their studies and have largely hung up their ribbons, you can't take the bad girl out of the girl completely, and so will torment our girl in a way that I hope you will find new and fun in an upcoming new progression arc. Erin is of course in medical school now and we will see her (and the rest of the medical students) when we return to the hospital in the future. Kaitlyn is now Poppy's girlfriend and although mostly seen in the pub or hung from a display column these days, surely still has a part to play in our story.

I wanted to round off today's check-in with a word about the upcoming changes in Discord's policy regarding NSFW servers. If you are not a member of the Saint Alancia's Discord and have no interest in being, then this won't interest you, have a great week.

I have been following developments with this carefully as a decision will need to be taken regarding what, if anything, should be done in response. If they were to push ahead with mandatory ID verification/facial recognition for all users, then the status quo would not be an option as I am not personally prepared to take this step. I've verified my ID to Patreon, Subscribestar and Itch, because these companies handle money for me and I get that money laundering laws are a thing, but I am not in the habit of showing my papers to anyone who arrogates to themselves the right to ask. No law is compelling Discord to do this.

The good news, however, is that this may never be a problem. If the platform's algo classifies me as an adult, without my having to prove it, then I can continue to administer the NSFW parts of the server. If not, then options ranging from removing the NSFW parts of the server to migrating to an alternate platform will be on the table, but I'll consult on this at the time. For now, the policy remains one of wait and see.

Until next time!

Trinian

The Rise and Rise of Poppy

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining me for this week's public post.

There's a few things to get through today, firstly, there's a small patch to fix a bug with Missy, then we'll talk about the 0.11 plans, and finally we'll round off with the outro for Rise of Poppy.

Because Best Frenemies uses the same locations as the quiz part of Lola's quest, it has created a conflict that can hard lock you while you're trying to get into Lola's panties. If you intend to play Always the Quiet Ones between now and the release of 0.11, you'll need this patch. Download it here. The instructions for how to patch the game are included, and they're very simple, but if you have problems, message me and I can help.

Following three dramatic rounds of voting, the School Council has decided that the next quest to be added to the game will be Charity Begins at School, a school side quest in which Missy and her friends will need to put on a series of charity events for slaves - dressed as slaves themselves! Flounce around school in that humiliating underwear set that Madeline had you wearing in Slave to Love - but all for a good cause!

The new quest will give us, among other things, a peek into the private world of the teachers when we venture inside the Staff Room, and for this reason, the final two teachers will be getting character models. the beautiful Miss Pupusa has already been unveiled to supporters, and Miss Argolla won't be far behind. We'll also be seeing some significant character development for Becky, Natalie and Miss Fafine - but with Jessica, Abbie, Lola and Mary plus of course the irascible Miss Paris featuring heavily, there's something for everyone in this quest!

Once again, this is happening a little later than I'd like, but I want to throw up a small poll to gauge how well Rise of Poppy went over. This story was a couple of years in the making, mostly due to a lack of development time. When I had a month left until Christmas after releasing 0.10 to supporters, I knew this was the best chance I'd get.

For this, we met some new characters and significantly developed others. Isabelle gained her character model (and I have to say it's absolutely one of my personal favourites so far,) and two new bad girls, Sheryl and Charlotte arrived. Both are still fifth years and will be back. Celine will also be finding her way into the main game, but as she's now 25, she has left Saint Alancia's. We'll be encountering her elsewhere.

A lot of thought went into how to make this truly feel like the past - making the school slightly less developed, such as through the quiet study area being unfinished and having Miss Boceta hanging around perving on girls, plus the various conversations you can listen in on, such as the two teachers discussing the imminent arrival of Miss Paris all contributed, as I hope did the "unknown middle school girl" in Fallulah Park chatting with her mother.

A snap poll on Discord revealed that a plurality of people now care about Poppy and Isabelle's relationship, so I'm happy to announce that this subplot will be resolvable in the concluding part of Poppy's story, whenever that ends up being made. Right now, of course, Isabelle isn't Poppy's biggest fan. So would you like to help her get even, or maybe even get them back together? We do of course have that whole complicating factor that in some timelines, she's currently in debt to Melanie...

I hope you enjoyed this little vacation in Poppy's stream of consciousness, and I'm sure it won't be too long before I'm inspired to give another girl her turn. There seems to some interest in playing as Jessica, or maybe Stacey. Anyway, please do take a moment to share your thoughts.

Until next time!

Trinian

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

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

As you may be aware, 0.10 and the new quest Best Frenemies, Jessica's relationship quest, is now released to supporters. You can become a supporter today and be playing the new content right now! With over 1600 new renders, 23 fully-rendered scenes and 6 months of work behind it, this is the largest and I daresay best Missy update so far.

The really good news is that this does not end Jessica's character arc by a long shot. Once she's your girlfriend, we'll be going back and seeing how that relationship develops, and with 4 different outcomes (plus a fifth in which you can reject her if you really hate her that much,) this relationship will develop along exactly the lines you want it to! Included with this update is support for Jessica being your girlfriend in school, and a mini-update's worth of new dialogue has been added to various school day events to handle this.

The Rise of Poppy

The really really good news is that after firing hard on all cylinders, I got this update out in time to turn my attention to a Christmas special, which I anticipate being with supporters before Christmas and the public just after. It's not festive themed this time around, but steps back in time two years and tells Poppy's origin story.

Currently in second year and not even a bad girl yet, you will guide this absolute nutcase as she seeks to rise to dominance. Explore the background of this beloved antagonist from her own perspective and meet a host of new characters, since with this being two years in the past, quite a lot of the characters from Missy (including Missy) will be too young to be putting in an appearance.

I'm excited to add the fourth game to the Missy Cinematic Universe™, and I hope you'll enjoy seeing how things at Saint Alancia's were two years ago when this all started!

Have a great week!

Trinian