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, 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. Thank you for joining me for this week's public post. Spoilers ahead for the mini-update, so if you haven't played it yet, the poll below will be running all week.

The mini-update has now been in the wild for a week, and unfortunately, there were a few bugs that somehow slipped through. Apologies if you've encountered one of these, but most are now blammed, and if you haven't got the latest version, 0.8.7, you can get it from my itch.io page for free.

The bugs are generally being caused by old code. One of my ongoing projects is to bring the early quests up to scratch on the coding side, but since the only way this affects you is through fewer bugs, it's not as high priority as, say, creating new content. Nevertheless, during the next development cycle, The Bad Girl's Bitch and Down With the Bad Girls will be getting this treatment. It's my hope that this will finally stop problems from occurring with Abbie's house. 

The other big bit of news on the technical side is that I have now perfected a new compression technique which will effectively freeze the file size bloat and even shrink it over the next several updates as I retroactively apply it. It's already started in fact, as 0.8 was 3.2GB while the mini-update was just over 3.

It takes image sizes down by up to 95% with no visible loss and may even put a mobile version back on the table at some point. The really good news here is that it also massively cuts down on time spent chopping up and creating composite images for the sake of efficiency, meaning I can make more stuff more quickly. (If my life ever slows down at least...)

Anyway, on with the retrospective!

We have now met our school's terrifying, but alluring headmistress Miss Gloria Whorle. And as you saw in that assembly scene, she's not one for taking prisoners. In the coming updates, you'll get to see more of this ultra-strict disciplinarian now that she's been unleashed on an unsuspecting school cohort. She may be patrolling the halls, performing random uniform inspections on passing girls or even teaching your class! If you end up in her clutches, you'd better make sure you're on your best behaviour, and I hope you put white panties on that morning...

The changes to the school's rules will also become more apparent as time progresses. A new uniform inspection scene, updated for the new policy of inspecting inside your undies is on the horizon, as are new scenes for the prefects who can now take a look down there at will themselves. Events with tie-up outcomes, expanded use of the punishment outfit and much more is also coming down the pipes. Our poor girls will be even more traumatised!

This update also introduced Emma's new story progression. I've been enjoying reading your theories/hopes about where this is going, but I am quite confident that you won't see what I have planned coming! We've got lots more fun doing her chores planned, and we'll also be meeting her older sister Dana and natal mother Callie, as well as seeing more of her super-hot progenitor mother Jenna, whom we met in this scene.

As you may have noticed, this first event contained options for both subby and dominant players, with the player given the choice between meekly accepting the humiliation your former friend metes out or soaking her and getting her naked as well. This will be a running theme as we move ahead, and the next quest Slave to Love will come with an option for those who really aren't interested in Missy submission scenes to skip them entirely, (though choosing this does more or less skip the entire quest. I'm happy to accommodate players who don't want to see any Missy submission, but since that's most of the game, it does mean you will get a much shorter experience.) Nonetheless, from here on in, I'll be looking to make sure everyone is in some way looked after, (which is going to make for a major headache at the end of Act 2, as there will be another multi-chapter epic story,) and may even eventually go back and re-write parts of Reign of Jess to make most of the submission skippable. If I can figure out a way to make that make sense.

Anyway, instead of the usual customer satisfaction survey, I've opted to find out your thoughts on both the mini-update and these plans for the future. Enjoy, and see you all next time!

Trinian

Hi, all. I know that public posts have been a bit sparse of late, this was down to a series of things making unreasonable demands on my time, not least the rush to get Chapter Six done and out. Real life is currently still on the busy side, but I'm hoping to get a bit more regular with these as summer progresses. (Or winter, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere...)

But anyway, today I'll be doing the traditional outro on the recently-released content, and then next time, we'll focus on what's ahead. Because this is the end of a major arc, I'll also be discussing the Reign of Jess story as a whole and welcome all comments and criticism below. Needless to say that if you haven't played Chapter Six yet, you should definitely stop reading now and go and play it first, as today's piece contains a discussion of major plot twists in the chapter and the ending. Don't worry, the poll at the bottom will run for a whole week.

The Reign of Jess is a story that has been in my mind (and partly on my computer) for nearly four years. One of the first things I wanted to do after I had this insane idea to make a game with a repeating school day and an immersive story and world was have my brand spanking new villainess Jessica blackmail and dominate the heroine. It was always the case that part one would be the day at school in which Missy is punished relentlessly, then in part 2, we'd assume control of Abbie and head for Fivaviana where she'd get mixed up with Scarlett and eventually find the solution in the Oblidar pills. When the scale of what I wanted to do with Fivaviana became apparent, I split part 2 into parts 2 and 3.

I opted for an ending that puts everything back to as close to normal as possible, so that I can continue the story into Act 2 without it wildly diverging and every new update after this taking a year to make! Many of you would have preferred that Jess had won so that you could remain her slave forever, while just as many would have liked this story not to have been told at all so that you didn't have to be her slave for three chapters.

There's no squaring this circle. Not without putting in insanely diverging branching paths that would require huge amounts of time to add relatively small amounts of content anyway. It can be mitigated to a degree - some on the subby side have suggested a bad ending in which Jess wins and it's game over - this is possible, and along with some of the other scenes that I didn't have time to make, such as more fun with the bad girls, I can always go back and add them in later, while really the only option for those of you looking to play a dominant Missy would be for Chapters 4, 5 and 6 to be skipped entirely. I've floated this possibility before on forums and people have largely thought it was a bad solution.

However, while the solution I did choose - a drug that erases memories - may seem a little contrived (at least it didn't all turn out to be a dream,) it does have the shining virtue of allowing me to have told a story with high stakes and seemingly-life-changing events and then afterwards have everyone go back to school the next day none the wiser. More on this below.

It's been noted that setting up the whole thing with Jess dominating Missy then instead playing as Abbie while all that goes on elsewhere was an interesting choice for a sex game, (Abbie also acknowledges this in-game with a fourth wall break,) but bear with me here. If you'd spent the whole time with Missy... what would you actually do? What sort of gameplay would there have been for me to put in? At best, you'd have spend your time walking around Jess's house in what amounted to a scene finder that would have been quite short. This way, we still got to see all the terrible things Jess did to Missy while playing a full adventure with Abbie.

It would have been nice to have had time to add a second scene will all four bad girls, but again, there were already so many scenes in Chapter Six that time became a factor, and also once the Scarlett's base sequence started, I didn't want to pull the player away from it and break immersion. And once Abbie was back out into the big wide world in her birthday suit, there was plenty of humiliation going on on-screen anyway.

Why the reset?

This is the part I was the least sure about in terms of the reaction. As expected, some people hated it, but most seem to at least see the need for it. If I'd had this idea later in development, I could perhaps have made it the final chapters with the player getting to determine the outcome, with it ending in anything from Missy remaining Jess's toy forever to Jess being expelled and sent to an obedience school as Miss Paris described.

The fact is that I actually have something even more dramatic planned for later in the game, so it's as well that it worked out the way it did. ^^

It should be obvious why I went the way I did - the mindwipe enables me to now slide effortlessly back into the school in Act 2 with most characters thinking that little has changed. No one who knew what was happening remembers it and no one who remembers it knew what was really happening. Except Missy, if you decided to flush the pill, as about 3/4 of my supporters did!

Finally, I've left myself writing space in two ways, one of which was easy to miss: Firstly the obvious: we know that victims of Oblidar can regain their memories, as evidenced by Scarlett, and second, which you could have missed if you chose to have Emily help you get back to the ferry instead of Tina, is that two women you can overhear talking at the docks say that no one was found at the slaver base and Scarlett has disappeared. I won't bother pretending this is the last we'll see of her. She'll be back.

But wait, Trinian, couldn't you have done everything you wanted to do in this story by opening up a new area of Sapphory City instead of making a whole new town? Well... maybe, but going to another city was cool! Plus it allowed me to do things like have Abbie wander around naked without it affecting things back home. The idea to add Emily in came late on in development, but was something I was very pleased with and gave us a great ending to Chapter Five.

I know that some of you don't like making choices without having an idea where they'll lead, and this one probably brought you out in hives, but this is a choice-based game after all, and there had to be some consequences after it was over. Remember though that there are no right or wrong choices, and you should always play Missy as you see fit, then find out how badly things go for her as a result!

All we know so far is that whether or not Missy remembers what Jess did to her is likely to have an effect on Jess's upcoming relationship quest (now that we're into Act 2, this will become an option for my School Council and Noblewoman tier supporters.) Exactly how it affects your relationship with Jess remains to be seen.

Jess and Miss Paris's character development

In the Chapter Five retrospective, I discussed the impact that this story has had on the characters of Jessica and Miss Paris, a subject on which some players have offered strong opinions. What I of course couldn't say at the time was "hey, it's fine! Everyone's memory is getting wiped anyway, I've got a big old undo coming, so I can make things as extreme as I want without breaking anything permanently. Chill!"

But... yeah, what I just said. We as players have had a look into the darkest recesses of Jess's psyche, and seen what she would do with unchecked power - behave like a member of the nobility - but none of the characters know it happened. Miss Paris is back on top and has no memory of her humiliation and Jess is back to being a sulky schoolgirl brat who's biggest powerplay is making you act as a footrest for her if she wins at volleyball (though as things ramp up in Act 2 this will change...)

And of course, in Act 2, you'll be able to get into both of their panties ^^

Anyway, please take a moment to fill out the customary customer satisfaction survey, please choose as many options as you like.

Have a great week!

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