Maids & Masters (& More Strategy Guide Appendices)

So, right up front, I want to be clear that I'm doing everything in my power to change up my strategy to something more effective to try and have the guide and v1.0.2 for Maids & Masters done by this Friday, the 12th.

However...

As I've been going through and creating Appendix A - the one that covers all of the Maids and their affection quests - I've discovered that it was taking me about 4 hours per Maid to finish everything for their part of the appendix. That means only two got done in a day, and while that's not a terrible pace, it's not nearly quick enough to have all 23 Maids done by Friday.

That also leaves me with no time to add in the rest of Appendix A and cover the mothers, where you find them, how to unlock their scenes, and what their mechanics are.

Or, y'know, fill out the other appendices. The full enemy stat blocks alone are probably going to be a day or two's worth of work unless it proves to be significantly easier than I'm expecting.

 

With me being gone for most of the back half of the month, I really don't want to have to announce any delays, so I changed up my strategy a bit. Instead of going Maid by Maid, I took a day to copy in all the visual assets from the game to make the fluff pages I wanted to make and got all of those done in one day. I then did the same thing with their Strategies & Synergies pages and got all of those done in one day.

I do have some social obligations this week still, so I certainly don't expect to get everyone's affection quests done in a single day, but I'm hoping I'll still be able to find enough time to get them all done over the course of two days (today and tomorrow), and knock out everything else on Thursday and Friday so release can happen, even if it's late in the day.

 

That's an extremely tight time frame, though, and assumes that everything will go more smoothly and much faster than I'm expecting it to, which is almost never the case with the way my life tends to go. I hope I'll prove myself wrong and everything will fall neatly into place and the guide will release without a hitch or any delays, but I do want you to be prepared for release being delayed by a week.

That does still present a problem, as I'll be out of town starting in the middle of next week, but that still gives me four more days to get everything done. Which is conveniently pretty close to how much time I'm otherwise projecting the guide will take to complete if things take as long as I'm worried they will. If there is a delay, it'll only be for one week, which isn't awful.

Hope for the best, brace for the worst. You'll find out for sure on Friday when I make the Patreon and Subscribestar posts.

I'm still pretty happy with how the guide is turning out, though. Unlike the game, which is full of cut content and things I would've liked to do differently or better but couldn't for a number of reasons, the guide is pretty much exactly what I want it to be, and I hope you're excited to get your hands on it. 

Maids & Masters (& Strategy Guide Appendices)

So yeah, if you didn't know or figure it out already, appendices is the plural form of appendix. Not appendixes. Now you learned something. Nerd.

 

Anyway, with the story portion of the guide (finally!) complete after more than 330 pages, I can get into putting together those appendices to cover all the secondary and tertiary stuff the strategy guide hasn't covered yet. Right now I'm working my way through the Maids in appendix A, which will cover a page worth of fluff to lay out at least their past before the game starts, if not their whole story (which means you can run into some spoilers if you aren't careful), a page for synergies and strategies to get into the weeds of how best to use them in combat, and a few pages to cover all of their individual affection quests.

 

Some of them are going to be a little more extensive than others, since some affection quests are as simple as "go to location, read dialogue, quest complete," while others involve exploring areas that the guide hasn't covered before that point and fighting enemies that don't exist anywhere else.

That's all going along fairly smoothly so far.  I'm not expecting it to get any more difficult as I go, but I do need to make sure I keep going at a decent pace, because this game has more than 20 Maids in it for me to cover. And that's just the Maids. Appendix A is supposed to cover the mothers, too.

And that's before we get into appendix B, C, D, or E. Then I need to decide if appendix F is going to be a thing or not.

 

I just hope I don't lose pace. I'll be out of town for a good chunk of this month, and this guide has taken me long enough to complete. I really want to get it done before I leave. I should be able to, but life has this terrible habit of kicking me in the shins just when I think I'm getting somewhere. 

Maids & Masters (& Strategy Guide Act 3 Progress)

I'm a little bit past the mid-point of Act 3 right now; probably about a third to halfway through the castle. You can get some specific details and stats over on Patreon and/or Subscribestar (for free!).

The current hurdle is the library stacks puzzle that gets you into the secret library. Since so much needs to move, it's all events in the editor, which makes the screenshot for the guide look like a mess. Putting more numbers and blocks and lines on there to try and create a visual reference without making it look even messier isn't easy, and that's before getting into making the instructions for the solution legible but concise.

I continue to hope and pray ya'll appreciate this guide, cuz getting all this done is work.

 

There's really not much left after this puzzle is done, though, which is nice. Some basic instructions for where to go to get the rest of the way to the courtyard and what you can find along the way is the castle's mid-point, with the castle catacombs and the second half of the castle ending with the final boss fight being all that's left after that.

It's another busy week this week (I'm not even sure how much time I'll have to get work done tonight), so it'll be close getting the story portion of the guide finished for Friday, but I'm confident I can make it happen.

 

Then it's on to filling in all the appendices, which (like is mentioned on Patreon and Subscribestar) is likely to take me another three weeks. I might be able to smash it down into two if I'm lucky, but my post schedule means it'll likely take three weeks to get it posted anyway.

Which is for the best, because that'll help stop me from working myself half to death and burning out and not having the energy to start development on my next project. The appendices aren't just fun info segments (though that is part of it, certainly), it's also where each Maid will get a page dedicated to combat strategies and the intricacies of how their abilities function, all their affection quests, where to find all the mothers and how their various mechanics work, everything you need to know about all the trophies, and so on.

 

Speaking of my next project, one more Patreon and Subscribestar plug - both places have a chance for you to vote on my next project, even if you aren't a paying Patron/Subscriber. It is effectively just a tie-breaker poll, but like I mentioned recently - I still want to know your opinion. If I'm lucky enough to get to make yet another project after this next one, it gives me a more solid direction to go in and a better idea of what you want to see out of me.

Maids & Masters (& The Strategy Guide & Computer Troubles)

It seems like I can't get through a project without some form of computer trouble no matter what I do to try and minimize both the odds of it happening and the impact it has when it does happen.

For some context, one of my friends gave me a RAM upgrade to try and make my life a little easier. Which was great and I appreciate him doing that, none of this is his fault and I'm glad to have the upgrade.

However, swapping out my RAM led to some sort of hardware conflict. It didn't affect my work at all at first, programs would just crash every so often for reasons I had a very hard time trying to diagnose. I updated drivers, I installed security updates, I rolled updates back and reinstalled them, I updated more drivers, I ran hardware and software scans that turned up no issues, I read through tech help threads with similar issues that found solutions that didn't fix the issue for me, and somewhere along the line, all my attempts to fix the problem made the problem worse.

What that boils down to in terms of progress is that I spent a lot more time trying to find a solution for my programs crashing on me than I did actually working on the guide.

 

As frustrating as all that was, though, the issue does now seem to be fixed (at least to the extent that trying to create situations that caused crashes before doesn't cause any crashes now), and I've managed to still make enough progress on the guide that I don't feel like I've fallen horrendously behind. Really, the biggest downside of the whole ordeal is that I had less time to relax and reset before I had to make myself be productive the next day, which means I'm yet again flirting with burnout.

But hey, now I have twice as much RAM as I used to, so I get better performance out of things when I do let myself relax.

There's also not a lot of game left to make a guide for. As far as the main story goes, it's just the shrines in the northlands and the castle itself.

 

Granted, that doesn't count all the appendix stuff that still needs doing, which is likely to take a couple weeks to fill in, but one thing at a time. We'll get there.

Maids & Masters (& Starting Act 3 of the Strategy Guide)

I didn't get as much done over the weekend as I'd have liked, but a healthy chunk of the war has been finished. The main thing I need to do right now is actually play through it to double check myself, then I can finish the war and get started on the wastes, which is another segment I've seen a number of people struggle with. Though I think that's mostly because you can't actively see the doors you need to walk through when you're outside the towers on one Estate.

 

The war itself is also a segment I've seen a number of people struggle with, but understandably so. If you don't like the combat system and neglect investing in Emily's (and later Master Emmerich's) Contracts, both your level and your gear ends up lacking. There isn't a ton you can do about that in the moment, especially if you're trying to get all the trophies, so hopefully the guide will help with that. Even if it means following the whole guide or reading way ahead and spoiling yourself on how Act 3 starts.

 

I'm still not totally sure exactly how long finishing the guide will take me, though. I can make a few good guesses - hopefully I'll have the war done tomorrow, complete the wastes over Thursday/Friday, spend the next week on the northlands and one more week on the castle itself, meaning the story will be done by the end of the month pretty comfortably - but once the story is done, I've got all the appendix information to enter in. The Uncommon language primer is gonna be fairly easy; I already have my own document for that exact purpose, I'll just need to add some commentary and edit it a bit so it's easier to read for someone who isn't me.

I have no idea what the other appendices are gonna take to make, though. I know what I want to do with them, but for example, I don't know if completing an entry for one Maid is going to take me an hour, or two, or a whole day. Spending a whole day on one entry is unlikely, but I haven't exactly made a strategy guide before, so I only have so much to go on when I make these estimates.

 

Mostly, I just continue to be grateful this isn't proving to be the massive slog I was worried it'd be, even through most of writing out the guide for Act 1. I try to avoid talking about my income because I feel like I'm either begging or trying to guilt-trip money out of people, but it's not easy to keep going when I'm watching my income backslide almost every month. Combine that with making a strategy guide feeling significantly less fulfilling than making a game is, and I don't think it's much of a stretch to understand how ready I am to get started on the next project. 

Speaking of, the public poll for my next project is currently up on Patreon and Subscribestar. The vote is very heavily skewed in one direction right now, but if you have an opinion about what my next project should be, now is the best time to let me know what that opinion is. 

Maids & Masters (& Finishing Act 2 of the Strategy Guide)

Well, it's a good thing I gave myself the time I did. I haven't run into any issues, but the weekend had me much busier than I expected to be, so even acknowledging that I'm taking things a little slower than I otherwise would've, Act 2 of the strategy guide still isn't quite done.

It's close, though. I should have the third Haunt done either today or tomorrow, get the third Freeze done on Thursday, and then I actually have Friday just to address any formatting issues that have sprung up in the 100+ new pages that have been added. Which is a good sight better than thinking it's ready to go then realizing the page count is off and some pages are blank for some reason and spending an extra few panicked hours trying to get that fixed so I could actually post the dang thing like I did with the "test build" for act 1.

 

In other news, if you aren't already paying attention to my Patreon and/or Subscribestar, now is a great time to start. The public poll for my next project is up, and while the winner does already seem pretty clear, it's going to be running for at least two more weeks. If you have an opinion about what I should make next, get over there and give it to me.

 

That's pretty much all there is to say for now. I'll save new guide stats for Friday when I put up the next "test build." In the mean time, I'll be busy being grateful that I'm only roughly a week behind schedule on my initial projections for how long the guide would take to make and that I was very wrong about a later guess that expected me to take a year or longer to make it. I'm still chomping at the bit to get to work on my next game, and gears are already turning thinking through mechanics and how I want the game to play. 

Maids & Masters (& Strategy Guide Act 2 Midpoint)

I said I'd save the stats for the strategy guide today over on Patreon and Subscribestar, so let's jump right into those.

The strategy guide is now up to 226 pages at the mid-point of Act 2. It's just shy of 375MB in storage (which compresses down to about 50MB on disk), and my playthrough that's accompanying the guide is just about ready to tip over into 100 hours of playtime. 

 

What I find most impressive (or, probably more accurately, most relieving) is that I'm already past the midpoint of act 2. Approximately, anyway. It's kinda hard to say exactly where the midpoint of act 2 is, as you could count it being completing the Introducing... task, or meeting Evdokia before Archibald, or starting Archibald's segment, or actually getting north of The Gate at the end of Archibald's segment.

Point being, progress on the strategy guide is going much more quickly than I expected, which is a huge load off my shoulders.

 

I'm still not totally sure if I can commit to getting a "test build" of the guide out this Friday with act 2 complete, as much as I'd like to and as quickly as I'm approaching that point. If I can keep up this pace, the rest of act 2 should only take me 3 or 4 more days, and Friday is exactly 3 days away. Sure, I could just commit to the crunch and make it happen, especially since things are going as quickly as they are, but that doesn't leave me a lot of time to fix any formatting errors or look for and fill in anything I might have missed (which does happen from time to time, and it's a giant pain to keep everything I already wrote when adding what I missed without adding extra mostly-blank pages and/or creating a bunch of formatting errors).

 

I don't really like the "play it by ear, we'll see what happens" strategy when it comes to updates (even if it's just a strategy guide), but it'll be such a close call if I try to force act 2 of the guide to be done that I think it'll be better for my health if I don't try to force it. At the same time, progress has been going significantly faster than I expected, so it might happen on accident, and I'm not going to arbitrarily delay sharing it for another week if I manage to get it done. So, we'll play it by ear and see what happens. 

Maids & Masters (& Strategy Guide & A Weekend Away)

If you didn't see the post on Patreon or Subscribestar, I was away over the weekend, and am settling back in today. That means, as you can probably guess, that there wasn't any progress on Maids & Masters' Strategy Guide over the weekend. That also means I'm pretty solidly behind schedule, and I'm not sure I'll be able to complete Act 2 by the end of the month for a new "test build" for VIPs at the end of the month (which would actually be May 1st, because that's when the closest Friday is).

 

To try and make up for that (and for the probably pretty boring preview that the Table of Contents page made for) I'll be doing a back to back page preview, with this Friday's post being about the Freeze tasks.

I've been trying to avoid that, as there are only so many "types" of pages I can post as previews before I'm just picking pages at random to show off, but I'm always trying to make sure I'm doing right by the people supporting me (and hopefully encouraging more of you to support me), so I'm hoping this makes up for any disappointment while I gather up the energy to try and have Act 2 of the guide finished in two weeks.

 

That's not an impossible goal, even if it does mean I'll likely end up in crunch mode again. While there are the cult segments in between and all the side content that gets unlocked as you go, most of Act 2 takes place inside of 6 major quests - getting into the mountains, the four Estates you can complete in any order, and Archibald's segment - and that first one is already mostly done. Even if each of those that are left take me two days each due to the extra complexity, May 1st is exactly 10 days away. That means no days off or really crunching down on a few days (or more realistically, both), but it's not impossible to do.

Though it's more likely I'll just take an extra week instead of killing myself trying to get all that work done as fast as humanly possible. 

 

Act 3 is comparatively short, so even with the extra week, it's entirely possible the guide will still be finished at the end of May, which is roughly in line with the longer end of how long I wanted to spend on this thing. If I actually pull it off, I'll be happy. Though it does seem likely I'll end up pushing into June (no pun intended) since I also have all the appendices to put together after the story is done.

But regardless of whether it takes until the end of June or not, that's still miles better than the original estimate I had of this guide taking a year to put together. I'm itching to get to whatever game you want me to make next, and putting that off for a whole year would drive me up a wall. 

Maids & Masters (& Strategy Guide Act 2 Begins)

I'm officially into act 2 of Maids & Masters with the strategy guide, having just finished the second Haunt over the weekend and started the second Freeze yesterday. I'll be out of town over the weekend, so I'm hoping to have the second Freeze finished before I leave and have a new page preview scheduled to go up on Patreon and Subscribestar before I'm gone.

It's actually kinda serendipitous that things lined up the way they did, as the thing that'll have me be out of town for a weekend was pushed back multiple times, and this particular weekend was pretty much always going to be really busy for me. Now I have an excuse to relax a bit and get away from work entirely (even if it makes things more hectic and increases travel time) rather than kinda feeling guilty about taking so much time away from work.

 

It's been a few weeks since the last time I posted anything about the guide here (and hopefully the Maids & Re-Masters 2 post for April Fool's Day didn't throw anyone too bad), so I suppose I can put up some stats.

The guide has nearly doubled in size from the 90 pages I mentioned last time, being up to 175 at the time of writing this (it'll likely have actually doubled by the end of the day). There were a bunch of formatting issues with the first preview (which was just Arrival), and all of those have been hammered out for the second preview (which includes the whole of Act 1). Something I'm not sure how to feel about is the way the file size gets compressed when it goes from my online storage to the final PDF, as it's now over 300 MB for the editable document I'm working from, but it's barely over 40 MB once it's downloaded. That's great for drive space and makes life way easier on phone people, but it was around 40 MB as a PDF back when it was 200 MB as an editable doc, which makes the compression feel weird to me.

 

I'm pretty happy with it on the whole so far, though. As much as working on it feels like trying to wade through knee-deep molasses (and if this guide doesn't sell well, there's no way I'm doing any for future projects), it is kinda nice getting to go back through and be reminded of all the bits and pieces that came together to make the final product, then use the commentary cut-outs to actually be able to talk about those things. Most of it is the sort of thing that I might say here, but a lot of it is "this was inspired by this" or "this was going to be this but changed" type of stuff that doesn't have a lot of depth to it, so it never actually made it into a blog post.

Though I might have to change that going forward. For as much as I already know and appreciate about game design philosophy, there's a pretty big gap between knowing a thing and having the practical experience to fully comprehend a thing, and there are lots of things I haven't really talked about in terms of puzzle and map design that probably won't make it into the guide, either. The changes that were made to Odette's puzzle in the Deep Wilds Tower Hold is a good example of that; with the way the guide is put together, there wasn't really room to put both a picture of the solution and a commentary box without creating a new (mostly blank) page, so there wasn't any room to mention that the buttons were added later in development as a way to make the puzzle easier because so many people were struggling with solving it despite being able to go back and forth between the puzzle and the painting that tells you the solution.

I might have to turn that into a poll for Patreon/Substar posts on off-weeks. 

Bundle of our Bunnies

Easter might be behind us, but that's no reason to not enjoy yourself a bunny-girl.

 

You can get up to 12 games for around 70% off - there's tiers involved, so you can pick how much of the bundle you want - or just grab some free stuff. 

There's even stretch goals, so tell your friends. After all, who doesn't like BooBs?

Get the bundle here: https://itch.io/b/3624/boobs-bundle-of-our-bunnies-easter-bundle 

Maids & Masters 2

Pre-order now.