Redemption Harem - Finally Out of the Fortress

After almost exactly a month of development, I've finally gotten past the first 15 minutes of the game and out of the fortress. That doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment, but in reality, it means that all of the core systems that aren't part of combat and exploration are done. That doesn't leave a lot of work left to do, and v0.1 is getting very close.

I'd like to say the v0.1 test build will be coming on Patreon on Subscribestar this Friday, but that feels like tempting fate. 

 

While there is very little left (basically all I have to do for the game to be playable is finish adding in the quests), as tends to be the case with a thing as complex as game development, every few steps forward leads me to a new problem that helps me empathize with Sisyphus. 

The most recent example of this is how exploration is handled. I wanted a way to visualize how much of the map you've explored, both as a means of displaying the gathered information so it's easier to reference and to incentivize you to explore areas. It gives me more ways to reward you as well as something easier to design around, as the natural gamer instinct when you're given an incomplete map is to try and fill it in.

The plugin I found to do that flat out doesn't work. The code was obscured by the person who made it, so I can't attempt to fix it myself, and the error being thrown is a code issue.

I spent today redesigning the map exploration checks to make sure I could implement another solution, but the other solution I have is very fiddly and requires me to make a ton of custom assets, and may delay v0.1's release another week or two while I figure it out unless I cut it so v0.1 can release sooner. The feature is probably still worth taking the time to implement, but I already feel like v0.1 has taken me too long to finish and I still haven't gotten to trying to implement a parry system to combat. Which, based on what I've been able to find so far, is not going to be a simple process either.

 

That's really all that's left, though. There are still a few events that need name boxes added, I need to finish adding the quest logs where they need to go, and I still need to make sure the capture system will work the way I want it to and get that fully implemented, but adding name boxes and quest log updates is a few hours of work at most, and the capture system shouldn't take more than a day. If I'm able to get parrying to work the way I want it to quickly and easily, that's just two days of work, and Friday is technically three days away. If things don't cooperate and I run into other issues it might take a week to get set anyway, but we don't need to spend more time on that.

I might be missing a few other things that will need my attention before v0.1 officially ships into early access, but that's what the testing period is for. It still feels like too much of a long shot to say that testing period will actually start this Friday, but we're very close.

Redemption Harem - Significant Progress on v0.1

Although I haven't managed to escape the first 15 minutes of the game in terms of what's ready to ship quite yet, progress is still being made, and lots of it.

Last week I mentioned one of the hangups was the professions tab not correctly listing known recipes. Since then, I ran into another hangup that prevented professions from gaining levels and experience. Fixing the second issue also fixed the first issue, so now you'll be able to view your learned recipes from the Professions tab like I originally intended.

I ran into a similar issue while troubleshooting auto-discovery for your Journal entries. While I still need to do custom entries for the People tab, I've gotten the Bestiary and Conditions tab (which hold all the information for enemies and the game's states respectively) working as intended, but with the addition of custom notes, so you get all the lore I'd otherwise not be able to include with raw enemy stats.

I also mentioned the research system, which is now complete and partially tested, and that worked exactly the way I wanted it to, which is a welcome change of pace from some of the hair loss I experienced over getting some of the other mechanics working. There's still a little building out I need to do, especially for cooking, but it's nice to have development (mostly) going smoothly again.

 

The remaining major mechanics are the things I'm not confident will go quickly, because they're reliant on plugins I've never used before and/or may require me to implement a more complicated solution.

The first is a map system. The plugin I found claims to be able to create maps that show you how much of an area you've explored, which will work as a great alternative to the way I currently provide exploration rewards. Everything except a visible map is already implemented in the demo, but visualizing it is a major quality of life change that would make finding and getting exploration rewards so much more intuitive. The trouble being that I'm not sure how easy it'll be to implement or if it'll work at all, so this may require some retooling or may not even make it into the game.

The second is parrying. If you've played Expedition 33, you're already familiar with the general idea (and if you haven't, you really should, it's a phenomenal game). In short, if you "perfect parry" you'll counter-attack, with the next step down being a perfect block, and the next step down being a partial block, ending with you taking full damage if you miss entirely. This is something that I feel the new direction requires, so if I'm not able to use a plugin to make the process easier, I'll have to explore methods on doing it the hard way, and doing it the hard way is likely to be rather time consuming.

 

That's just the big mechanics, though. There's still lots of little things that need attention, like making sure name boxes exist, balancing combat according to how the parry system works, entering all the quests and making sure those entries are fully readable since the scroll on those boxes won't work, trying to balance out the economy so you aren't able to completely break it but you also aren't constantly struggling to avoid starvation, and probably at least half a dozen other things I can't name off the top of my head.

Those smaller things will generally go pretty quickly once they're identified, though, and won't have a meaningful impact on overall gameplay even if they're enough to notice (like missing name boxes). 

Progress is coming along pretty nicely, but I'm still very much in a space where I can't say exactly how much longer development is going to take before we actually hit v0.1. Since we're at the end of the month, I'll be putting up a poll to help me understand how you want development of v0.2 onward to function. The TL;DR on that is finding out if you want monthly updates no matter what, or if you're okay with a "it's done when it's done" approach. If you have an opinion about that, head over to Patreon or Subscribestar and consider supporting me if you aren't already. That poll will be going up this Friday.

Redemption Harem - Still Developing v0.1

I was hoping to have made more progress by now, but having a clearer vision for all the mechanics I want in Redemption Harem than I did for Maids & Masters means there's a lot more to do to get the game to a playable state, and all of those things take time to implement, even if the implementation is relatively smooth.

And while the vast majority of things have gone pretty smoothly,  there have been a few hiccups.

 

The first was with the crafting system. I wanted the "recipes" tab to show you your professions info as well as your learned recipes, if that wasn't obvious by the name. Something in the plugin is apparently broken, and regardless of whether you start the game with a recipe known or you learn it later on, it doesn't appear in the tab the way it should. I haven't been able to find any documentation about getting it working, nor have I been able to troubleshoot the issue to find a fix, so I've had to remove that. You'll still be able to see the information about the professions, but you won't be able to see your learned recipes unless you're in the middle of crafting them.

Next is the auto-discovery for your Journal. I know how to do it all manually, so if I can't get it working, it's not a big deal, but I really want you to be able to learn about enemies either by encountering them or by researching them, and the auto-discovery will save me a lot of work on that front. I haven't gotten as far as working on combat yet, so I haven't been encountering enemies yet anyway, but it's supposed to work for party members as well, and so far all it's done is stay empty and erroneously claim I have 100% of entries unlocked. So I have to figure that out still.

More recently, I ran into trouble with the video player plugin. It's the same one I used for Maids & Masters, but when I first started to add the re-rendered animations, the video refused to play despite the commands being correct. This I was able to troubleshoot to get working as intended, but it still made what would otherwise be copying and pasting a few lines of script into place take an entire day to get working.

There's also the quest log, which is supposed to allow for scrolling text. It does scroll, but I'm having an issue where it will "bounce" back to the top as soon as it tries to scroll anywhere, leaving the window to think it scrolled properly when you're still looking at the same text. I can work around this if I have to and just reduce text until it all fits on screen, but the preferred option is to get it working, which means I need to learn some javascript and do a bit of coding to get it working the way it should.

And this is all for the first 15 minutes of the game.

 

That might sound like a lot of negativity, but I want to assure you that's just because it's taken up a lot of time, and development is generally going really well. The crafting system, for example, worked almost perfectly on the first try and gives me a lot of options for future implementation. The visual style took way less time to reach than I was worried it would, and editing the videos for Asgina to make her properly transparent was significantly easier than I was anticipating. You'll have to be a supporter to see the images, but since the test build is unlikely to be ready this Friday, I'll be putting up a preview for that on Patreon and Subscribestar. 

Another thing I was really apprehensive about but ended up working perfectly is the Condition system. I wanted to have each character's Condition be easy to view, especially if they're in your party, but I didn't have an easy way to display it without added a new custom menu screen. As a separate issue, using a zero-XP system means I needed to get rid of the level display in the menu, since that would be useless at best or cause confusion at worst. A happy coincidence is that I'm able to rename what "level" is called in the back end, so I simply renamed it to "condition." Now you can see your party's condition in the menu and I don't have to figure out how to rip that out of the menu. That was also an extremely easy transition to make; I was worried moving that number up and down would undo your earned stat boosts, but thanks to setting it up the way I did, that also worked perfectly on the first try. It does put a few limits on what I can do, since your condition now can't go below 1 or above 99, but I want to implement mechanics where getting below 10 or above 90 can have consequences anyway, so that all works out with relatively little friction.

There are lots of other little changes that I've been able to make, too, like updating the visuals for the text box (which is a small change, but it's something you'll be looking at for the entire game, so I'm happy it worked out), and adding name boxes (another relatively simple change, but one that's time consuming to implement). Name boxes do present another issue, as the plugin I use to let you hide the text box doesn't also hide the name box, so if I want to have that happen, I need to learn more code to get that working, which will take even more time, but my point is that development is going very well despite the amount of time it's taking to make it all happen. 

Redemption Harem - Continuing Development on v0.1

I've reached a point where I'm comfortable enough with the crafting system that I'm ready to move on to building out the other systems and getting v0.1 to a minimum viable product for a test build. Which means instead of having over one hundred things to do for a single system, I've got just 3-5 things to do for what feels like one hundred systems.

 

Obviously that's not quite accurate. I'm sure I could interpret things generously enough to say the game has at least one hundred unique systems in it, but my point is that there's still a lot left to do. The quest system gave me a bit of grief, largely because the system I was using for Maids & Masters required an extra compatibility layer that I'd prefer to avoid using for Redemption Harem. I found a few plugins that would've had more features, but they all - either in whole or in part - didn't work, and required me to do more work to achieve the same effect as the more basic plugin I'm ending up using. While the compatibility layer method would grant me access to a lot of things that would make life a little simpler, it also creates other problems, such as making a mobile build impossible, and I'd like to try and make that happen for RH since I couldn't for MnM.

 

I did eventually find a new quest log system that works and is easy enough to use, but it isn't quite as robust as the one in MnM, so I can't do things like script calls to determine what steps of the quest have been completed. That means I need to rely on other variables and switches to track that information, not only so the game knows what to do as you progress, but so I can put things in place that allow the rest of the game to change and how to change as you go. If I can figure out enough about how the plugin functions, I may be able to do script calls to determine if a quest has been completed or started or not, but that's kind of superfluous if I need to use variables and switches to track progression anyway. It's not the worst thing ever, but it does limit me in some ways unless I can find a workaround - which I think I have, but I haven't had the chance to test it yet, because the quest log is just one of the half-dozen things I needed to do in order to start testing the introduction sequence of the game.

 

Development is chugging right along, though. I'm hoping I'll get far enough in the minimum viable product to be able to start working on combat so I can talk about how progression and fighting will go for the Patreon/Subscribestar post on Friday, but that still feels pretty far off, so I might end up talking about the more general improvements that are being made relative to the demo. Which is a lot, given how old the demo is.

Redemption Harem - Starting Development on v0.1

I have to admit, it feels very good to be back on actual game development. I should really be running from rooftop to rooftop yelling about Maids & Masters being finished and an official strategy guide being available, but I've always been terrible about promotion.
(but if you could yell from your own rooftop or even just tell a friend that'd be super cool of you)

I also sadly don't have a convenient blog title meme within reach for posting about RH like I did with overusing ampersands with Maids & Masters, but oh well. Maybe something will present itself with time.

 

As for how development is actually going - pretty slow, though pretty well. The demo for RH didn't rely on any plugins to exist, so all of the systems that did exist and can be made simpler using plugins need to be transferred to plugins, the quality of life plugins (like input rebinds and the ability to hide the text box) also need to be added, and the systems I wasn't able to implement without plugins for the demo (most notably the Journal and Jobs (this game's encyclopedia and quest log)) need to be set up and added.

 

Getting all of that done will make the game much easier to play, as accessing information will be much easier and the UI for things like crafting will be vastly improved, but it also gives me opportunities to do things like require you to learn recipes for crafting, create "improved" recipes so you can possibly recover some items when you fail to craft things, and all sorts of other little things that you might not even think about while you're playing the game.

These are all good things, but it requires me to go in and set up all of it. Setting it up takes time. A lot of time. Just getting the alchemy recipes transferred has taken me all weekend, and I'm still not done with it yet, nor have I properly started on cooking, smithing, tailoring, any of the other crafting skills that are hinted at but not used in the demo, or made any decisions about turning things like farming or gathering into skills. I feel like I want to, at least for gathering, since that would give me a bit more control over how easy or difficult it is to get the items you need to craft things, which would in turn make it easier to balance the game's difficulty and economy, but my point is that all of that's still several steps down the road in this process.

 

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned anything about combat, or the day/night system, or adding new content yet, either. That's because I haven't been able to get anywhere near those systems yet. Though you can definitely rest assured I'll be blabbering about those as soon as I start working on them; I do have ideas, and hopefully what I have in mind will be fun and intuitive, because I really like the ideas. I just have to get that far first.

There's also things like redoing character designs a bit and using all my significantly improved skills to do things like replace the animations in the game with proper video, but if you want to know more (and maybe see) about that, that'll mostly be happening over on Patreon and Subscribestar.

Summer Adult Games

It's that time of year again. Sun. Sand. Girls in bikinis.

Not to mention one of the best deals in adult gaming you'll find! We've got more than 140 games from 89 developers, with more than $200 worth of games and extras available for just $25 (nearly 90% off)!

Jump on in! The water's fine! https://itch.io/b/3748/summer-adult-games

The bundle's been active for almost two weeks already, but there's still almost two weeks left to get one of the best deals in adult gaming.

The bundle has even already hit it's first stretch goal, and is approaching the second! That means even if you don't want to buy the bundle, you can still check out all the bonus renders that have been shared by participating developers, completely free! 

Maids & Masters (& A Strategy Guide & v1.0.2 Release Date)

Well, if you didn't already know, I didn't quite make it. The guide is functionally done now, though, which is doubly a good thing because I'll be out of town starting tomorrow.

Which also means there won't be a post here next week. I can schedule posts for Patreon and Subscribestar so the guide and new update go up this Friday, but everything else will have to wait until I get back home. If you want the guide ASAP, that's where you want to go.

 

All that's left for the guide is some extra work on the section for Big Dick's in the appendix, the info on the extras (like the April Fool's releases) and some final checks. I should have all of the links set up that bounce you around to different sections of the guide, so it's really just making sure the formatting doesn't freak out once I export the document into a PDF and then doing the testing for the new content in v1.0.2.

Which, before you get too excited, isn't much. It's just patching in content that should've been in v1.0 or v1.0.1 but wasn't quite ready in time, like the remaining birth events for the mothers and making the last few trophies properly obtainable. I also found a few things that weren't obtainable when they should be, like being able to obtain the Freeze trophies after the story is complete and you can enter and exit the Freeze at will.

That also is very close to done, mostly just needing some testing to make sure there's a minimal number of bugs. That's still a decent amount of work to cram into a single day, but it's not unreasonable. So long as I don't run into a pile of other issues along the way, anyway. 

Here's hoping I didn't just jinx it.

 

Anyway, actual release dates:

Both Maids & Masters v1.0.2 and the official strategy guide for it will release on Friday, June 19th on my Patreon and Subscribestar.

I'll be out of town until June 26th. v1.0.2 and the guide will become available elsewhere (like itch.io) as soon as I'm home and have the time to put it up, which is likely to be the 27th.

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.