Maids & Masters (& Progress on v0.7 & Jinxing it Anyway)

After trying to avoid jinxing myself and making things fall through, the development I was most looking forward to of those that I had alluded to last week has fallen through. It's more than a little disappointing, but that's kind of the way life has gone for me recently. 

The good news is that v0.7 is coming along. It's been a bit more of a grind than I'd like it to be, but progress itself has been good. The intro is completely done, and the story is somewhere between a third and half done. Of the two bits of optional content for the update, the smaller of the two is complete, and the larger of the two is a little over half done. 

Speaking of things I sort of mentioned last week, I want to talk about working on demos for other solo projects. Believe me, I absolutely love what I do, and I very much want to finish Maids & Masters before moving entirely onto a new project; however... It really has become something of a grind recently. It's been nearly a year (...holy shit, it's been nearly a year...) since I started working on Maids & Masters, and have worked on basically nothing but Maids & Masters. I am a part of other teams working on other projects, but my day-to-day work generally goes into MnM.

Yesterday, as I had other plans made for the day and didn't want to get dug into typical work, I decided to start playing around with a demo concept, and I got more lost in working on that than I have working on anything else for months. This demo went from what was a single map and a handful of placeholder assets to nearly three quarters of the way done, which I think reaffirms something I said in an earlier post; I need to take a break from MnM. 

 

This break will come in the form of demos for other ideas I have. These demos will be made available exclusively to my Patrons. Once MnM is done, I'll hold a supporter-only vote to see which of these demos becomes the next project I work on.

But that's for the future. v0.7 is still my next release. I will still do bugfix and post-game releases for v0.7 to complete things like the new side content and the love shack, but expect these releases to come closer to monthly rather than bi-weekly. Once v0.7 is out, the next major update - v0.8 - won't be until the Halloween update in October. After that, the next update will be the second Freeze update - v0.9 - in December. Work on MnM Act 2 will start in 2023, after I've had the chance to make some of these demos and let myself relax some of these creative muscles.

Maids & Masters (& Returning to v0.7)

It feels good to get back into the swing of things.

All the new art assets for v0.7 are done, not counting all the renders for the new character scenes. This is always the biggest hurdle for me when I start work on a new major update. I don't hate it, but I'm a writer, not an artist. Doing the art stuff almost always leads to more frustration and burnout than any other part of the job.

Past that, I'm hoping to get the rest of the introduction done tonight. Then I have some attention to give to the optional Estate for the update - where you'll be able to earn trophies you might have missed elsewhere in the game. There are a lot of sub-systems I'm still trying to figure out for this section, so it likely will only provide a second chance at Ratslayer when v0.7 first releases, but more will be added as I make v0.7.x updates.

Then it's just, y'know, the rest of the update.

At risk of incurring the curse of delays that come with projecting release dates, I'm hoping this will take me 3-4 weeks to get done, so something like a mid-July release. The reason I'm saying this now is that I'm hoping to have some pretty exciting new developments when it comes to the work I do here. I don't want to jinx a second thing, so I won't talk about those developments until after they're well and truly underway, but hopefully some of the posts coming in the next 3-4 weeks will be about something besides Maids & Masters.

Maids & Masters (& A Lack of Progress on v0.7)

As much as I hate to say it, this is going up a day late and I don't have much else to say about the project. Real life drama has slowed development to a crawl, largely because it's left me without the mental energy to be able to work. I'm doing my best to move past it and get back to work as normal, but it hasn't been easy.

I do have a good idea of where I want the story to go for v0.7, and nearly all of the art assets are done (aside from the new characters' scenes), so once I pick up some momentum, things will hopefully go relatively quickly.

I truly despise letting my work fall behind like this. I greatly appreciate the support I get from all of you, even if it's just reading this, or looking at my Patreon page, or posting feedback on F95. I see you, and I thank you. If you're looking forward to the rest of this story, know that I'm just as excited to tell it.

However, I think I need to switch into some different creative gears. I've run into a plateau in terms of building financial support, which has made upgrading my software more difficult than I'd have liked. This recent drama has been the closest to a day off that I've taken in nearly a year. A year's worth of work weeks where working 40 hours that week was taking it slow. I love the work that I do, but working as hard as I have for as little as I'm getting is not easy, and these past weeks have forced me to confront that.

Maids & Masters is still a priority for me. I intend to release v0.7 and follow it up with any necessary bugfix releases, as well as some post-game stuff that I've been looking forward to putting in the game for a long time. It will likely be the next thing I release, excluding any work I need to do on TLotG. That said, I have so, so many other ideas banging around in my head, and if things work out the way I want, I should have a few months between v0.7 releasing and the releases I have planned for v0.8 and v0.9. 

All that to say that MnM isn't going on hold, and I'm not taking a hiatus. What I'm probably going to do is switch my focus to demos for other project ideas. These demos will only be available to my Patrons, and will serve as the minimum viable product to let you see what these projects are intended to be. Once development on MnM has concluded, I'll hold a poll on which demo should be turned into my next project.

If I can find the motivation to get back to work on MnM, the first of those demos will likely be out sometime in August, with a second potentially coming out in September or October. If I manage a second, I might have a third for November or December. Those aren't hard dates, just general projections, but I'm sitting on a lot of different ideas. It all comes down to how well I'm able to execute on them.

But one thing at a time. First, I need to get back to getting v0.7 into your hands.

Maids & Masters v0.6.4 Public Release

Development on v0.7 has begun, but most of what needs doing right now is the art assets. Maps are mostly done, and about half of the introductory bit is done, but past that there's not a whole lot to say. The last week has mostly been sprite sheets and face sets. 

 

Anyway, it's been a week, so the latest build is now open to the public.

It's in the previous post, but for the sake of completeness, here's a link to the changelog.

Download links are updated on the Downloads page. I've still got some real life things to deal with, so F95 will get the new version once I get around to it; probably in a day or two.