Maids & Masters v0.7 Public Release

The latest Maids & Masters release, v0.7, is now available to the public. 

I have, true to my word, been taking most of the past week to decompress and relax. The work that I have gotten done has been on the demo for Love/Loss, the first of a handful of demos I'm looking at releasing over the coming months. The only things I have left to do for the demo are creating the remaining renders and implementing them into the game, so it should be ready in another week or two at the rate I'm going. Once that's done, it's on to work on v0.7.1.

 

If you're interested in Love/Loss, either scroll down or click here to read about it. As a reminder, the demo will be available exclusively to my Patrons, so if it's something you're interested in playing, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you just want the download links, they're over on the downloads page.

If it's the changelog you're after, you can find it a few posts down, and/or by clicking here.

Upcoming Demo: Love/Loss's Setting and Main Character

Since it's fairly close to done and the first thing besides MnM I'll be releasing, let's talk about Love/Loss.

Love/Loss is an urban fantasy romance story about finding hope in the wake of tragedy. The setting isn't too dissimilar from what you'd expect from typical urban fantasy, with a magic system (as well as a number of plot points) inspired by an anime called Loveless.

I won't get too deep into the magic system here since there's a book in-game for the curious to read, but the general idea is that people are able to draw magical power from interpersonal relationships. For the average person, this might make you stronger, smarter, or tougher. For some people, you might be able to light a campfire without tools or charge your phone without plugging it in. If you're lucky, you might be able to fight fires, handle power lines, or otherwise save lives with your bare hands. The truly extraordinary, literally one in a million, are geniuses, war heroes, and modern day wizards, capable of truly miraculous feats.

This is referred to in-setting as a Pairing. Pairings describe in general terms the sort of relationship you draw your power from. Rather than "romantic relationships" or "platonic relationships," examples of these Pairings are Single Paired (where you gain magic from a single, mutual, monogamous relationship), Open Paired (where you gain magic from fleeting, momentary relationships), and True Paired (only gaining magic from nurturing a relationship with your soulmate). These relationships are generally romantic, but can be platonic, familial, or purely sexual; it varies from person to person. There are six types of Pairings in total, along with hybrid Pairings and a handful of unrecognized theoretical Pairings.

 

The main character is a woman who, along with her fiancee, left everything behind to try to build something for themselves in a new city, away from the judgement and stigma of their homes. She is True Paired, her relationship with her one true love allowing her to manifest the elements of fire, ice, and lightning in fantastically destructive ways. 

The story begins several months following a car accident that took the main character's fiancee from her, with a chance encounter revealing one impossible truth after the next, calling into question everything she thought she knew about herself.

If you're not interested in the lesbian relationship, the demo does include an option to play as a male main character, and if I do carry this forward into the main game, there will be alternate renders and scenes to accommodate this option. But that's a full release that's rather far off into the future. For now, look forward to this demo becoming available exclusively to my Patrons sometime in August.

Maids & Masters v0.7 Release

It's release day!

Insomnia got me good today, so hopefully my sleep deprived brain didn't miss anything important, but I'm totally out of things I can think to do and I've got no more notes left, so there shouldn't be anything game-breaking. If there is, I'm sure someone will let me know.

I tried my best to get some post-game stuff in here, so there should still be stuff to do after the "end of version" dev outro. As a hint for that - do Big Dick's before you finish Lalita, then go back to Big Dick's. Especially if you missed the Ratslayer trophy. This is something I've been looking forward to implementing, and that's an area dedicated to allowing you to obtain otherwise missable trophies, but it's more than that. If you've already got the trophy in question, you can do the event anyway, which will improve your reputation (a variable that'll be important in Act 2), but the event will play out totally differently. I spent way longer than I probably should've getting this bit working right, but I love the way it turned out. It should be worth a laugh or two, if nothing else.

So... Yeah. That's Act 1 basically done. There's some interlude stuff to do - I talk about it in the dev outro in-game - but as excited as I am to keep plugging away at Maids & Masters, complete my first solo project, and get it into your hands... I'm just as excited to stop making myself work 70 hour weeks just to get paid in packing peanuts. I love my supporters, I really do - yes, all 4 of you - but if the insomnia wasn't evidence enough, I work way too damn hard.

But enough about that. You'll hear plenty about my plans for this "down time" in the coming weeks. For now, I'm going to get you your changelog, get these uploads finished, get the download links to my Patrons, and sleep.

v0.7
Next story release
- Includes 5 new areas to explore, consisting of more than 40 new maps, more than 100 new renders, 2 new trophies, and introducing 7 new Maids - including 2 new party members.
Added an extra check to ensure the truce is active in situations where it may have been missed.
Added more pick-up sound effects to collectible objects that didn’t already have them.
Added fast travel to Ventire that unlocks after obtaining the relevant trophy.
Added puzzle reset checks to the Amaira Hold to prevent potential bugs in other areas.
Added an alternate end to the Ventire water side quest to allow completion after Trophy 10.
Added Puzzle Reset to Homing Stone teleports to prevent possible bugs.
Added a missing screen tint when using Bianca to teleport during the Amaira Estate section.
Fixed a bug that would cause the Amaira fog to remain even if disabled during negotiations.
Fixed a bugged encounter that could cause a “divide by 0” error leading to a game crash.
Fixed a bug that would send the player to the wrong instance of the Love Shack’s yard.
Fixed a bug that displayed Quinn’s name when inviting Teely to the Love Shack.
Fixed a bug that prevented one of the Griselda Anal repeat renders to not erase correctly.
Fixed a bug that allowed the Mother’s Blessing trophy to be collected multiple times.
Fixed a bug that would cause a freeze while recruiting Teely if revisiting her while missing items.
Updated render positions of Griselda’s Anal scene so the repeat version matches the original.
Updated Rat Swams/Extermination to have roughly 10% less attack and HP, and lower evade.
Updated the text presented when the Homing Stone is available but cannot be used to teleport.
Updated the affection check-in room to accommodate the new characters.
Updated the Love Shack invite room to accommodate the new characters.
Updated the priestess in Augalamh to provide more specific directions to Hachtlamh.
Updated the README walkthrough to also provide more specific directions to Hachtlamh.
Various minor dialogue, item description, map, and event updates.

Maids & Masters (& v0.7's Home Stretch)

We are officially in the final testing and bug-fixing phase of the update. I'm very glad I chose to take my time getting here, because woah buddy is some of this complicated.

There's a bit of conversation that I don't expect people will want to select, but the choice is there, so it needs to work properly. It does function, but there's a loooooooot of context you end up missing out on, so that needed to be reworked more than I anticipated.

I'm also taking advantage of some new mechanics that I'm planning on making heavier use of in Act 2, so I need to make sure it works correctly now. Everything works as it should in the first fight, but they're set up slightly differently in the second fight, which of course means absolutely everything broke and I need to figure out what went wrong and potentially completely rework the fight.

 

Not to mention the other new systems and mechanics that are present in the new characters. Most of that has been tested and fixed and tested again to the point where it shouldn't be an issue anymore, but I'm still new to a lot of this, so it's been a lot of work to get it all functioning the way I want it to function. Plus all the one-off stuff that I used previously and wanted to bring back for this update so you're getting a little bit of the whole rest of the game in this one update. Hopefully that'll help make this feel like a culmination of events instead of just "the next step."

Getting all of that working should take me roughly two days, though, which still leaves a few days to comb through to find and fix any other bugs I haven't run into yet. Hopefully the end product is less buggy than some of my other initial releases, because as I've mentioned elsewhere, bugfix updates are going to be monthly until next year while I give myself some time to rest. I'll make an exception for any bugs that end up being totally game-breaking, but that shouldn't be necessary with all this extra testing.

I'll see ya'll this weekend for the changelog!

Maids & Masters (& A v0.7 Release Date)

The larger piece of optional content: Done. The smaller optional content: Done. The story for v0.7: Two scenes remaining. After that second scene is done, it's just the wrap-up bits of the update that will set up the down time coming in-game. But I'm going to set the release date for the weekend following this one. So expect July 22nd to be the day the update goes out to my Patrons.

If I rushed things, I might be able to get v0.7 done in a week or even for this weekend, but it would be just that - rushed. The optional content for this update could use a little more polish. It all works the way it's supposed to, but it'll definitely benefit from the extra attention. Then there's the playtesting. I really don't want this release to get to people and be a buggy mess. That'll probably happen anyway, but I want to at least try.

In other news, the render count has officially passed 100. In fact, it passed 130. More than 20% of the game's total renders will be present in v0.7 alone, and there's still more to come in the v0.7.x updates. Once I get to the Love Shack content, that will likely be well over another hundred renders.

As a bit of an extra teaser, the most recently finished bit of content is the end of the new Hold. This map is, to put it bluntly, weird. It's like nothing else in the game, there's a good chance I won't use anything like it in the future, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Maids & Masters (& v0.7 & Some Positivity For Once)

I've been pretty open - maybe even a little too open - about how rough things have been lately. That's not going to change, because this is my blog and I'm going to do what I like with it, but I do recognize that I've been more negative than I really want to be.

So I think it's time for some friggin positivity.

First, v0.7. The main story is about... 85-90% done. I originally wasn't entirely sure where I wanted to take this portion of the story; I only really knew how I wanted it to end. It took me a bit of meandering and redesigning, but I'm happy with where the story has ended up. I'm trying to incorporate a little bit of everything so it feels like you're using everything you've learned before now with the stakes set higher and more clearly than they have been in the past. I don't know how well that feeling will come through for people who aren't me, but I'm pretty satisfied with how things have been turning out.

I've also tried to make a point of including more renders. If you're the sort of person that wants more visual novel than game, several sections in this part of the story feel more like a visual novel than an RPG. There are a lot of renders in v0.7. For comparison, the first update of the game originally included 36 renders. I haven't even started on the repeatable scene renders for most characters, and I'm already up to 79 renders. I fully expect this update to have well over 100 by the time it's done, which would mean roughly 15% of the game's total renders come from this update alone.

If you're more into the RPG parts, there's still a new segment of the wilds with a Hold that will open during the v0.7.x updates, a new dungeon within the Deep Wilds that leads to one of the previously unused landmarks, new types of puzzles that I haven't included in the game before now, new enemy types, new mid-boss style encounters that use new combat mechanics, two new combat characters to join your party that also use those new combat mechanics, and more that I'm probably not remembering off the top of my head.

I'm still not close enough to done that I'm comfortable setting a release date, but based on my current progress, my previous estimate was more or less accurate. It's certainly been a journey getting here, but I'm excited to get this into your hands. This update will have a bit more "clean-up" to do than v0.6 did, so I won't just hit the finale and call it an update, and there's still some work to do with the side-content, but if I can keep this pace I should have a release date next week.