Maids & Masters v0.9 Public Release

Things are (finally) starting to cool off between all the holiday business and other deadlines to meet. Probably a good thing, because my head has been trying really hard to split at the seams from the way it's felt the past few days.

Anyway, development on v0.9.1 will (hopefully) hit the ground running over the weekend, that'll go out during the second or third week in January, and then I'll put as much energy as I can spare into v0.9.2 and getting the Love Shack wrapped up and creating a sort of "post game" for the "end" of the VX Ace version of Maids & Masters. After that, getting the MZ version going will be up next.

For now, v0.9 is available. You can find it on my itch page, my Patreon, or on the downloads tab above. If you want the change log, you can scroll down or click here.

One known issue to call out (which at this point has already been fixed and is ready for v0.9.1) is that the optional Maids - Quinn and Teely - have events that don't behave correctly in the second Freeze. If you've already done their events, or you haven't recruited them, or you skip their events for the second Freeze, there won't be an issue. If you do go through their events in the second Freeze, there is a bugfix feature in place that should prevent the game from locking up on you, but things might be a little buggy. 

I hope you're staying warm out there, I hope you had a Merry Christmas, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

Maids & Masters (& REM Cycle & The Holidays)

The holidays have been extremely hectic for me, so I haven't had more than an hour or two in any given day to get much in the way of work done, and what work I have been able to get done has had to go into other projects, so there isn't much to say in terms of the progress I've made.

What I can say is that Maids & Masters does already have a number of updates complete. No real new content like what I've been wanting to put together, but a number of issues have been addressed and a few bugs have been found and fixed.

REM Cycle has seen even less progress, but I'm realizing that all of the custom assets that the main project will require can't all be put off until development starts on it. As I'm not an artist, creating these assets has been a bit of a trial. I'm doing what I can to change things around so I can get this demo/prequel thing out to you and off my back burners, but it's becoming a much slower process than I'd like it to be.

Since most of my time has been spent with friends and family and/or working on other projects, that's all there really is to say this week. Next week will be the year in review to celebrate both the new year and the year we just passed. After that, we should be back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Maids & Masters (& Act 2 & 2023)

This should've been up last night, but I've been busier with family than usual this year.

Well, I'm here now. Let's lay out my current plan for Maids & Masters as we go into the next year. I'll probably talk a bit more about specific things as I get closer to getting them done, and dates might need to move around a bit, but on the whole this is more or less what things should look like.

First, going to monthly releases. I'm doing this for a number of reasons, but the big one is that it condenses all of the work I need to do to publish a release into two days (one day to review/publish everything, one day to follow up and do customer service type things) every month instead of 4-5 days every month. That means more development time, which I'm going to need. v0.9 will still be coming out after a two week time period (which is the 30th), but v0.9.1 will not - it'll be releasing to the public in February after its January paid release.

For an update on non-MnM things, REM Cycle is still on the back burner. The way I want to do things and the way things are ending up still aren't quite meshing the way I want, which has further slowed development. I'm still hoping to get it done sometime in January, because I don't want to have this half-finished demo just floating around. It may get pushed to February depending on my other teams and how much work they require of me, but it's on my mind, and I want to get it done.

The current iteration of Maids & Masters will soon become Maids & Masters: Act 1. With the interlude complete (story-wise) there's just a closing event to end the Freeze, the Love Shack, getting trophies from Big Dick's, and a few other small things here and there to do. That's a lot for one update, so it's likely the January release will be v0.9.1 and feature the end of the Freeze and a few trophies for Big Dick's. Then we'll have a February release for the Love Shack and the rest of the trophies for Big Dick's. This release will be Act 1's v1.0. I'm aiming for any other updates and bug fixes to be unnecessary, as I don't plan to have a v1.0.1. More on that below.

March's release will be a remastered version of Maids & Masters: Arrival, made in RPG Maker MZ. I'll be getting rid of all the placeholder assets, updating events to give slightly more realistic rewards, rewriting the dialogue to better fit the characters and tell a more coherent story of the prequel events, and adjusting anything else that needs adjusting to fit both the story and allow you to bring saves forward from Arrival. 

That brings us to April. It may end up needing to be delayed, but I'm going to try my damnedest to have Act 1 remastered in RPGM MZ by the end of the month. This is where v0.10 will pick up, and I'm planning on starting this process alongside development of Arrival's remaster. It's likely that v0.10 will only be Act 1 and the Interlude content, but I'm planning to have new features built in from the start (like a quest log and key rebinds) that I'll need to find and set up plugins for, as well as making sure the new native features (like text skip and mouse support) don't break anything. There are also a few parts I need to rewrite (mostly around Viridius and Griselda) so that the game properly remembers certain actions and so certain story points don't get neglected. I'd also like to include more side quests, though I don't have any planned at the moment. So there will be new content within the Act 1 portion of the game.

I'm also likely to go looking for feedback more actively once development starts on Act 2. I want to try to involve some communities and get a wider array of perspectives than I have been so far. I won't implement everything I get a suggestion for, but I have made quite a few improvements based on feedback already, and MnM is a better game for it. There are still a number of things that aren't as intuitive as I'd like, and other things that are plain under-served, and I want to dig into that more.

I hope you're looking forward to all of this as much as I am. It's a lot, which makes part of me nervous, but it's also exciting.

Maids & Masters v0.9 Release

Nearly all of the work for this update went exclusively into new content, so the changelog is pretty tiny this time around. That said, there is still about 2 hours of new content depending on your reading speed and whether or not you count all the optional/repeatable stuff, and nearly 100 new renders.

 

Sorry in advance if there are any bugs, but hopefully any bugs in here will be less egregious than some of the bugs last year's Freeze update had.

The build is currently available to Patrons, and since by some miracle of compression I'm still just below the 1GB mark, also available on itch.io.

Anyway, here's your tiny changelog:

v0.9
The second interlude story release, and the second Freeze update.
- Includes a new trophy, an updated winter version of the Estate, and 7 new scenes.
Updated Melissa’s repeatable Freeze event to be clearer about leaving with her.
Updated certain Freeze events to prevent activation while the player is on the mansion’s balcony.
Updated Katrina’s status screen ‘nickname’ for consistency.
Fixed a bug where Quinn’s Freeze dialogue with Alice may not occur correctly.
Various minor dialogue and map fixes and updates.

Maids & Masters (& A Release Date For v0.9)

I'm saying this with a pretty healthy dose of optimism, but I think I'm going to go ahead and solidify v0.9 going out to Patrons this Friday, December 16th. There's about a character and a half left to finish (one character needs their extra event and the associated renders, and another needs their main event, extra event, and associated renders), and then the main meat of the update is done. Even if the rest of the character I'm currently working on takes me an entire day to finish and the last character takes me two days to finish (which is an incredibly generous time frame), that still has be getting done with everything with Friday left to test the build. That wouldn't be ideal, but I've pushed out builds in worse condition.

Like last year, I think it'll be necessary to split this up into two chunks. v0.9 will be the majority of content, with all the character events, extra interactions, adding in everything to let you earn the new trophy, and so on. v0.9.1 will be adding in the smaller things that I don't have time to do right now - things like being able to take Maids to their rooms to have them comment on what the MC says, taking them into Cumhaill and any special interactions they might have there, add in the beginnings of the third tier of equipment, and a dinner event to end the Freeze and open the rest of the game back up. Some of these are already partially implemented, but I definitely won't have time to do everything before Friday.

I also want to try to fit in some random Estate events in v0.9.1. I doubt I'll have a lot of these, but they're still something I wanted to try to add, since the Freeze update takes place almost entirely within the Estate, and it's the best time to introduce something like that to make the Estate feel like something besides a collection of giant rooms.

As a note for the itch.io release - that is likely to be delayed a little. I haven't created a deployable build to check the final number yet, but I'm certain the game is now larger than their 1GB upload limit. Most of the game's size comes from images, I've been hovering around 900MB for a while now, and the Freeze updates add a lot of new images. If the game does end up being larger than 1GB, I'll need to contact them to increase that limit before I can upload the new build there.

Maids & Masters (& Progress on v0.9)

So, for those of you who didn't read my last post, REM Cycle is on hold until I can get v0.9 done. There are a few reasons for this (general holiday business being one of them), but the big reason is that I want to try to get v0.9 out to Patrons on the 16th. I'm not sure if I'll manage that, but I'm going to try.

 

This year's Freeze update is turning out to be a lot larger than the last one. Almost all of my development time has been spent getting just the chat options done. With each character having their own unique chat with each other character, plus another for if you don't have anyone with you, plus a few others (like the snowman, or Deirlinn, if she's in the nursery), there's something in the realm of 200 different chat options. There's also a new mechanic for the frozen pool now that it's not covered in plants that each character also has a unique reaction to. 

 

Thankfully I'm down to just one character left for dialogue. The Maids you had last year don't have any new events (just new dialogue), but I do still need 8 new events for the 8 new Maids. Of those, only one is tested, but three are complete, and one more is rendered (though not written or implemented yet). There will also be a new cosmetic trophy to unlock, same as last year - complete all the bonus objectives and you'll get a new suit. Now that the costume system is actually implemented, that'll also need an asset, rather than me being able to stop after getting all of the bonus objectives done (and I'm about halfway through those).

And that's before I get to Cumhaill. I wanted to go through Cumhaill and give all the Folk their own unique interactions based on who you had with you, but I may not have time for that, so it'll probably be more or less what it currently is, with the exception of any special events like the bonus objectives. Maybe I'll have time, but I know the first Freeze had so many new and unique mechanics that a number of things would hard lock the game, but I'd like to put more effort into playtesting this one so that isn't an issue.

Speaking of, special shout out to my playtester. They put a lot of work in for me, which I greatly appreciate. Hopefully I can get this done without the deadline being too tight for either of us.

Maids & Masters v0.8.1 Public Release

This year's Freeze update is turning out to be a big one. More on that on Tuesday, so I won't say a whole lot here.

What I will say is that development on REM Cycle will have to go on pause until after I get v0.9 done. Just like the last one, there are a few events that use unique mechanics, and I want to have time to test things without needing to delay the release, so something had to move.

Hopefully the delay won't be long and the rest of v0.9 will go quick and easy, but let's not jinx things, eh?

You can find v0.8.1 on my downloads page (or just go straight to my itch.io page), where you can now also find the demo for Love/Loss.

If you want to check the change log, you can find that here.