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.