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.