Maids & Masters (& Progress on Arrival Remastered)

Lots of big progress for such a little demo.

I'm still unsure about adding full animations to the main Maids & Masters game due to the sheer amount of work it'll entail, but since it was just one scene, I figured "why not animate the end of Arrival?"

This led me to a 14 hour journey through despair, downloads, and ultimately - victory.

And as an extra bonus, I have a whole new set of skills now.

Animation isn't something I'm particularly passionate about, but it is something that interests me, and it's one of the many subjects I've studied just for fun. This last weekend, all that studying paid off, and now instead of chopping up renders and animating the pieces, I'm exporting full blown custom animation videos. Will they make it into the main game? I've got a poll coming up on that, so if you think the answer is "yes," go support me on Patreon and vote when that poll goes live. The decision - and a significant part of my future - is in your hands.

The other big thing is all the plugins. See, RPG Maker doesn't like to play movies in parallel with literally anything, so I needed to go find a plugin to make the animation happen while the text was going. Then it took a little more work to loop those animations without the map below flashing in between each loop. Then I got to work on all of the other QoL plugins that I've wanted to put into the game since I started making Maids & Masters - a quest log, custom status screens, proper external linking, instant text, the ability to hide the text box, customizable controls, and a few extra bits - all of which now works about as well as I can ask it to.

There are still a small handful of things I need to figure out. For example, the Formation option doesn't need to exist and isn't relevant to Arrival, so it's just turned off, but I still need to figure out how to let you arrange your party in the main game with the option gone. So there's still a good deal of work to be done, but Arrival functions from start to finish. The only thing left to do is playtest the hell out of it. 

 

Launch for Arrival's remaster is still scheduled for March 10th, at which point it'll be available for early access on itch.io and to Patrons.

Maids & Masters Bonus Post - Girls With Glasses

I was doing a goof with someone helping me playtest and took the goof far enough to turn it into three renders. Nothing is going to come of these, but I figured I may as well share them with the internet.

To see the other two, be sure to check out my Twitter and my Patreon.

 

 

Maids & Masters (& Arrival Remastered)

If you follow me on Twitter, you've already seen the evidence - the process of remastering has begun.

There's a lot of pre-work I have to do - getting tilesets to not look terrible in MZ after resizing, doing the same for sprite sheets, re-rendering the existing renders, rendering any new things that might need visual representation - the list goes on for a good while.

The good news is that this gives me a good deal more assets to work with (like the native assets for the other versions of the RPG Maker engine) a whole boatload of new features that are native to the engine (like mouse support and text skip) and a whole slew of other benefits on the development side of things.

I already covered a lot of my general plan in my general February update, but just to reaffirm it here, the first step is to remaster the prequel/tech demo thing I made. That project is closer to a remake than a remaster, since there are a lot of placeholder assets and I need to rewrite basically all of the dialogue, but it's already coming along pretty smoothly. I think I'm going to set the release date for that as the second weekend in March, which my calendar tells me would be March 10th. 

 

I do still have other things to concern myself with that'll take up more than a trivial amount of time, so it's likely it'll be done before then, but I want to give myself an excess of time to test things for a couple of reasons. First, I want an extended period of time to playtest the new prequel. I want the save to properly carry over this time, I might want to go back and forth between the prequel and the main game for continuity, and the smaller scope of the prequel gives me an opportunity to test out any plugins I might want to use in the main game and make sure I fully understand them before implementing them. All of this will take time. On top of that, Arrival will be coming out as a complete product. Unless I manage to miss something absolutely game-breaking, there will be zero patches or updates to it. That means I should take the time to be thorough and really make sure I'm not missing something.

Plus, I don't want to leave ya'll hanging for a full month, or possibly longer. Sure, I could have it done this Friday, but then you'd not hear much of anything from me until April, and I don't want to leave that much dead air.

Maids & Masters v0.9.2 Release

Itch was faster than I expected them to be about raising my upload limit, so early access will be going live there right on schedule. You can find those links either on my itch page or the downloads tab above once they go live later today. Alternatively, the update is available right now to Patrons, and you can find my Patreon page (as well as all those polls to help guide development on the MZ Remaster, which will be starting very soon!) on the Support tab above or by clicking right here.

 

If you're not sure you can or want to support me financially, v0.9.1 is also going public today! You can find that in all the same places mentioned above.

Not a lot changed other than the love shack, so the changelog is pretty short, but here it is anyway. Remember that this is the last VX Ace update - unless there's something game breaking I need to fix, this is the last you'll see of the main Maids & Masters game until the MZ Remaster is ready. Up next is the demo remaster for Arrival.

v0.9.2
Reworked the Love Shack, featuring more than 300 new renders.
- Added a short introduction event to indicate when repairs can begin.
- Maids now cannot be invited until after obtaining Trophy 18.
- Playing through love shack scenes (both first time and repeats) increase Maid affection scores.
- The mothers have been updated to be more in line with the Maids’ content.
- Each character that can be invited has two types of scene; indoor scenes and outdoor scenes.
Added some hints to help locate Trophy 3.
Added dialogue to both Vendra and Deirlinn to make it clear when they’ve become pregnant.
Added an equivalent to an issue of Stay Clean Quarterly to Baleflight Manor.
Updated the repaired love shack grove’s BGM to match the Estate’s BGM.
Updated Deirlinn’s Freeze dialogue to mention more about her pregnancy, if she’s pregnant.
Updated Deirlinn’s non-Freeze instance to include similar pregnancy dialogue if she’s pregnant.
Updated Vendra to have pregnancy dialogue similar to Deirlinn’s new dialogue, if she’s pregnant.
Updated Vendra’s birth event to call back to her new pregnancy dialogue.
Fixed a bug that prevented inviting the mothers to the Love Shack after childbirth.
Fixed a bug that prevented the Freeze from working correctly in the post-game sandbox mode.
Various minor dialogue, map, and event fixes and updates.

Maids & Masters (& A Release Date For v0.9.2)

It's not quite done yet, but all of the renders and associated framework for the love shack is done, and a good portion of the testing has been done. By a quick and dirty count, there's around 300 new renders just for this little side bit of content, and probably far too much work being put into it, but I'm happy with the way it's turned out. Some of the interior scenes have actual mechanics to them, so replaying them is more than just reading through a slight variation on the original scene, and the exterior scenes all feel nice and cozy. I never thought a one-off suggestion would lead me to where I am with this content now, but here we are anyway.

There are a few other things I want to do for the update, just to give the VX Ace version of the game some final polish before my attention fully shifts to the MZ remaster. There shouldn't be any game breaking bugs, especially since the new content is very simple from a code/scripting standpoint, and the VX Ace version of the game won't get any more updates after this.

Hopefully wrapping this up will also free up some brain space for other necessary business, like taxes, before I dig into remastering the prequel demo, Arrival. After doing 300 renders in about two weeks, I could use a day off.

The good news is that what's left for me to work on is pretty small in scale, so the update will be ready to go out to supporters this Friday. v0.9.1 will go public regardless, but early access for v0.9.2 may not go up on itch right away due to the size of the game and needing special approval for an increased data limit, but that should just be a delay, pending on how long that process is. Just a reminder though - all Patreon tiers get early access to the latest update, and on top of that, we're up to four polls to help guide development on the MZ remaster coming in April. If you don't want to wait for itch, take a look at the Patreon page.

And last but not least, happy Valentine's day. Here's a dumb idea for a card that popped into my head and refused to leave.

A More Generalized Update For Your February 2023

There's still not a lot to say about v0.9.2, so instead of just saying "I got more done," I figure now is a good time to put together a general update on what's going on inside the Hourglass.

First, since it's probably what you're here for, Maids & Masters. Render batches have gotten smaller as scenes have gotten more complicated, but the exterior scenes are basically done. There's still some writing to do (mostly for Deirlinn and Vendra), but the majority of the work that's left has to do with the interior scenes. There are 8 more scenes to render for interior scenes, two of which are at least partially posed, and two of which are for Deirlinn and Vendra. And just for the sake of setting expectations - since Deirlinn and Vendra don't have affection scores, they'll have less content than the Maids do. Their scenes won't evolve and they're likely to have fewer conversations due to their smaller role in the overall story. They'll still have content at the love shack, but it's closer to an extra scene or two instead of three or more scenes that evolve over time and potentially have unique mechanics like the Maids' content.

Next, I want to talk about REM Cycle. The love shack content being as much work as it is has kept me busier than I'd like to be, and while I have freed up some time, I really want to be ahead of things when it finally comes time to start working on the MnM MZ Remaster. As much as it pains me to say it, I'm plain and simple not able to find the time to work on REM Cycle alongside MnM for the time being. Once the remaster is out in the world, that will hopefully change and I'll be able to cross this off of my backlog of work, but for the time being, I think I need to accept that the delay is going to be indefinite.

Related to freeing up some time, I've made the choice to separate myself from The Legend of the Goblins: A New Tribe and the team at MaD_Rabbit_Works. There are a myriad of reasons for it, and while I've seen a small amount of retaliation sent my way as a result of my choice to leave, I'm going to choose to be the bigger person and stop at saying that it was time for me to move on.

Thankfully, the team at Night Icons has been much more enjoyable to work with. This is something I've wanted to talk about for a while now, but my role has been fairly small, which made me want to wait until after my work was a part of the published product. I was originally brought on as a part of the writing team for Lust Element to write the side content. Shortly after joining the team, I was asked to consult on the main story, and while the final result still comes from the original writer, my role within the team has been growing. Lust Element is a sci-fi adult visual novel that takes inspiration from all sorts of science fiction media, from The Expanse, to Mass Effect, to Star Wars and Star Trek, and more. If you're interested in checking it out, v0.3.1d of the visual novel is available on the team's Patreon page.

Lastly, just to wrap things up, Maids & Masters' MZ Remaster poll #3 is live on my Patreon page, and discussion is already under way on things that can be added, expanded on, and improved upon. So far the polls have been about adding different types of content, creating events within the Estate, and which of the Maids needs more screen time. If you'd like to join the conversation, cast some votes, or just see what we're talking about, I'd really appreciate it if you considered heading over to Patreon and supporting me. Poll #4 will go up this Friday, and will hopefully help me address something I never stop seeing criticized in RPGM games - the maps.

Maids & Masters (& Progress on v0.9.2)

The love shack is turning out to be just as much work as I thought it would be. Even completing dozens of renders every day, I'm currently still a little less than half way through the bare minimum. It probably isn't going to feel like a ton of content once the release actually goes out, but it's taking up quite a bit of time to get done.

I do enjoy the way the content plays out, though. Most of my time has been spent creating renders and writing for the exterior events, and having that opportunity to sit down with these characters and talk to them outside of the context of the story has been fun to write. If you ever run into the sort of feeling where you want to keep playing the game, but your brain just can't process what you're supposed to be doing, these love shack fireside scenes are probably exactly what you're looking for.

The down side to focusing on such a small vertical slice of the game is that I don't have much to say about the work I'm getting done. Of the 300-400 renders the love shack is likely to have, I've completed about 160. It's likely it'll take me another week or two to get everything done, give or take a few days for testing. Hopefully I'll have a better idea of where exactly the release will land for next week's post.

Just to call it out really quickly - the second poll for the MZ remaster is now up on my Patreon page, and the third poll will go up on Friday. If you want to be involved in the remaster process, I'd really appreciate it if you visited the page and considered supporting me.