This might be kind of a boring post. Not because I don't have anything to say - if you've been here for a while you know full well I can ramble on about nothing for a good long time. No, it might be kind of boring because all I really have to say is that my follow-up to v0.15 is to play my own game like a player for the first time since the remaster.
It's something I've been meaning to do for a long time, because it gives me better context for what the player experience actually is. Sure, I playtest everything - often multiple times - but that's mostly an attempt at making the game "work right" rather than trying to figure out how fun it is. That's one of the reasons I appreciate feedback so much. If you're still having fun, I must be doing something right. If I play through a section and I don't have fun, I'm definitely doing something wrong. Having gone so long without playing my own game just for the fun of it, that's an extra check that I've been missing.
Doing a detailed playthrough like this also means I can finally re-create my checkpoint saves. Those are nice to have for a couple of reasons, with the two big ones being that I can provide saves to Patrons if they lose their data (something I typically avoid doing, but my Patrons get special treatment), and if someone reports something I'm having trouble finding on the back end I can look for it on the front end. That second thing also makes investigating certain bugs much, much easier. Sometimes you just can't understand what's happening until you experience it, and doing that part of the research has been a lot harder without having those saves ready. Of course, this does mean that the next few days are going to be dedicated to something other than development, so next week's post might be a bit boring, too.
That's not to say there's no development happening, though. While I play through, I am still hunting for bugs, typos, and keeping an open mind to anything that might need to change. So far, I've found and fixed a couple of bugs (including a rat fight engaging during a save transfer from Arrival; turns out it was triggering because you already beat it, but the self-switches are set differently between Arrival and the main game) and have started taking a closer look at progression to see what I can change to improve the overall experience without affecting existing saves too much (which so far just means that boss encounters give more XP now). On that second note, I'm a little wary of changing things like that, but even counting the XP increases to some enemies that happened in v0.15, existing saves are still only down one fifth or so of a level if they've cleared all current content. The biggest difference this change makes is that Maids are more likely to level up after clearing a boss, which adds to both the reward and incentive to getting through those challenging fights without really affecting the long term balance of the game.
Once I'm through this, it'll be on to development on v0.15.1. Probably. I have some things I need to talk over with my Patrons about how to best go forward on developing the second half of Act 2, so the next release might just be v0.16. If you want in on that conversation, it'll be open to all of my Patrons.
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