Maids & Masters v0.16 Release

Finally release day.

Despite having what I thought was a decent amount of time to playtest and make sure everything worked as intended, I (and a particularly helpful Patron) already found a handful of bugs in the new content just in the time it's taken to get the first few uploads done.

This is going up a lot later in the day than I'd like because of that, but releasing a build with known issues before uploads are even complete felt terrible. I don't want ya'll to have to sit through bugs or download and apply patches when the bug has already been fixed. Even if it means I have to babysit uploads for a cumulative 16 hours.

If you any more bugs (though I hope you won't), even if it's as small as a typo, please let me know so I can fix them for v0.17.

Here's your change log:

v0.16
Added the next story segment - the Ambrose Estate. Including:
- A new Estate to explore, including Ambrose City, featuring multiple unique shops.
- Some shops allow the direct purchase of equipment, other shops offer special events.
- The opportunity to recruit a third optional Maid - Iris.
- The fifth cult segment, featuring new repeatable scenes unique to the cult segment.
- Several new trophies, both for new and existing content.
Added an event to the 1st floor of the Ambrose Tower Hold to explain the door on your first visit.
Added the missing Trophy entries for partially implemented trophies.
Added Trophy 31, which can be earned in Uncle Gil’s Estate.
Added the first affection quest for June, Chloe, and Iris.
Added additional dialogue to Chloe’s love shack scene.
Added a secret boss fight related to Trophy to Lalita’s hidden attic.
Fixed a customization bug where the wrong statue could appear outside the servant quarters.
Fixed a customization bug where the wrong statue could appear outside the guest house.
Fixed a bug that caused the Location entry for the South Mountains to not be discovered.
Fixed a bug that prevented June’s love shack animation from being displayed properly.
Fixed a bug that prevented Chloe’s fireside chats from becoming available at the love shack.
Fixed a bug that caused an image to not display correctly during Chloe’s love shack scene.
Updated a handful of things in the trophy room, mostly for clarity and ease of use.
Updated the Trophy Codex to match changes to partially implemented trophies.
Updated Lalita’s hidden attic to have an indication of progress toward unlocking the secret boss.
Updated Tiny Spiders to have less health, but an increased chance of inflicting poison.
Removed the “end of content” message from v0.15.
Various other minor dialogue and event updates.

Maids & Masters (& A Release Date For v0.16)

v0.16 could've almost come out last Friday, so it should be no surprise that v0.16 is going to be coming out in early access this Friday, August 30th. I say "almost" because while the story was complete, there were a number of things (like Emily's shop) that hadn't been updated yet, and the cult segment actually requires the optional content I've been meaning to add there, because without a way to advance time, this cult segment actually doesn't have a way to continue forward to actually trigger. So now there are three new repeatable scenes specific to the cult segment, all the other little bits are done, I have a few days to try and fit in the optional content missing from v0.15.2, and there's a new trophy available for actually conducting your investigation rather than spending all your time banging someone in the storage room.

Speaking of trophies, if you like those, you're really going to like v0.16. Not only is there a trophy for Ambrose City, but there's a trophy to get from Archibald (which marks the third trophy it's possible to fully miss), the new trophy for properly investigating the cult, another trophy having to do with the cult that can be earned (or missed and gotten from Big Dick) that has been waiting for this update, and a trophy that I meant to implement way back at the start of Act 2 but didn't for a number of reasons. That's an entire five trophies to find in this update. Plus the third optional Maid, if you're into that sort of thing.

There's also more than 100 new renders for this update (nearly half of which are associated with the Ambrose City trophy) and 7 new animations, which if you're familiar with how Maids & Masters usually updates, is a lot for something that isn't a Freeze update or v0.15.2. If exploring is more your thing, there aren't any new Wilds maps, but there are nearly 40 new maps to poke around in, two sets of affection items to find, a slightly more hidden box of Silcrow, those five trophies and new Maid I mentioned, and a couple new mazes (one of which you can't solve by clicking the next open space and letting the game do the work for you, and I'll be very disappointed if no one complains about that).

And then there's the actual story. Like I've been mentioning, there are story beats here that I've been wanting to get out for quite some time, so finally getting to them feels really good. v0.16 is a lot of things that I've been eager to do for a long while, so I really hope you enjoy playing through the update as much as I enjoyed making it. 

I just hope development continues to go this smoothly, because v0.17 and v0.18 might end up taking longer than a month to develop. There'll be a poll about that on Patreon and Subscribestar about that this Friday as well. The story will also really start to move near the end of v0.18, with Act 3 starting in v0.19 (though v0.19 is likely to be the Freeze update - it's complicated). I have to try really hard not to rush or get ahead of myself on that, because I'm incredibly excited about telling the rest of this story.

If you're looking forward to it too, maybe think about checking out my Patreon or Subscribestar and giving me some support. Most of the posts only go out to those that give me financial support, but there is a free option, and I will be making that development poll about v0.17 and v0.18 available to those of you in those free follower spots as well. If you do decide to support me financially, you get access to an invite to my private Discord server, early access to all my game updates and demos before anyone else, news and behind-the-scenes info that no one else gets - and that's just at the lowest tier. There's also a bunch of limited slots available for the higher tiers so you can get the same special treatment (plus all kinds of other benefits) at nearly half the cost. Thanks for thinking about it, and if you read this whole paragraph, I appreciate you.

Maids & Masters (& More Progress On v0.16)

I haven't play tested it all yet, but I'm still more or less on schedule with progress. v0.16 isn't quite done yet, but the Archibald segment at least is down to its last two scenes. I would have that second-to-last scene written already, but I started to feel like I was jumping the shark a little bit, so I had to slow down and let myself sleep on a few story beats. That aside, I think I've done everything with Archibald, Master's origins, and giving Lalita a few opportunities to be sweet, so all that's really left is getting those last couple story beats in there, tying a bow on it, and connecting the cult segment to the end.

The optional portions of the Ambrose mansion are also done now. I may need to redo some things for puzzle difficulty balancing once I test them, but they're done. The optional Maid is also now fully recruitable, though I still need to add her to your Estate and make sure you can repeat her scenes - and hopefully you enjoy those, I tried out a different animation method to try and get more fluid whole-body movement, and while I'm not sure the overall process is faster, there are technically fewer moving parts, so it should make creating custom animations go a little faster if I keep using it and get better with it.

That means the only bit that's really left to do, aside from those last two scenes, is the cult segment and the optional content that's been missing from there. There's actually not a lot in terms of the optional content to include there, but some of it does tie into the related trophy, and it may become impossible to progress past the cult segment if I don't include it with this update, which would be kind of a problem. 

I can't say 100% of that will be done by Friday for the test build, but I hope it will be. Once all of that is done, the following week will give me some time to go back and implement at least some of the missing content from v0.15.2. Given the sheer amount of it that I had wanted to include, I doubt I'll get it all in there, but I should have time for the basics - namely, the affection quests for June and Chloe, plus Trophy 31. If I have extra time, I'll be able to get the affection quest implemented for the new optional Maid as well, but I doubt I'll be able to go much further beyond that. 

Updating the love shack content to match what the affection quests are supposed to unlock would take me at minimum two weeks to implement focusing on nothing but that. I'm honestly not sure when I'll have time to develop that, because what I want to do for v0.17 and v0.18 will end up with very large updates, and I need to focus on that if I'm going to stick to monthly updates without going back to alternating between Maids & Masters and Precious Kouhai.

But that's about all there is to say about development for now. The other thing I wanted to talk about is Subscribestar. If you're not familiar, Subscribestar is a Patreon alternative. It allows you to support me financially, giving me stable monthly income. If you don't already know because you don't follow me on Twitter or BlueSky, I'm happy to tell you I recently got my Subscribestar page approved! Starting with the test build for VIPs and the patch notes for the other paid tiers going up this Friday, everything that goes up on Patreon will be going up on Subscribestar (though I have already posted a few things for people who join now - more on that in a paragraph). 

This is important for a number of reasons, but the one that's most relevant to you is that you can give me that monthly financial support without getting Patreon involved. While I'm more than happy to continue to grow my Patreon page and I'm definitely happy to keep my Patrons around, I've seen people say they can't support me on Patreon despite wanting to because Patreon doesn't support a payment method that's available for their country. So, if Patreon isn't an option for you, I'd appreciate it if you gave my Subscribestar page a look.

And as a show of my appreciation in advance, I'm doing a bit of a launch celebration. For this week only - ending on Friday - people that subscribe to the free Follower tier get access to a Discord invite. I normally reserve invites for paid members, volunteer play testers, and other types of people I want to include in my community, so if you want to be able to chat directly with me about my work in real time but can't afford to support me financially, head to my Subscribestar page and give that Follower tier a click.

Maids & Masters (& Progress on v0.16)

Ambrose City is now completely finished (minus fixing any bugs I haven't found yet) and the trophy for the area is now implemented. That brings the city up to 21 maps total across two different districts, containing three locations dedicated to special events, ten locations dedicated to different types of gear, five that have something for your Estate (mostly customization options, but there are a couple other things to find), the two area maps connecting all the shops, and a handful of other things just for flavor.

 

Between the special event(s) that the trophy unlocks and the new sub-system that becomes available with some of the new Estate customizations, there are also just shy of 100 new renders in this update, not counting anything I render for the story itself. Hopefully you have fun finding all of those, because I had fun making them, and that's a lot more renders than is normal for me.

With that done, I can now focus on building out the Ambrose mansion and putting together the actual story. My mind has been a little more scattered than I'd like on that front, but I'm going to blame that on having so many things I want to do that I'm losing focus on what the story needs in order to move forward. There are definitely a few select beats that I want to hit no matter what, but there are a few other things - like how many negotiation segments there should be, what those should be about, how those will affect the story and where that will leave certain things going into Act 3 - that I'm not 100% settled on what I want to do with just yet.

Things are still coming along at a good pace, though. It's been really nice getting a number of things complete and being happy enough with it that I actually let myself relax for a few hours at the end of the day instead of feeling like I haven't done enough to move on and working 14-hour days. I still don't want to jinx it by promising anything at this stage, but I'm hopeful that I'll actually be able to fit in the content that was missing from v0.15.2 and not have quite so massive of a backlog of optional content and QoL additions. Especially since some of those will be necessary for the cult segments coming up.

I'm pretty happy with how the new progression of regular test builds has been going, too. If you're not familiar yet, near-weekly test builds have been going to VIPs and patch notes have been going to my other paid Patrons over on Patreon. If you want in on those test builds (or just the patch notes, along with early access to all my updates, weekly posts, an invite to my private Discord server, and whatever else I can come up with) I'd really appreciate it if you stopped by and considered giving me some support. This year has been particularly rough in a lot of ways, so a sub even that bottom tier would mean a lot.

Maids & Masters (& v0.16 & Ambrose City)

With v0.16 well underway, I'm finally starting to dig into making some of the content that's been swimming around in my head for months. While I have been ideating and iterating on exactly what to do with Archibald since the very start of the game when I first had him walk into your Estate and try to take it from you, there's a lot more than that long-overdue confrontation to this update.

There's plenty I could say about where I want the story to go, or that some of you might be disappointed by the lack of certain more violent options (no, I'm not letting you kick his door in and stab him to death), or that Lalita might finally get to show of some of the "dere" side of tsundere, what I'm gonna focus on for this post is the city side of the Estate that you've been able to see just inside the outer-most wall.

When you first enter the Estate, rather than being immediately confronted by hostile Servants or being presented with Archibald's front gate, you'll instead enter Ambrose City. While, yes, nearly everything is going to have "Ambrose" stapled to the front of it, and sure, most things are going to cost you far more than they would if I made gold a currency in the game, there are actually going to be shops in this city. Not just traders, where you give them one item and get another - actual spend-your-Silcrow shops.

Now, there are a few things to keep in mind. These shops all work more like real life shops. That means you can't walk in and sell off 70 of the 99 Potions you've been sitting on since the start of Act 2, go back to your Estate to finally pick up the other 50 that have been sitting in their box in Emily's shop, then come back and sell those, then do that with all your other items before sitting back and enjoying having broken the game economy. These are almost exclusively purchase-only shops. If you spend all your Silcrow, you can't just get it back where you spent it.

That said, I'm sure there are a lot of you out there that will be especially relieved at being able to buy a piece of equipment on demand, doubly so for the equipment that's still relevant or that you haven't gotten your hands on a Supply Contract for yet. Same goes for those of you that somehow manage to find yourselves constantly out of Potions and you haven't been able to clear the arena yet because of it. To those of you out there - you're welcome.

 

I've also included a few shops that will sell you Estate customizations (which is something I've been itching to implement for a long, long time). One set of these even comes with it's own sub-system. It's fairly simple in terms of how to use it and what you get out of it (spoiler, it's Maid renders), but the dingus that I am wanted to actually check if you had these things put down in the different places it was possible to put them down in so that when you checked the system, you wouldn't get a render randomly selected from all possible renders. Instead, a location is randomly selected (and a new one is selected if the location doesn't have the right decoration for the system until you land on a location that does have the proper decoration), then you get a random render from that location. Most locations only have a few renders, but there are 8 possible locations (including new styles for your front gate, and finally something you can put in your Master bedroom), so there's still a ton of variety.

There are also a handful of "shops" that don't just sell things. For example, there's the Ambrose Restaurant, where - once you spend probably too much Silcrow buying yourself a premium membership just so you have the privilege of being able to sit at a table and pay yet more Silcrow for the food - you can buy yourself and one (or maybe even two, you sly dog) of your Maids a fancy dinner (chosen at random, but there might be a trophy you can get that'll change that eventually). These shops are considerably less common, but I had fun making them (the restaurant in particular even has special dialogue about you trying to run out on the bill if you're broke, and it's different for each Maid), and I think it adds a bit of depth to the city so it isn't just a giant money-sink to distract you before you're able to afford Emily's Contract once you get into the desert and find her Master.

There are eight shops to explore in the main city so far (plus a non-shop you've already been in), with another ten (possibly more; it's still in development as I'm writing this) in the shopping district you gain access to after progressing a bit into the story. It'll be a bit of a squeeze, but VIP Patrons will get a test build this Friday, and regular Patrons will get details on each shop with the patch notes, so if this sounds like fun to you, maybe go give my Patreon page a look.