Maids & Masters (& (Slowly) Starting on v0.23)

The first bit of development news on v0.23 is how it's going to be coming out. Over on Patreon (and Subscribestar), I held a poll asking my supporters if they wanted one big update, or complete individual quest lines, or layers of quests, and they overwhelmingly voted for complete individual quest lines.

I don't want to have updates be as small as a single quest line for each Maid, both because that would make for very small updates and because that would have me developing v0.23 for more than 20 weeks, and I fully intend to have Maids & Masters enter v1.0 before the end of the year. I admittedly also wanted to get updates out faster than I have this year and already be at v1.0, but Maids & Masters has been an entire story of things taking longer and being bigger than expected.

 

That is unfortunately where development news more or less ends. After v0.22 released, burnout hit me like a ton of bricks. I desperately want to continue development at the pace I have been, but every time I make the attempt, almost nothing gets done and I end the day feeling awful.

I have kept up with bug reports, but it's basically all I've been able to manage. I've been organizing the events for the mothers, since v0.23 should see all of them fully complete and implemented, but I'm not going to force myself through implementing anything right now. I learned this lesson a long time ago -  if I force my way through this, I'll end up burnt out for the rest of the year and v1.0 won't come until 2026, and it'll be covered in bugs and lacking polish and I'll spend months fixing it. It's significantly better to take the time to recuperate and come back to development as fresh as possible.

 

And it's not like I'm falling off the face of the planet while I recover, either. I'm still going to be posting weekly both here and on Patreon, and I've put what little energy I do have for work into learning more about and getting better with the visual fidelity of my work. Despite it not being much time in total, I've made a huge amount of progress through familiarizing myself with all these assets and options that I've never touched before. I'm even realizing how out of date some of the things I'm working with are, since I've been holding back from updating my software to keep everything stable and reliable while I work on Maids & Masters.

 

Something I'm considering is using what I've learned for bonus renders while I'm still working on Maids & Masters. This is particularly relevant because I have a bonus render poll running on Patreon/Subscribestar right now, and there's another excuse for bonus renders coming later this summer (which will almost assuredly come with its own bonus render poll). If you want to see what I'm on about (or if I've actually improved my visuals), scroll back up to the top of the post and click one of those links. That's where the renders will go first.

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Maids & Masters (& Following Up On v0.22)

I can tell I was mostly running on momentum getting v0.22 done. I feel like I've just got done taking a sled down a snowy hill, but the sled was my face, and now I'm just lying at the bottom hoping nothing runs me over before I find the energy to move again.

 

The good news is that I haven't had any bug reports for v0.22's early access or v0.21's public release yet. I have had a handful of bugs be reported, but it's mostly for older content. One I'm still investigating, and another pertained to Roich and Caitlainn, where it was possible to skip the first half of the Accord progression by getting to Adhdre (and then proceed to the Hold) without actually ever meeting Caitlainn, which could lead to the variable moving more than it's supposed to when you start gathering signatures, which would cause progression to break once you hit the point where the game thinks you're done with the Accord progression despite not actually having the Accord yet. Worse still, this could cause Ella's first affection quest to not trigger correctly, leaving you unable to complete that quest.

Adhdre has not been fixed to stop that from happening, but it continues to frustrate me that I miss these things that are pretty game-breaking and have been broken for as long as they have.

 

But despite whatever frustration with myself I might feel, I also continue to be incredibly grateful to those that send me those bug reports so that I can find and fix those issues. Maids & Masters wouldn't be what it is without you. Keep those reports coming.

 

There unfortunately isn't much news for me to share about v0.23 yet. Being as wiped out as I am, I need to take a little time to recover, but I had a wave of client work come in right as I was approaching the finish line for v0.22, so now I need to focus on getting all of that done before I can return to Maids & Masters. One client is already squared away (or at least they should be; there might be some adjustments to the script that still need to be made once the current draft has been reviewed), but I have an entire checklist for another client I need to address, and a third I have an outline for that I've been meaning to send to them for approval for about a month now. There's no hard deadlines for those second two, but I don't like leaving my clients waiting on me.

 

Though there will be a poll coming for Patrons and Subscribers over on Patreon and Subscribestar about how to go about all the character quests coming in v0.23, as well as more bonus renders on the way (which you'll get to vote for first, then they'll go up another week), and by the time you get through all that, there's going to be test builds and patch notes. If any of that sounds like something you might be interested in, go give one of those links a click.