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 I'm even realizing how out of date some of the things I'm working with are, since I've been holding back from updating my software to keep everything stable and reliable while I work on Maids &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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