Precious Conclusions

Precious Kouhai is now down to only needing two more animations to be finished, leaving just enough time for me to wrap it up, do some testing, and still have some time left over to do something other than work between now and Friday.

 

As much as I want to go back and add more animations to the first part of the update, I don't think I will. Once PK is done, I have a web build to try and figure out (though probably not one for PK, since I'm not sure if the file size will cooperate - it depends on where the game ends up) and obviously I have a lot of work to do on the Maids & Masters strategy guide, so crossing PK off my to-do list feels like the best way forward.

 

Even if the way PK ends is kinda bait. You'll see what I mean about that once you can get your hands on v1.0.

 

Since this post is ending up a little on the short side without saying more, I'll give you a little extra bonus.
The Valentine's Adult Games bundle has already ended, but it managed to cross the threshold for the final stretch goal in the last 24 hours it was running, so I'm running a sale on my Patreon tiers.
You can get 30% off Supporter and higher tiers with code VAG26, or (if there are any left, I'm only giving away 5) you can get your first month of Eternal Gratitude completely for free by clicking this link here.
Or, if you actually want Precious Kouhai, you can get early access on itch for just $1 by clicking here.

And as one last thing, if a bundle is what you want, there's a completely different bundle running over here. I'm not hosting it, but it is another opportunity to pick up Precious Kouhai along with a ton of other games.

 

Still a pretty short blog post, but hey, now you get free/cheap stuff out of it. 

Precious Little Left

Since I want Precious Kouhai finished by the end of the month and I've kinda been neglecting working on it to get started on the Maids & Masters guide and trying to finish writing the chapter for Divine Intervention, so now those two projects need to be set aside so I can focus on PK.

 

With the commitment made more to the release date than the amount of content, PK v1.0 is basically entirely written and only needs to be animated. I'm still dialing in how exactly I want to work on animations to find a good balance between quality and speed, but that's exactly what I started making PK for.

I could easily spend most of a day working on a single animation even using all of the time-saving techniques that I've learned, doing little tweaks and fine-tuning the movement to make things look as good as possible from as many angles as possible, but I do feel I eventually hit a wall in terms of diminishing returns. 

Granted, I don't want to just maximize speed and be sloppy, either. Especially when the animations are intended to loop, any flaws it has become more obvious with every loop that goes by. Making a loop that's less than a second long can make that problem exponentially worse, since you see that many more loops in the same amount of time spent looking at it.

 

As much as I want to believe the characters and narrative are the most important part of a story - and they arguably are, and they'll remain my top priority - it's a bit foolish of me to take the stance that people will look past the visuals in what is ultimately a visual medium. I want to at least put enough effort into the visuals of my future projects that the average person won't disregard or lose interest in whatever the project is because I've put so little effort (or it appears that I've not put very much effort) into the visuals.

 

Unfortunately I still have some obstacles that need resolving before I can get the full benefit of my updated software (the broken teeth texture continues to haunt me), but the main thing is that I'm continuing to improve, and the bulk of the improvements that came with the software updates are still being used, even if it's not to the fullest. Between that and PK being fully written, my hope is that the animating that's left to do will go relatively quickly and the rest of my February will be nice and productive.

Maids & Masters (& Starting on the Guide)

I had to deal with a nasty bout of insomnia over the weekend, so I sadly got a lot less done than I was hoping to get done, but I did get a good start on the Arrival portion of the strategy guide. I'm fairly happy with how the guide is turning out so far, but I want to reserve any judgment about how good it actually is until after someone else has had the chance to see it. I don't want the guide - a thing that's intended to walk someone who knows nothing about the game through everything from start to finish - to be another instance of "it makes sense to me but no one else." I think the level of detail will go a long way toward preventing that, but I also don't want to be going through multiple iterations of the guide after it's been published as people point out something didn't work for them after they didn't follow the instructions in the guide. Though I'm sure that will happen no matter how hard I try to avoid it.

 

The less comfy realization that I came to over the course of the work I've done so far is the amount of time this is going to take to complete. If you haven't played Arrival before, it's possible to get through it from start to finish in 15-20 minutes. On the high end, if you take your time and go through absolutely everything, it might take 45-60 minutes. Since I'm putting together a guide, I'm obviously going to be going through absolutely everything, so we can estimate that my actual play time is probably going to be pretty close to an hour. I'm right around two thirds of the way done with Arrival right now, and I've put a total of 10 hours into making the guide so far. The same level of scrutiny applied to a playthrough of the main game can put your total play time pretty close to - if not over - 100 hours.

 

To put this in terms of simple math, that means finishing the guide for the main game could take upwards of 1500 hours.

 

I desperately hope that isn't the case and I'll be able to speed up once I'm more used to putting the guide together, or something about the way I tracked my time so far is off, because I cannot spend an entire year making this thing. As much as I want the guide to contain enough to be worth the asking price, I'm also basically giving it away to anyone that supported development for Maids & Masters, and while I hope it doesn't happen, I'm kind of expecting pirates to leak it immediately and ruin any kind of potential return on the investment of my time and effort. Plus I genuinely want to get started on another game. These are just a few of the reasons I was hesitant to commit to making a guide before the poll was up and my Patrons decided for me.

 

In less gloomy news, the next chapter for DI is very nearly done. I won't talk too much about that here since it has its own Patreon page you can go visit for development news, but once that's done and ready to go into proofreading, that's a big chunk of my time (and available brain space) that'll be freed up to put into things like the strategy guide.

Valentine's Adult Games Bundle

 

It's February, and that means a new Valentine's bundle!

 

Looking for a way to spend Valentine's Day? Or maybe someone to spend it with? Whether you're looking for a fling, a lasting romance, or something in between, you're sure to find something worthwhile in this Valentine's Adult Games Bundle!

 

Get it here: https://itch.io/b/3501/valentines-adult-games