The Maids & Masters strategy guide is officially over 90 pages now, and I'm approaching the end of the first act. There's still a bit left for me to fill out with Drain The Swamp and the Haunt, but once that's wrapped up, it's just Griselda, the Freeze, and Lalita left to finish out Act 1.
I would love to say that this Friday's Patreon/Subscribestar post will be a "test build" for the guide up to Act 1, but I've had a busy weekend (which is why I'm still working on Drain The Swamp - I feel like I should've had that done days ago despite still gaining 10 pages) and I still have a fairly busy week ahead of me. My general goal has been to complete one quest per day, but while some days I get two or three done pretty easily, Drain The Swamp is a quest that covers two regions, (technically) three Estates, four Holds, two optional Maids, and not one, but two entire side quests. Which is all still before I get into the trophies in the area. It's taking a minute.
But as much as I feel like I'm not making as much progress as I'd like to be making, when I actually put some math to the amount of work that I've gotten done, it maths out halfway decent. I think the main problem that I'm perceiving is that I'm used to either working myself to death or threatening to dive head-first into burnout, mostly because I genuinely enjoy doing the work. That - for better and worse - isn't so much the case here.
Which, to be clear, I don't actively hate working on the guide. It's not nearly as much fun as working on the next game, regardless of which game that ends up being, but I find myself dancing around what I actually want to say with these guide-related blog posts and ending up being unintentionally negative more than I want to be. I know the strategy guide is something you want, and for reasons other than my income backsliding, I want to do right by you for supporting me, regardless of how you've supported me.
The guide is another way for me to do that, and I've been debating changing my development process to make a guide alongside the next game. I doubt I will, because as much as I like hiding secrets and making those secrets rewarding to find beyond the simple dopamine rush of finding something I've hidden away so you can feel extra smart (and if MnM's guide ends up making me enough money to fund development for the next game, repeating that would be really nice), I also don't want a guide to feel necessary. I've had people use the phrase "guide dang it" on me before, which is the sort of "moon logic" that's most common in old adventure games where what you're supposed to do makes zero sense until after you've looked up how to do it.
I don't think I've ever gone full moon logic for any of the puzzles or secrets I've designed; the vast majority of things that come close (or that people have complained about frequently) are just the sort of thing that only happens if you go looking for it (and unless you're looking for literally everything literally everywhere, you'll naturally miss some things) or that use the cancel mechanic (which is inherently not directly in front of you, so even though it's used constantly, unless you use it constantly, it's easy to forget it's there). I can think of more times where a puzzle was just poorly designed in the first iteration and had multiple solutions when only one solution was intended to be correct.
But that's a lot of game design philosophy talk, and there's way more to be said on that topic than I can fit in several blog posts, so I'll leave that there.
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