Maids & Masters (& Strategy Guide & A Weekend Away)

If you didn't see the post on Patreon or Subscribestar, I was away over the weekend, and am settling back in today. That means, as you can probably guess, that there wasn't any progress on Maids & Masters' Strategy Guide over the weekend. That also means I'm pretty solidly behind schedule, and I'm not sure I'll be able to complete Act 2 by the end of the month for a new "test build" for VIPs at the end of the month (which would actually be May 1st, because that's when the closest Friday is).

 

To try and make up for that (and for the probably pretty boring preview that the Table of Contents page made for) I'll be doing a back to back page preview, with this Friday's post being about the Freeze tasks.

I've been trying to avoid that, as there are only so many "types" of pages I can post as previews before I'm just picking pages at random to show off, but I'm always trying to make sure I'm doing right by the people supporting me (and hopefully encouraging more of you to support me), so I'm hoping this makes up for any disappointment while I gather up the energy to try and have Act 2 of the guide finished in two weeks.

 

That's not an impossible goal, even if it does mean I'll likely end up in crunch mode again. While there are the cult segments in between and all the side content that gets unlocked as you go, most of Act 2 takes place inside of 6 major quests - getting into the mountains, the four Estates you can complete in any order, and Archibald's segment - and that first one is already mostly done. Even if each of those that are left take me two days each due to the extra complexity, May 1st is exactly 10 days away. That means no days off or really crunching down on a few days (or more realistically, both), but it's not impossible to do.

Though it's more likely I'll just take an extra week instead of killing myself trying to get all that work done as fast as humanly possible. 

 

Act 3 is comparatively short, so even with the extra week, it's entirely possible the guide will still be finished at the end of May, which is roughly in line with the longer end of how long I wanted to spend on this thing. If I actually pull it off, I'll be happy. Though it does seem likely I'll end up pushing into June (no pun intended) since I also have all the appendices to put together after the story is done.

But regardless of whether it takes until the end of June or not, that's still miles better than the original estimate I had of this guide taking a year to put together. I'm itching to get to whatever game you want me to make next, and putting that off for a whole year would drive me up a wall. 

Maids & Masters (& Strategy Guide Act 2 Begins)

I'm officially into act 2 of Maids & Masters with the strategy guide, having just finished the second Haunt over the weekend and started the second Freeze yesterday. I'll be out of town over the weekend, so I'm hoping to have the second Freeze finished before I leave and have a new page preview scheduled to go up on Patreon and Subscribestar before I'm gone.

It's actually kinda serendipitous that things lined up the way they did, as the thing that'll have me be out of town for a weekend was pushed back multiple times, and this particular weekend was pretty much always going to be really busy for me. Now I have an excuse to relax a bit and get away from work entirely (even if it makes things more hectic and increases travel time) rather than kinda feeling guilty about taking so much time away from work.

 

It's been a few weeks since the last time I posted anything about the guide here (and hopefully the Maids & Re-Masters 2 post for April Fool's Day didn't throw anyone too bad), so I suppose I can put up some stats.

The guide has nearly doubled in size from the 90 pages I mentioned last time, being up to 175 at the time of writing this (it'll likely have actually doubled by the end of the day). There were a bunch of formatting issues with the first preview (which was just Arrival), and all of those have been hammered out for the second preview (which includes the whole of Act 1). Something I'm not sure how to feel about is the way the file size gets compressed when it goes from my online storage to the final PDF, as it's now over 300 MB for the editable document I'm working from, but it's barely over 40 MB once it's downloaded. That's great for drive space and makes life way easier on phone people, but it was around 40 MB as a PDF back when it was 200 MB as an editable doc, which makes the compression feel weird to me.

 

I'm pretty happy with it on the whole so far, though. As much as working on it feels like trying to wade through knee-deep molasses (and if this guide doesn't sell well, there's no way I'm doing any for future projects), it is kinda nice getting to go back through and be reminded of all the bits and pieces that came together to make the final product, then use the commentary cut-outs to actually be able to talk about those things. Most of it is the sort of thing that I might say here, but a lot of it is "this was inspired by this" or "this was going to be this but changed" type of stuff that doesn't have a lot of depth to it, so it never actually made it into a blog post.

Though I might have to change that going forward. For as much as I already know and appreciate about game design philosophy, there's a pretty big gap between knowing a thing and having the practical experience to fully comprehend a thing, and there are lots of things I haven't really talked about in terms of puzzle and map design that probably won't make it into the guide, either. The changes that were made to Odette's puzzle in the Deep Wilds Tower Hold is a good example of that; with the way the guide is put together, there wasn't really room to put both a picture of the solution and a commentary box without creating a new (mostly blank) page, so there wasn't any room to mention that the buttons were added later in development as a way to make the puzzle easier because so many people were struggling with solving it despite being able to go back and forth between the puzzle and the painting that tells you the solution.

I might have to turn that into a poll for Patreon/Substar posts on off-weeks. 

Bundle of our Bunnies

Easter might be behind us, but that's no reason to not enjoy yourself a bunny-girl.

 

You can get up to 12 games for around 70% off - there's tiers involved, so you can pick how much of the bundle you want - or just grab some free stuff. 

There's even stretch goals, so tell your friends. After all, who doesn't like BooBs?

Get the bundle here: https://itch.io/b/3624/boobs-bundle-of-our-bunnies-easter-bundle 

Maids & Masters 2

Pre-order now.