Maids & Masters (& A Strategy Guide & v1.0.2 Release Date)

Well, if you didn't already know, I didn't quite make it. The guide is functionally done now, though, which is doubly a good thing because I'll be out of town starting tomorrow.

Which also means there won't be a post here next week. I can schedule posts for Patreon and Subscribestar so the guide and new update go up this Friday, but everything else will have to wait until I get back home. If you want the guide ASAP, that's where you want to go.

 

All that's left for the guide is some extra work on the section for Big Dick's in the appendix, the info on the extras (like the April Fool's releases) and some final checks. I should have all of the links set up that bounce you around to different sections of the guide, so it's really just making sure the formatting doesn't freak out once I export the document into a PDF and then doing the testing for the new content in v1.0.2.

Which, before you get too excited, isn't much. It's just patching in content that should've been in v1.0 or v1.0.1 but wasn't quite ready in time, like the remaining birth events for the mothers and making the last few trophies properly obtainable. I also found a few things that weren't obtainable when they should be, like being able to obtain the Freeze trophies after the story is complete and you can enter and exit the Freeze at will.

That also is very close to done, mostly just needing some testing to make sure there's a minimal number of bugs. That's still a decent amount of work to cram into a single day, but it's not unreasonable. So long as I don't run into a pile of other issues along the way, anyway. 

Here's hoping I didn't just jinx it.

 

Anyway, actual release dates:

Both Maids & Masters v1.0.2 and the official strategy guide for it will release on Friday, June 19th on my Patreon and Subscribestar.

I'll be out of town until June 26th. v1.0.2 and the guide will become available elsewhere (like itch.io) as soon as I'm home and have the time to put it up, which is likely to be the 27th.

Maids & Masters (& More Strategy Guide Appendices)

So, right up front, I want to be clear that I'm doing everything in my power to change up my strategy to something more effective to try and have the guide and v1.0.2 for Maids & Masters done by this Friday, the 12th.

However...

As I've been going through and creating Appendix A - the one that covers all of the Maids and their affection quests - I've discovered that it was taking me about 4 hours per Maid to finish everything for their part of the appendix. That means only two got done in a day, and while that's not a terrible pace, it's not nearly quick enough to have all 23 Maids done by Friday.

That also leaves me with no time to add in the rest of Appendix A and cover the mothers, where you find them, how to unlock their scenes, and what their mechanics are.

Or, y'know, fill out the other appendices. The full enemy stat blocks alone are probably going to be a day or two's worth of work unless it proves to be significantly easier than I'm expecting.

 

With me being gone for most of the back half of the month, I really don't want to have to announce any delays, so I changed up my strategy a bit. Instead of going Maid by Maid, I took a day to copy in all the visual assets from the game to make the fluff pages I wanted to make and got all of those done in one day. I then did the same thing with their Strategies & Synergies pages and got all of those done in one day.

I do have some social obligations this week still, so I certainly don't expect to get everyone's affection quests done in a single day, but I'm hoping I'll still be able to find enough time to get them all done over the course of two days (today and tomorrow), and knock out everything else on Thursday and Friday so release can happen, even if it's late in the day.

 

That's an extremely tight time frame, though, and assumes that everything will go more smoothly and much faster than I'm expecting it to, which is almost never the case with the way my life tends to go. I hope I'll prove myself wrong and everything will fall neatly into place and the guide will release without a hitch or any delays, but I do want you to be prepared for release being delayed by a week.

That does still present a problem, as I'll be out of town starting in the middle of next week, but that still gives me four more days to get everything done. Which is conveniently pretty close to how much time I'm otherwise projecting the guide will take to complete if things take as long as I'm worried they will. If there is a delay, it'll only be for one week, which isn't awful.

Hope for the best, brace for the worst. You'll find out for sure on Friday when I make the Patreon and Subscribestar posts.

I'm still pretty happy with how the guide is turning out, though. Unlike the game, which is full of cut content and things I would've liked to do differently or better but couldn't for a number of reasons, the guide is pretty much exactly what I want it to be, and I hope you're excited to get your hands on it. 

Maids & Masters (& Strategy Guide Appendices)

So yeah, if you didn't know or figure it out already, appendices is the plural form of appendix. Not appendixes. Now you learned something. Nerd.

 

Anyway, with the story portion of the guide (finally!) complete after more than 330 pages, I can get into putting together those appendices to cover all the secondary and tertiary stuff the strategy guide hasn't covered yet. Right now I'm working my way through the Maids in appendix A, which will cover a page worth of fluff to lay out at least their past before the game starts, if not their whole story (which means you can run into some spoilers if you aren't careful), a page for synergies and strategies to get into the weeds of how best to use them in combat, and a few pages to cover all of their individual affection quests.

 

Some of them are going to be a little more extensive than others, since some affection quests are as simple as "go to location, read dialogue, quest complete," while others involve exploring areas that the guide hasn't covered before that point and fighting enemies that don't exist anywhere else.

That's all going along fairly smoothly so far.  I'm not expecting it to get any more difficult as I go, but I do need to make sure I keep going at a decent pace, because this game has more than 20 Maids in it for me to cover. And that's just the Maids. Appendix A is supposed to cover the mothers, too.

And that's before we get into appendix B, C, D, or E. Then I need to decide if appendix F is going to be a thing or not.

 

I just hope I don't lose pace. I'll be out of town for a good chunk of this month, and this guide has taken me long enough to complete. I really want to get it done before I leave. I should be able to, but life has this terrible habit of kicking me in the shins just when I think I'm getting somewhere.