Maids & Masters (& Progress on v0.6.2)

Oh, shit, it's Wednesday. I was supposed to write this yesterday. Whoops.

If that isn't enough of an indication, v0.6.2 is keeping me busy. I decided to rework the uncle's Estate first, because I have non-rework things to get done still and I expect reworking Lothario's Estate to take more care and attention. It took me the majority of the last 5 days to get done, but it is now (mostly) done. I still want to go through it all and spruce things up so it feels more content-dense, but the maps themselves are now done. 

As for what's changed, the maps are 30-60% smaller, and one map has been removed entirely. Some of them still have the same issues as their previous iterations, such as the Servant's floor - there are over 40 rooms, and only about half a dozen of them have unique events, and only about another half dozen have something worth finding in them. I'm still at a bit of a loss for how exactly I can fill them out (or at least make them unique enough that the curious don't feel like they're just wasting their time), but I've got a couple ideas that might at least help a little. I'll probably go back and forth between that and my next point. One last thing before that

Onto Teely. Teely is a Folk girl living in Adhauga who looks up to Maids and fantasizes about one day being one, but sees herself as far too clumsy for a Master to ever consider her. She's is the second (though for new players, the first you can encounter) optional Maid. Once recruited, she'll serve as a door Maid - she'll stand immediately next to the entrance of your mansion, and offer to escort you to different places as they open up. This means if you want to go home to sleep, rather than walking all the way up to the bedrooms on the second floor, resting, then walking all the way back down, you'll be able to just chat with her. I'm also working on a way for you to be able to toggle whether or not she greets you when you walk inside (and depending on affection levels, you may be able to change how she greets you, if you catch my drift). This is all in development, so I can't say for certain all of this will make it into an actual release, but I'm hopeful.

As usual, I've also got a number of smaller changes to implement. If I've got the time, I'll be adding in the repair quest for the love shack in the hidden grove, which - once completed - will be the first real feature to utilize affection levels. Most of the planned content related to affection levels was never intended to be implemented before act 2, but as development has continued, affection levels are turning out to be higher than I thought they'd be. This would be fine if they were used, but currently the only thing they affect is the dialogue you get when you ask Melissa for a check-in, and one of Emily's scenes in her shop. There's also a QoL improvement that should make picking up large amounts of items on the ground feel smoother/quicker, and a couple of visual improvements through custom sprites I'd like to make, but the visual improvements are very much on the back burner compared to Teely and the QoL stuff.

Phew. Anyway. Public release for v0.6.1 is Friday!

Maids & Masters v0.6.1 Release

v0.6.1 is now available to Patrons. If you're interested in getting early access, please consider supporting me. 

 

All of the "known issues" listed in the previous changelog should now be addressed. I'm pretty sure this is a new record for longest changelog, so I'm gonna keep this nice and short and lay that thing out. 

v0.6.1

Added more Maids to Griselda’s Estate. Most can progress the quest for trophy 15.

Added transfers to gargoyles so the secret paths work both ways (active after completing story).

Added multiple new events to Griselda’s Estate.

Added a new book to the library in Viridius’ Estate.

Added functionality to the hidden Love Shack (interact with the chest if it’s already open).

- Partial implementation; more will be coming for this feature in future builds.

Added a non-Haunt swamps maps with new events and updated existing maps to allow access.

Added Maids outside your guest house on Griselda’s Estate to allow repeating certain scenes.

Added the Hold next to the Augalamh pond that requires the Damp Writ of Holdings.

Added combat encounters and a hidden item to the wilds outside Griselda’s Estate.

Added a short quest to Quinn to rebuild empty bookshelves in your Estate library.

Added partial functionality for Trophy 9 (more coming in future releases).

Added the Ventire trophy quest to Quest Tracking.

Added a check if the Ventire move quest was completed to update the BGM in their new home.

Removed a missed “end of version” message for v0.4.

Removed the FAQ from the README and added it to the dev blog.

Fixed a bug that prevented the Homing Stone teleport from being used after completing the story.

- Existing saves will remain bugged until the “end of version” message is replayed.

Fixed a bug where a trader in Ventire would have the wrong dialogue box.

Fixed a bug at the entrance to Viridius’ Estate.

Fixed a bug that allowed the player to enter the wilds outside Griselda’s Estate before intended.

Fixed a bug that prevented one of Quinn’s scenes from being repeated.

Fixed bugs that prevented some “scrap” items from correctly disappearing after collection.

Fixed a bug that incorrectly disabled the Homing Stone’s teleportation without re-enabling it.

Fixed a bug that prevented gathering the scrap wood in Ventire fireplaces after the move quest.

Fixed a bug where the Homing Stone on-use event duplicated itself in some circumstances.

Fixed a bug that may have prevented interacting with the Headstone at the Beauregard Estate.

Updated Quest Tracking to properly track the new quests.

Updated Quest Tracking to provide better guidance for Augalamh side quests (for real this time).

Updated the Silcrow payout in Emily’s shop to account for being enthralled.

Updated Bianca in your Estate’s yard so she disappears correctly after story completion.

Updated the mysterious tower in the Deep Wilds to be less (more?) mysterious.

Updated the path to the cloth trader near Cumhaill so he’s easier to reach after appearing.

Updated the wilds leading to Griselda to be smaller.

Updated v0.6 finale so trophy 16 can be earned after event starts even if conditions are not met.

Updated destructible headstones to prevent events from incorrectly duplicating.

Updated the dungeon instance of Bianca to allow repeating certain scenes.

Updated a girl in Adhauga to tease the upcoming community-created optional Maid, Teely.

Updated the FAQ to address the self-extracting archive .exe.

Updated several encounters in the swamps to account for the Haunt being inactive.

Updated elements of Augalamh sidequests for clarity and to account for the Haunt being inactive.

Updated the Nithercott Hold to be more consistent with other story elements.

Updated the surveillance chair so it is interactive outside of its story relevance.

Updated position and movement behavior of some enemies to reduce risk of divide by 0 errors.

Updated interaction points for Trophy 14 for story consistency and obtainability after v0.6 ends.

Updated interaction points for Trophy 15 for story consistency and obtainability after v0.6 ends.

Updated Rescue quest so it can be completed after the story for v0.6 ends.

Updated quest progression in Ventire so it can be properly tracked in Quest Tracking.

Updated equipment tiers in Emily’s shop to be more flavorful.

Updated the Maids at the player Estate to align them better with story progress.

Various item description updates, and minor event, map, and dialogue updates.

Maids & Masters (& A v0.6.1 Release Date)

The release will be going out to Patrons this Friday. I'd like to say Teely will be ready, but there are a few things I want to make sure are totally done and work as intended before I get to her, and Teely also needs all-new assets which I have yet to get started on, so she might not be ready until v0.6.2.

I've been experimenting with some things that I haven't used in MnM so far, and those things should let me go back through some previous sections and make them at least a little less tedious - most notably eliminating some required player input from manually repairing the floors after Ella joins the Estate. 

Most of the other things that I'm giving attention to are considerably smaller in scale, but are equally important in terms of consistency and overall quality of life, particularly as it applies to the part of the game immediately following the end of v0.6's story.

There is one other thing, though - seasons. I did manage to save myself some work by using switches, events, and scripting, but the swamps aren't always supposed to be a purple mess of poison. As of v0.6.1, they won't be. That's only supposed to be there during the Haunt, and now that the Haunt has passed, the swamps needed a load of new maps, along with a load of new switches, conditional branches, new events, adjustments, and on and on and on. Most of that is now in place, but needs a little more thorough testing, because if I miss even one thing in a list of literally hundreds, it could break the game and trap you in the Haunt. I've put other checks and balances in place to un-break the game if that happens, but I don't want to rely on that; the game should never break in the first place.

So tl;dr, if Teely isn't ready for v0.6.1, it's because I needed to playtest roughly 15% of the game several times over to make sure I didn't miss something or do something wrong.

I've gotten significantly fewer bug reports on this release, though, so I'm taking that as a sign that I'm getting better at this "game development" thing. Here's hoping I can keep that up.

Maids & Masters v0.6 Public Release

Just a quick post to say that v0.6 is now available to the public. Links have been updated on the Downloads page.

For those interested, the changelog is here.

As a small update, the issues listed in the known issues section of the changelog have been addressed and fixes will be implemented in the v0.6.1 release. If you encounter any bugs, please refer to that section of the changelog for v0.6 before leaving feedback.

Maids & Masters (& Following Up On v0.6)

As some of you may have noticed, there's that new "known issues" segment of the changelog for v0.6. As of today, all but one of those items have been addressed, along with a number of smaller items, some of which came from the feedback I got in the time leading into v0.6's release.

v0.6 itself will still go out to the public on Friday as planned, and v0.6.1 will likely be hot on it's heels. I do still want to give it a week to let bug reports and the like come in so any bugs I might've missed are addressed as quickly as possible, which means it'll likely be two weeks between releases, but I've got some plans for the v0.6.x updates.

v0.6.1 is going to be the typical "bug fix" update. Anything I hear about being broken or otherwise not working as intended will get fixed, that release will go to my Patrons likely the Friday after this weekend, and public the Friday after that.

v0.6.2 is going to be a reworked Estate, either your uncle's Estate or Lothario's. Both are considerably larger than they really need to be, and it's taken me some time to decide how exactly I want to handle shrinking them down to a size that better fits what you're actually doing there. Now that I've got my thoughts and some notes organized about how to handle things, I can actually go about reducing the size of those maps and bringing them up to snuff in terms of side events and loot to poke around and find.

v0.6.3 is going to be the other Estate rework, covering whichever Estate doesn't get done in v0.6.2. The release cadence shouldn't suffer since I'll be able to collect feedback and implement fixes as they come in, and the extra time between releases going to Patrons before going to the public should give me plenty of time to playtest everything and make sure reworking all this game doesn't result in things getting broken.

v0.6.4 may not be necessary, but given the amount of content I'm looking to either rework or add (because I still haven't talked about things like the game's second optional Maid, or the v0.6 post-story things that should exist, like the Hold near the pond, or having updated dialogue so you don't feel like you're traveling back in time if you deviate from what the story is telling you to do), there are likely going to be enough bugs or little fixes or other updates to do that I'm not going to rule it out now.

And by the time that's done, hopefully I'll have a better idea of how to handle v0.7, because v0.7 is supposed to be the end of the first act of this story, but as it stands it's shaping up to be smaller than v0.6 with fewer lasting consequences. I'm working on changing that, though.

I should probably stop there. Any more would be spoilers~

Maids & Masters v0.6 Release

Happy April Fool's Day, everybody. I hope you enjoyed Maids & Masters Abridged, because it cracks me up. If you hate it and you're mad about it: sorry not sorry. It's meant to be a joke (and I make plenty of fun of myself), but if you can't accept that, I recommend some deep breathing exercises.

If you're wondering about v0.6, it did actually release yesterday. It went out exclusively to my Patrons, as my releases do now, and it will go public next Friday. If you're interested in getting your hands on the build now, please consider supporting me. If you're waiting to support me because you want to see the game in a newer engine like MnM Abridged is, I made a post about that. TL;DR - if I get a copy of MZ, I'll port the game to that, but even working on three projects I barely make enough to cover my personal expenses, never mind do crazy things like buy my own food, contribute to my household bills, or pay the taxes I will inevitably owe on my self-employed income. If you really want to see that happen, again, please consider supporting me. Or support TLotG, if that's your thing. That won't translate as directly into helping me meet my goals, but it's still financial support, and I'll thank you for whatever I get.

Anyway, I owe ya'll a changelog. So here's that for v0.6.

v0.6
Next story release
Includes 2 new large areas to explore (consisting of nearly 40 new maps), 10 new scenes, 3 new trophies, and a new party member specialized in offensive Theurgy
Added a tracking condition to an NPC on Viridius’ Estate.
Fixed a bug where Phoebe’s dialogue wouldn’t trigger after completing the Cumhaill funeral.
Fixed a pixel being out of place with Phoebe’s sprite.
Fixed a bug where Trophy 13 wouldn’t appear correctly in the trophy room.
Updated war table/Homing Stone Quest Tracking for Augalamh to provide clearer direction.
Updated some item names and descriptions.
Updated the garden maze to make the end of the maze more apparent.
Updated a conversation regarding the hunter on the north road.
Updated Bianca’s sprite so her headband appears less jagged.
Various other minor dialogue and event updates.

Known Issues - These will be addressed in v0.6.1
Quest tracking is incomplete; guidance is attached directly to chatting with party Maids
This update utilizes a switch that can cause bugs with Viridius; his Estate may close off
There is currently only one NPC that can be utilized to progress a trophy quest
Some buildings are largely empty except for a few hidden items
Certain secret passages do not unlock as they should after you learn of them
You cannot re-enter the swamps (during the story, speak with Bianca next to your Headstone)
Some scenes do not currently have a means of repeating them

Maids And Masters (And Release!)

After some long and hard consideration, I've decided to drop the VX Ace version of Maids and Masters and move the game to RPG Maker MV. This means most of the script-based features in the old Maids and Masters are now part of the core engine of M&M, massively reducing the chance of bugs, along with other features like text skip and mouse support. I can also now take all the feedback I've been getting and implement it from the very beginning, no fussing with existing scripting and potentially breaking the game to add these highly requested (and frankly, absolutely vital) features. The download links are up on the Downloads page right now. I hope you like this new direction for my game!

Maids & Masters (& A v0.6 Release Date!)

I cannot put into words the amount of joy and relief I am feeling right now.

v0.6 is functionally done.

Everything is implemented. The final event works, which is something I'm not sure I was able to accomplish ever, never mind in time for this weekend. I managed to figure out not one, but two things that should make scripting in the future much, much easier.

There's even a new feature I've implemented. Due to the structure of MnM, it sadly isn't something I expect to be able to implement across the entire game, but I'm glad to have learned it and I'm hoping to make good use of it in the future.

I do still have some testing to do. My test save is bugged because apparently one character's class data is something that was lost when other files got corrupted, but that has since been fixed. I just need to go back to the save that's set before the v0.6 content and get a few fresh test waves done, fix any other issues I find, and put it in your hands.

I intend for it to be in your hands this Friday. I'm really looking forward to what the reception will be like, and figuring out the new things I have has re-kindled the fire that had been so thoroughly doused by the recent difficulties.

I can't wait to hear what you all think of this update, because I love it.

(inb4 thx I hate it)

Maids & Masters (& And Some Overdue v0.6 Optimism)

I'm finally nearly back to where I was before technical issues led to lost work. I'm still a little shy of where the main story was at before, and I need to finish up the alternate ending that ties into a different side quest for one of the side quests, but I have lots of other work done that wasn't done before.

Since any kind of deadline was completely thrown out the window when that work was lost, I took the opportunity to implement something that I had initially skipped due to time constraints and not really liking the way it was coming together. Now I'm a little happier with the side quest in question and a version of the cut content is properly included. If you're curious about what that content is, I made a post of related renders on my Patreon, and those renders are available at all tiers.

In addition to that, all of the renders are done, and all but one of the repeatable versions of the scenes have been written out. That's usually some of the last work I do, but with everything that happened and the effect that had on me, I used that work as a sort of springboard to get back into working on everything else.

Being totally honest, I'm still not quite 100%, but things are mostly back to normal. If I don't run into any other issues, I might be able to convince myself to put in a few longer work days to get at least the side quests and main story done. If I manage that, v0.6 will be out for supporters this Friday, with the remaining content (as there are things outside of the core progression that you should be able to do, but you currently can't go do them) coming in v0.6.x releases.

If I can't manage to get a release out this weekend, there will definitely be a release the following Friday.

Maids & Masters (& Recovering v0.6)

Continuing work on v0.6 has been considerably slower than I'd like it to be, but shortly after posting last week's update I encountered issues with further data corruption. As if that wasn't bad enough, after posting the cut scene renders on Patreon on Friday, I discovered a hardware issue that I needed to address, as if it ended up being as bad as I feared, I wouldn't be able to continue working until I replaced the hardware in question.

Thankfully it ended up not being as bad as I had feared, but it did put a near-complete stop on my work in the interim. All of this on top of the damage to my motivation has made recovering the lost progress on v0.6 an excruciatingly painful process. I still feel like I owe an apology to anyone who has been following me through all of this and is currently waiting for v0.6 to come out, but I promise I've been doing what I can to keep working.

Things should mostly be back to normal now. I just need to get back into the swing of things, find my groove again, and v0.6 will be out soon(tm). I do also have a few other things in the works that I had intended to wait until after v0.6 was released to the public and I maybe had a bugfix update or two out, but that apparently wasn't in the cards, so the release cadence for the other things will be really weird.

I just hope all of these issues are more or less behind me now. It's really soul crushing losing all this work, and I'm way beyond tired of finding new ways to circumvent potential issues from occurring again, especially when they're completely outside of my control.

And a special shout out to my Patrons. You've been really patient while I've been working through all this. You're my favorite people. Thank you.

Maids & Masters (& Lost Progress on v0.6)

I genuinely don't know why this update has to be so painful to work on.

I was initially ready to get back from my week-long social obligation having brought some work along with me to say I had completed most, if not all, of the renders while I was gone, put up a Patreon post to share progress, and spend this update informing everyone that all of the side quests were done, all but one of the trophies was implemented, and the main story was between 80 and 90% done. Then I actually got back.

It turns out that somewhere along the line, the portable hard drive I keep the majority of my work on had gotten partially corrupted. I've only just exhausted my last attempt to recover the lost work. It is my incredible displeasure to report that none of the attempts bore any fruit. I do still have a backup I can work from, so all is not lost and the update will still be complete eventually, but this is yet another set-back. Given the nature of the corruption, I can't say for certain exactly how much work was lost. In terms that are relevant to those who have been waiting for v0.6 to release, we've gone from v0.6 possibly coming out this weekend to having no idea when it will be ready.

For the sake of my Patrons - I do still have something to share. That post will go up this Friday. As for v0.6, that will hopefully be available to my Patrons the following weekend, but it may be another week or two afterwards. I will keep working, and v0.6 will come out, but I need some time to reassemble the broken mess that is the remains of my drive to continue.

Here's hoping that process isn't as arduous as all of this has been.