Maids & Masters v0.9 Public Release

Things are (finally) starting to cool off between all the holiday business and other deadlines to meet. Probably a good thing, because my head has been trying really hard to split at the seams from the way it's felt the past few days.

Anyway, development on v0.9.1 will (hopefully) hit the ground running over the weekend, that'll go out during the second or third week in January, and then I'll put as much energy as I can spare into v0.9.2 and getting the Love Shack wrapped up and creating a sort of "post game" for the "end" of the VX Ace version of Maids & Masters. After that, getting the MZ version going will be up next.

For now, v0.9 is available. You can find it on my itch page, my Patreon, or on the downloads tab above. If you want the change log, you can scroll down or click here.

One known issue to call out (which at this point has already been fixed and is ready for v0.9.1) is that the optional Maids - Quinn and Teely - have events that don't behave correctly in the second Freeze. If you've already done their events, or you haven't recruited them, or you skip their events for the second Freeze, there won't be an issue. If you do go through their events in the second Freeze, there is a bugfix feature in place that should prevent the game from locking up on you, but things might be a little buggy. 

I hope you're staying warm out there, I hope you had a Merry Christmas, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

Maids & Masters (& REM Cycle & The Holidays)

The holidays have been extremely hectic for me, so I haven't had more than an hour or two in any given day to get much in the way of work done, and what work I have been able to get done has had to go into other projects, so there isn't much to say in terms of the progress I've made.

What I can say is that Maids & Masters does already have a number of updates complete. No real new content like what I've been wanting to put together, but a number of issues have been addressed and a few bugs have been found and fixed.

REM Cycle has seen even less progress, but I'm realizing that all of the custom assets that the main project will require can't all be put off until development starts on it. As I'm not an artist, creating these assets has been a bit of a trial. I'm doing what I can to change things around so I can get this demo/prequel thing out to you and off my back burners, but it's becoming a much slower process than I'd like it to be.

Since most of my time has been spent with friends and family and/or working on other projects, that's all there really is to say this week. Next week will be the year in review to celebrate both the new year and the year we just passed. After that, we should be back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Maids & Masters (& Act 2 & 2023)

This should've been up last night, but I've been busier with family than usual this year.

Well, I'm here now. Let's lay out my current plan for Maids & Masters as we go into the next year. I'll probably talk a bit more about specific things as I get closer to getting them done, and dates might need to move around a bit, but on the whole this is more or less what things should look like.

First, going to monthly releases. I'm doing this for a number of reasons, but the big one is that it condenses all of the work I need to do to publish a release into two days (one day to review/publish everything, one day to follow up and do customer service type things) every month instead of 4-5 days every month. That means more development time, which I'm going to need. v0.9 will still be coming out after a two week time period (which is the 30th), but v0.9.1 will not - it'll be releasing to the public in February after its January paid release.

For an update on non-MnM things, REM Cycle is still on the back burner. The way I want to do things and the way things are ending up still aren't quite meshing the way I want, which has further slowed development. I'm still hoping to get it done sometime in January, because I don't want to have this half-finished demo just floating around. It may get pushed to February depending on my other teams and how much work they require of me, but it's on my mind, and I want to get it done.

The current iteration of Maids & Masters will soon become Maids & Masters: Act 1. With the interlude complete (story-wise) there's just a closing event to end the Freeze, the Love Shack, getting trophies from Big Dick's, and a few other small things here and there to do. That's a lot for one update, so it's likely the January release will be v0.9.1 and feature the end of the Freeze and a few trophies for Big Dick's. Then we'll have a February release for the Love Shack and the rest of the trophies for Big Dick's. This release will be Act 1's v1.0. I'm aiming for any other updates and bug fixes to be unnecessary, as I don't plan to have a v1.0.1. More on that below.

March's release will be a remastered version of Maids & Masters: Arrival, made in RPG Maker MZ. I'll be getting rid of all the placeholder assets, updating events to give slightly more realistic rewards, rewriting the dialogue to better fit the characters and tell a more coherent story of the prequel events, and adjusting anything else that needs adjusting to fit both the story and allow you to bring saves forward from Arrival. 

That brings us to April. It may end up needing to be delayed, but I'm going to try my damnedest to have Act 1 remastered in RPGM MZ by the end of the month. This is where v0.10 will pick up, and I'm planning on starting this process alongside development of Arrival's remaster. It's likely that v0.10 will only be Act 1 and the Interlude content, but I'm planning to have new features built in from the start (like a quest log and key rebinds) that I'll need to find and set up plugins for, as well as making sure the new native features (like text skip and mouse support) don't break anything. There are also a few parts I need to rewrite (mostly around Viridius and Griselda) so that the game properly remembers certain actions and so certain story points don't get neglected. I'd also like to include more side quests, though I don't have any planned at the moment. So there will be new content within the Act 1 portion of the game.

I'm also likely to go looking for feedback more actively once development starts on Act 2. I want to try to involve some communities and get a wider array of perspectives than I have been so far. I won't implement everything I get a suggestion for, but I have made quite a few improvements based on feedback already, and MnM is a better game for it. There are still a number of things that aren't as intuitive as I'd like, and other things that are plain under-served, and I want to dig into that more.

I hope you're looking forward to all of this as much as I am. It's a lot, which makes part of me nervous, but it's also exciting.

Maids & Masters v0.9 Release

Nearly all of the work for this update went exclusively into new content, so the changelog is pretty tiny this time around. That said, there is still about 2 hours of new content depending on your reading speed and whether or not you count all the optional/repeatable stuff, and nearly 100 new renders.

 

Sorry in advance if there are any bugs, but hopefully any bugs in here will be less egregious than some of the bugs last year's Freeze update had.

The build is currently available to Patrons, and since by some miracle of compression I'm still just below the 1GB mark, also available on itch.io.

Anyway, here's your tiny changelog:

v0.9
The second interlude story release, and the second Freeze update.
- Includes a new trophy, an updated winter version of the Estate, and 7 new scenes.
Updated Melissa’s repeatable Freeze event to be clearer about leaving with her.
Updated certain Freeze events to prevent activation while the player is on the mansion’s balcony.
Updated Katrina’s status screen ‘nickname’ for consistency.
Fixed a bug where Quinn’s Freeze dialogue with Alice may not occur correctly.
Various minor dialogue and map fixes and updates.

Maids & Masters (& A Release Date For v0.9)

I'm saying this with a pretty healthy dose of optimism, but I think I'm going to go ahead and solidify v0.9 going out to Patrons this Friday, December 16th. There's about a character and a half left to finish (one character needs their extra event and the associated renders, and another needs their main event, extra event, and associated renders), and then the main meat of the update is done. Even if the rest of the character I'm currently working on takes me an entire day to finish and the last character takes me two days to finish (which is an incredibly generous time frame), that still has be getting done with everything with Friday left to test the build. That wouldn't be ideal, but I've pushed out builds in worse condition.

Like last year, I think it'll be necessary to split this up into two chunks. v0.9 will be the majority of content, with all the character events, extra interactions, adding in everything to let you earn the new trophy, and so on. v0.9.1 will be adding in the smaller things that I don't have time to do right now - things like being able to take Maids to their rooms to have them comment on what the MC says, taking them into Cumhaill and any special interactions they might have there, add in the beginnings of the third tier of equipment, and a dinner event to end the Freeze and open the rest of the game back up. Some of these are already partially implemented, but I definitely won't have time to do everything before Friday.

I also want to try to fit in some random Estate events in v0.9.1. I doubt I'll have a lot of these, but they're still something I wanted to try to add, since the Freeze update takes place almost entirely within the Estate, and it's the best time to introduce something like that to make the Estate feel like something besides a collection of giant rooms.

As a note for the itch.io release - that is likely to be delayed a little. I haven't created a deployable build to check the final number yet, but I'm certain the game is now larger than their 1GB upload limit. Most of the game's size comes from images, I've been hovering around 900MB for a while now, and the Freeze updates add a lot of new images. If the game does end up being larger than 1GB, I'll need to contact them to increase that limit before I can upload the new build there.

Maids & Masters (& Progress on v0.9)

So, for those of you who didn't read my last post, REM Cycle is on hold until I can get v0.9 done. There are a few reasons for this (general holiday business being one of them), but the big reason is that I want to try to get v0.9 out to Patrons on the 16th. I'm not sure if I'll manage that, but I'm going to try.

 

This year's Freeze update is turning out to be a lot larger than the last one. Almost all of my development time has been spent getting just the chat options done. With each character having their own unique chat with each other character, plus another for if you don't have anyone with you, plus a few others (like the snowman, or Deirlinn, if she's in the nursery), there's something in the realm of 200 different chat options. There's also a new mechanic for the frozen pool now that it's not covered in plants that each character also has a unique reaction to. 

 

Thankfully I'm down to just one character left for dialogue. The Maids you had last year don't have any new events (just new dialogue), but I do still need 8 new events for the 8 new Maids. Of those, only one is tested, but three are complete, and one more is rendered (though not written or implemented yet). There will also be a new cosmetic trophy to unlock, same as last year - complete all the bonus objectives and you'll get a new suit. Now that the costume system is actually implemented, that'll also need an asset, rather than me being able to stop after getting all of the bonus objectives done (and I'm about halfway through those).

And that's before I get to Cumhaill. I wanted to go through Cumhaill and give all the Folk their own unique interactions based on who you had with you, but I may not have time for that, so it'll probably be more or less what it currently is, with the exception of any special events like the bonus objectives. Maybe I'll have time, but I know the first Freeze had so many new and unique mechanics that a number of things would hard lock the game, but I'd like to put more effort into playtesting this one so that isn't an issue.

Speaking of, special shout out to my playtester. They put a lot of work in for me, which I greatly appreciate. Hopefully I can get this done without the deadline being too tight for either of us.

Maids & Masters v0.8.1 Public Release

This year's Freeze update is turning out to be a big one. More on that on Tuesday, so I won't say a whole lot here.

What I will say is that development on REM Cycle will have to go on pause until after I get v0.9 done. Just like the last one, there are a few events that use unique mechanics, and I want to have time to test things without needing to delay the release, so something had to move.

Hopefully the delay won't be long and the rest of v0.9 will go quick and easy, but let's not jinx things, eh?

You can find v0.8.1 on my downloads page (or just go straight to my itch.io page), where you can now also find the demo for Love/Loss.

If you want to check the change log, you can find that here.

Love Life! - A Horror Dating Sim

The demo (or, more accurately, prequel) to Love Life, REM Cycle, is still (rather appropriately) in development hell, but I still want to take this post to explain what exactly I mean by "horror dating sim."

First, what it isn't. Sure, there's an amount of "dating is scary because anxiety" and/or "fear of commitment/rejection" that might get explored through certain characters come the full release, but it isn't the focus of the game. The "horror" part and the "dating sim" part exist as two sides of a coin - part of the same whole, but not exactly intermingled. This is best explained as a day/night cycle.

During the day, you do daytime things. The setting is an all-girl cram school (if you're not familiar, think technical college with a dress code; post secondary education that still isn't quite a university), so these daytime things include attending class, befriending and/or flirting with the various love interests, and... Let's call it "managing your libido." I haven't quite decided on an exact day/night cycle yet because REM Cycle uses a different system, but right now, expect a typical morning/day/evening/night layout. In fewer words, the game in daytime is a dating sim with RPG elements.

At night, the world changes. The halls and classrooms become twisted reflections of their daytime counterparts, classmates are replaced by nightmares, and horrible abominations (that look eerily like your potential partners) roam the halls. You might need to find a key, fight for your life, run for somewhere safe, or face your fears and complete a specific goal in order to progress. To summarize, the game at night becomes a survival horror RPG.

The game's theme of duality still applies here, so there will still be things to do on either side in order to progress on the opposite side. For example, a love interest may refuse your advances until you do something about their night-time counterpart, and getting to know that love interest better as a friend might make that task easier by weakening the nightmare. Or it might make it worse, and doing something about the monster haunting you will cause their daytime counterpart close themselves off to you. Which applies to which will depend on the character, and will help each love interest feel unique, rather than having a couple dozen instances of the same relationship that requires the same grind over and over.

 

I also intend the game to have no "game over." Certain relationships may have a hard fail state (though this will be rare if it is included), and there will certainly be consequences and "soft" fail states, but you will never actually die. "Losing" during the day will penalize you somewhat, but there's nothing particularly deadly to encounter. The night, while full of potential death, is also a dream; dying there simply means halting your progress and waking up in a cold sweat.

Doing things this way (especially in RPG Maker) presents some interesting development challenges, which I think will make for some interesting gameplay once it gets to the full release. As far as REM Cycle goes, the main loop will focus on only two potential love interests and will have a more linear story, but will open up to the final intended sandbox style of dating sim by the end so you can experience things first hand (and will hopefully let you bring your REM Cycle save forward, too!).

Maids & Masters (& Loops Are Hard)

This post should be about Love Life! REM Cycle, but it turns out time loops are a bit of a challenge to write, and an even bigger challenge to program. I've been iterating on exactly how I want progression to work and I've made some progress, but it's not enough for me to really talk about.

So instead, let's talk about the December release for Maids & Masters. In between iterating on what exactly REM Cycle should be (trying to reconcile what I want it to be with what it needs to do to be interesting), I've been working on getting things set up for the next Freeze release. 

 

With 8 new Maids since the last Freeze update, and each of those new Maids needing new chat options with the Maids from last year as well as their own events and chat options for each other Maid, this Freeze update is going to be roughly 50% bigger than last year's. Thankfully these Freeze updates are fairly lighthearted, so I can just have fun letting these characters interact with each other in a way that isn't necessarily organic during normal gameplay.

Something that's a little less fortunate (for me, anyway) is how render-heavy these updates are. It's highly likely the game will officially break the 1GB mark in overall size with this update. I may look into some image compression to make this less of an issue, but hopefully it isn't as much of an issue as I think it is and I'll be able to barrel forward and focus on getting things complete.

Depending on time, I'll also be trying to get some of the 'semi-missable' trophies put into Big Dick's. I'm not sure how much time I'll have for that while also juggling my other projects and trying to get REM Cycle done, but it's on my mind.

Hard to believe there's only one week left before December gets here. Time really does fly, doesn't it?

Maids & Masters v0.8.1 Release

There's a longer changelog on this update than I expected there to be, but that's a good thing. It means there's that many fewer bugs to squash come time to port everything into MZ.

This build will be out to Patrons shortly after this post goes up, and available to purchase on itch.io and SpicyGaming within the next day or so.

For now, here's your changelog:

v0.8.1
Added the Trophy hint system.
Added the full version of Vendra’s childbirth event.
Added more books to the home Estate library, available after repairing the bookshelves.
Added nude wakeup scenes to Master’s bed - these are randomized and require 25+ affection.
Added an event for Quinn to react to the events of the second Haunt in the player Estate library.
Added an event to complete the side story of the Nithercott Estate to the Estate’s map.
Added first MC costume to the home Estate’s Master Bedroom wardrobes (requires Trophy 19).
Added nameplates to say which room belongs to which Maid post-remodel.
Added Katrina to the affection check-in and away rooms where the other Maids appear.
Added missing instances of Willow and Bianca to the away rooms where other Maids appear.
Fixed a bug that caused one of the Haunted Folk to crash the game if defeated repeatedly.
Fixed a bug that allowed walking on wall tiles in the home Estate ruins.
Fixed a bug where Trophy 20 would not display in the trophy room correctly.
Fixed a bug where the plaques for Trophy 17 and 19 wouldn’t display their text.
Fixed a bug where one of Odette’s renders wouldn’t erase properly during the repeat scene.
Fixed a bug that caused the customized exterior statues to momentarily change on interaction.
Fixed a bug where Katrina would take a Designer Dress but wear a Maid’s Dress.
Fixed a bug where canceling out of Teely’s greeting would cause the event to run again.
Updated the Augalamh Priestess’ dialogue so she doesn’t repeat herself after getting Trophy 11.
Updated the README spoiler-free walkthrough to include Baleflight Manor.
Updated the README to include the changelog for v0.8.
Updated the altar for Trophy 12 to make it more clear when the ritual is available to complete.
Updated Katrina’s introduction to include her first scene and sealing her Pact.
Updated Katrina’s Service option at the Estate to allow repeating her first scene.
Updated the explanation of the debug feature on the relevant trophy tablet.
Updated the Dark Mark’s Commune to have content for the new game phases.
Updated the bookshelves in the home Estate to use a new check type for Trophy 9.
Updated the Beauregard Estate to acknowledge the events of Ventire and the second Haunt.
Updated Quinn’s recruitment quest to acknowledge the events of the second Haunt.
Updated the “hidden answer” in Baleflight’s basement lab to provide the full answer.
Updated the Adhauga trader to respond to the completion of the Nithercott side story.
Updated the end of Viridius’ conversations so the player always sees the cult’s icon.
Updated the fast travel points for Adhauga to also recognize completing the Nithercott story.
Updated the interactions on objects in Melissa’s room so they no longer reference the ruins.
Updated the Controls section of the README to include basic controls.
Updated the “away” instances of Lalita, Kala, and Odette to include their available scenes.
Removed ‘saving after end of version’ message from the README as it shouldn’t be an issue.
Various minor dialogue and event updates.

Post #100 Special Announcement - Maids & Masters (& Act 2)

100 posts already. Man. I guess it isn't really that big of a deal, but it feels like a milestone. 

If you've been following Maids & Masters long enough (or if you've gone back through the thread on F95) you might've heard me say that MnM was made in VX Ace instead of a newer RPGM engine because it was all I had available. You might've also heard me say that MnM would get ported over to MZ once I had that engine available. Well, that engine has been available to me for a while now. It's what I've made the demos for Love/Loss and Redemption Harem in, and it's what Love Life! REM Cycle is being made in. So why isn't MnM in MZ yet? It's complicated. I'm not going to list out a bunch of excuses though. Instead, we're going to have a special announcement.

Act 2 of Maids & Masters will be in MZ.

This means a few things. Lots of new features, like the engine having native adjustable screen size, built-in text skip and mouse support, and the wider variety of plugin support from the RPG Maker community. It also means there's a lot of work for me to do in terms of resizing images, additional playtesting to assure the game functions without the plugins it currently uses, finding new plugins to replace the features that MnM will otherwise loose and adding new features (like re-bindable keys), and so on.

So, what will happen to MnM in VX Ace? v0.8.1 goes out to Patrons this Friday, that hasn't changed. v0.9 is still planned for December. After that is 2023, when I had originally announced work on Act 2 will begin. There's a few extra stipulations on that now.

The existing VX Ace version of MnM is still missing some parts. Most notably, the Love Shack and the additional 'missable' trophies being added to Big Dick's. Once those are put in place, there will be some additional testing and fixing, and then the VX Ace version will be released as Maids & Masters: Act 1. Once that is complete, I also want to bring Arrival up to snuff. Get rid of the placeholder assets, remaster it in MZ, and make the save able to transfer properly into the main game. Somewhere in this time frame, I also want to finish REM Cycle. After all of these things are complete and released, then work on Act 2 will begin in earnest. This means it may not be until a few months into 2023 that Act 2 actually starts releasing, rather than being available right away in January. This might change and Act 2 will be available sooner than I'm anticipating, but I can't guarantee that right now.

What this doesn't mean for MnM is a "sequel." The entirety of Act 1 will still be available in the MZ version. I'm taking steps to make sure existing players don't need to completely start over and will hopefully be able to use their saves in the MZ version of the game. I don't know yet if that will actually be possible, but I am trying. Failing that, I'll at least put in some kind of time skip, so if you've already played through Act 1 you won't need to play through again unless you want to.

As one last closing note - this wouldn't be possible if it weren't for my Patrons. It's taken me a while to get to this point, but I wouldn't be here at all without that support. If you want me to keep making upgrades like this - new engines, new assets, and more - I would greatly appreciate it if you considered supporting me.