The future of the game.

Devlog 11

I hope you all enjoyed Yeuqin's newest events, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out other than a few spelling mistakes.

Next update (0.3.7) will feature some new event with.... OKIN!

You'll finally be getting the last level of the love menu and taking that final step with her, as well as some other events with her.

The release date is unknown currently, I'm working through making the animations and don't want to rush them. I'll post an update with the release dates once I'm confident I'll have them done.

Now, the future of the game. This might get a bit long winded so I'll summarize my thoughts first before I dive deeper into the reasoning.

The game will be changing from sandbox into a visual novel for things that happen after 0.3.7 or more specifically as we transition into our mc joining the sect.

The sandbox elements will remain for our first 'arc' where you get to know the characters and grow closer to them. After that the game will transition into it's second arc, the sect and our mc's journey through it with the game becoming a visual novel with choices, affection scores and such and away from the sandbox format.

This is a big change and is not what I had planned for the game originally. Those who have been following the devlogs will know that the game was originally set to become more of an rpg, with battles, stats and training.

It's not been an easy decision and I have long agonized over whether it's the right choice for the game but after weeks of trying out different ways to make it work I've realised that it's simply not fun.

Maybe it's my lacking coding skills, it is my first game and first time coding after all. But after building a few different variations of battle systems, training minigames and planning how the story will progress, the format just doesn't work the way I want it to. It ends up feeling disjointed and really limits the ability to tell the story I want to tell going forward.

Sandbox games have always had this issue, but I thought if I got it right it could work out the way I wanted. That hasn't been the case , and while there are other games out there that do a decent job of it, I'm simply too inexperienced to have that be the format without it being a net negative to the experience of the game.

Many will have noticed that Mira's update took a long time to come out, that's partly because of all the trial runs I was doing trying to make it work.

After many weeks of banging my head against the wall with lacking results I had to take a step back and really think about what my priorities are with the game. Thinking about it like this really helped me make the decision.

With adult games I think three things are the most important to making it good:

Good visuals(animations and renders), good characters and most important of all, a good story.

Hells, with just a good story and characters alone you could elevate even words on a page to being erotic. Obviously, the visual aspect can take that to the next level but I hope you can understand what I'm trying to say here.

While I think I've done a decent job of the first two I can't say the same with the story so far. That's been intentional to a degree, this first part of the game was always supposed to be about getting to know the characters, especially Okin, while setting the stage for the future plot. The sandbox format was perfect for that.

Now that we've reached the point where the story is going to play a much more important part of the game I really want to hone in on making it as good as I can.

Of course, you'll still be getting plenty of H scenes. It's an ADULT game and with each update you'll be getting more, same as now. As I said, having good H scenes is important to a game like this.

Off the top of my head I can't think of another game that has done something like this. To start as a sandbox and transition into a visual novel, and potentially even repeat the process further into the game once we reach new locations... it's likely to throw a lot of people off.

Maybe it would be better to use what I've already made for the game and continue as a sandbox instead of making a decision like this, but I can't help but think that this feels right to me.

Why limit the game to one format when another could do a better job for the next arc?

I'm aiming to make the game as good as I possibly can and I believe this is the best way to do it.

This will, unfortunately, make some of the previous grinding aspects of the game feel kind of pointless. Until this point things like strength, stamina and money were going to continue to be used in various aspects of the the game and now they won't serve much purpose for this next arc.

However, I won't be removing them entirely. The first arc will almost act as it's own small game before going into the next phase. Though I will most likely reduce a lot of the grind once the new arc is properly under way.

If you've made it this far then thank you for taking the time to read this wall of text...

I started this game having never typed a line of code in my life, never having created a single animation or even using the software to make renders. Literally every step of this process has been through experimenting on my own scraping together whatever I can find online to help me through each issue that has cropped up.

This is a big decision, maybe a even a stupid one, but it's the one I've decided to go with. I might look back on this and realise that it was foolish, it might even kill the game entirely, or... it might have worked out for the best, only time will tell.

If you have any questions or thoughts I would love to hear them.

I imagine this will be a bit of a controversial change, and many of you won't agree with it. Thank you to all of you who have followed the game up until this point, I understand if some of you no longer wish to support the game going forward.

For those who do decide to stay, I can promise that I'll make this next phase of the game as good as I possibly can.