[MEGA-POST] What I've been working on...

Hey all,

Hope everyone's doing well. Some people have been (rightfully) messaging me about where the update is and there's a bit of impatience in the air and I just wanted to run through everything I've been doing, and what to expect and when to expect them.

There's a lot to break down and I think it's an interesting read, or at the very least, scroll to whatever section interests you. Hopefully, it'll be an overall positive sentiment.

Let's start from the top in what is the longest Patreon post you will ever read.

Where is Emma's Update pt 2?

I had some personal issues around the week after Emma pt 1's release so I had to delay writing by about 10 days. When I got back to it, I pushed through my ideas but it started to get late and I was at a place where I was happy with the story rotating to the next. I submitted all the artwork that needed to be done but our artist has a full time job and sometimes that results in a follow up delay. So that's basically what's happening. We have the script done, and most the images. There's just a few gaps in between that need to be filled in that can't at the moment. So I'm going to make sure everything else is ready and as soon as I get the last few CGs/vids, it'll be production ready.

Very sorry for any impatience I've caused. Of course, it's not my intention to keep people waiting forever. 🙏

However that doesn't mean I've been doing nothing! But first I'd like to explain the future of NetoPhone's update cycle so we have the bigger picture before I share the details of what I've been working on.

NetoPhone Update Cycle

So my plan right now is to keep our 4 characters and update them all until they are completed stories. These stories will not run for too long, let alone forever or anything. All of them are about 2 major updates from ending. I would like to have no more than approx 300 CGs for each character, or at least that's the goal I set for myself. Any more than that and it'll be going on for longer than I intend. Annie is the furthest ahead and Lily/Mai are probably behind but they will each get to some range of images as well as their many different endings.

The update cycle is highlighted below.

What about June?

The original plan was to have June on the new phone engine for play-testing purposes as I've written in a previous post called "Overdue Update News". After some more in-depth script conversions, I realized that June's story didn't really work with any of the mechanics that the phone offered. The Female Perspective of June allowed you to see things from a wider viewpoint to begin with. There are strengths and weaknesses to having this POV that I'd rather not layout and turn this into a boring read but they're there and they don't work with what I intended to do with the new engine.

So as a result, June is in-waiting for one of the above character update cycles to end before being re-added. She is likely going to be added after Annie, since Annie is the furthest ahead and Annie will probably get her 2/3 total story update when her release comes out.

But June isn't the only other character I'd like to discuss. 2nd Cliffhanger, so sorry.

So... What HAVE I been working on?

Well to be frank, the new engine and the new story with it. For almost two weeks, I've been running on Ramen and 4 hours of sleep per night but it was all super worth because I've refined the new engine so much and I'd like to go through everything today.

I'll be honest, I've been looking around at every other game and I don't think there is a single game that comes even close to what I've done. But that's my opinion and you can decide for yourself!

I don't know in what order I should do this but here goes.

Meet Mabel

Mabel is an ultra sweet girl who just celebrated her 18th and is in her first semester of college. She grew up far away from the city in a fairly sheltered household but now is her time to explore the big scary world. You as her sweetheart and her oldest friend, also join the same college and she's super glad you're there as someone she knows and can rely on in an otherwise strange environment. Don't let her down!

Mabel is the love child of all the things I wanted to ever work on and of the surveys and data gathering made by the premium polls back in the day. We had another character design that was voted in but it gave me direction what others saw and looked like they wanted to come out of the game. That includes themes, character style, story perspective and so on.

Mabel's story is going to have choices between NTR and NTS themes.

That means Mabel has a stat system similar to Annie's but they are her own proclivities.

Character Info

[THIS SECTION IS OUTDATED, THERE ARE STATS BUT NOT THESE ONES!]

Our first of many screenshots show her stat bars clearly to the player.

First, let's look at the latter 2 bars.

Energy - Energy the format of Mabel's expressions. This means how she channels her day to day energies on things, how she responds to things. It's her internal chemistry. She can do things that she's passionate about and enjoy or do things that are spiteful and hurtful.

Orientation (not to be mistaken with sexual orientation) - Can be described as to how internalized or externalized her sense of self is. She can either hone in on her internal sense of vulnerability, or place her interests outside herself and look outwards towards what others have. To simply explain this, it's whether she is seeking others or whether others are seeking her.

These are going to take a while to shape however as Mabel is a gentle kind soul so even imagining that she would ever do something so envious or spiteful even is not fathomable. She will have to go through a lot to build those traits and they all pay off much like Annie's side stories except she's got even more of them.

Trust - Is a stat that is currently a placeholder stat and either it will be removed or reworked, whether or not I would like to do an NTS path after the base NTR path is fully done.

Though this is going to be a much longer project and not nearly a short story.

Her likes/dislikes and all that can change as well!

You can even track her experiences:

So let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture and the rest of the apps and features.

Everything has beautiful animations and interactivity to them. It feels very fluid on PC and I have yet to test it fully on the phone but I think everyone will be impressed.

These are the base apps that we have on startup. I'll go through them in an order I think will be least confusing but also from most important to the ones that add details.

Also everything I'm about to show you is subject to change and tweaks

Chat App

This is pretty self explanatory but it has a lot of little QOL and immersion features, like the little alert blip, fully functional stuff. Last message shown, all beautiful and clean additions.

You'll notice on the top right, our little speed flag. It's back with 3 speed modes.

You can also bring the view the profile of the person for some extra details like their status and profile picture!

But that's not all the chats can do.

Shop App

For my personal favorite and probably the best section yet, we have the shop system.

This is where the game REALLY is spiced up.

Okay okay, there's so much to break down here.

First of all, the top right, we have a currency system in the game. We can collect money based on actions in game and spend them to permanently upgrade our phone. The upgrades are as listed but I will go through them one by one.

Let's go from top to bottom.

HEART RATE MONITOR

The Heart Rate Monitor upgrade adds a pulsing heart onto the chat app. Anytime Mabel has above average heart rate, it will start pulsating and you can even hear her heart rate!

As I go through all the features, I'll leave most of it to your imagination on how the story can and will use them.

GIRLFRIEND POSITIONING SYSTEM (GPS)

The GPS upgrade will tell you exactly where Mabel is at any given time. It replaces the online status area with a pin location. You can still see her online status with the colored blip though! So no information is lost.

She'd never lie to us right?

MIC PICKUP

The Mic Pickup upgrade allows us to hear sound effects and voices from Mabel's end. These are directly tied with sound effects most of the time too, so you can actually hear Mabel!... Doing whatever... 😁

MIND READER

The Mind Reader upgrade allows us to pick up what Mabel's thoughts are on the other end. These are portrayed with animated thought bubbles!

I wonder what she thinks about this?

ECHO SCANNER

Though some of you might be able to tell what this one does from the shop description, I'm going to leave what the Echo Scanner does a secret for now! It will be revealed in game.

So those are all the upgrades for the chat! You can turn any and all of them on, or two or three of them. However you'd like to play is up to you.

Your first play though, you might find yourself left in the dark for quite a lot of events, but as you go through the game and collect money, you can reset the story at anytime and see more details of what you missed out.

"Was Mabel lying to me about going there?"

"What is she thinking right now?"

"Why is her heart rate spiking?"

You'll have a more and more complete picture as you collect all the upgrades for what Mabel is doing or going through.

Leaked Messages App

Sometimes Mabel texts people... and sometimes you get a hold of them...

With this app unlocked, as you play through your current run, you'll find find out what Mabel has been saying and who she's been talking to!

Sometimes the texts look mundane but who knows what's in there?

Those are all the shop upgrades! Again, once you unlock them, you unlock them forever on your phone, so restart the game as many times as you want, or save somewhere and revisit your save with more information!

Social Scene

Social Scene is where all the college kids are at!

This social media app is quite deep with all sorts of people and organizations. There are a bunch of different kinds of accounts to follow and subscribe to.

• Personal Accounts: Which are free and someone's personal account.

• Verified Organization: College news letters, cosplay clubs etc.

• Adult Entertainment (18+): Organizations that offer Adult Entertainment posts. Who knows who might show up on a page you follow.

• Exclusive Fans Creators (18+): Some girls and guys have their own... little adult corner lets say.

  Some of them like to charge and some of them have it up for free. But really, anyone can open up one at anytime...

Not all of them are free but any purchases you make will persist on your phone! But you'll have to discover them first in the story.

Can you find them all? And what kind of feed will you have?

Don't forget to hit like to unlock the images!

Gallery

All phones need a gallery and images you collect will appear here. We have quite a nice organization already but this is still undergoing tweaks to make it more sleek!

The image viewer this time around has filmstrip style swipe commands. You can swipe and see the next image partially! It works fantastic!

You might notice on the top right we have a star. If you click that, you send an image to a favorites tab on the gallery page where you can view them in any order you'd like!

Favorite all the pictures you'd like to revisit here.

Settings & Language Support

Now for a really exciting piece of news.

LANGUAGE SUPPORT!!!

I've been working really hard to get language support in the game for you guys. Now of course I don't speak all these languages and these are mainly AI translated and those have their limitations but I'll be fixing translations with the community's help over time. I'm sure a lot of it will not need tweaking but there will definitely be some.

We're currently supporting:

• English

• Spanish

• French

• Portuguese

• German

• Italian

• Russian

All of the apps have language support.

For example, here's our social media app in various languages!

And many more!

You'll have control over Light/Dark modes as well as font options if you prefer.

Notifications

The notification system is full functional and very realistic. Fully supports swipe commands to remove them like a real phone.

**There's some English text but that's just hardcoded placeholder at the moment.

Saving/Loading

And the last thing I'd add is our save/load system. We'll have 10 slots of story related saves.

You'll keep your unlocks through saves and restarts.

There is no rewind system however due to how insanely buggy it is with all these features unfortunately. So be sure to save often! I'll see if an auto-save system could be implemented if people would like that too.

There are a few app/buttons I haven't gone through like the Calendar app, which is a shared app/timeline viewer of all the events Mabel has gone through in your playthrough but I'll leave it for the play testers.

Update Cycle & Scope

I plan to run this game alongside NetoPhone Stories in parallel. They will each aim to have 1 update per month.

Due to the high complexity of the new game [Title Pending] in terms of the detail behind it, the updates won't be huge, most and medium sized at best. I would need to create the chat dialogues and plan out the structure with each upgrade, social media posts, leaked chats, images, stats control, non-linear storytelling etc etc etc etc.

There's just a lot to do per each update.

Bracket Tier (Premium)

As crazy as it sounds, I've been working on this engine since September but I've finally got it all together. For this reason, this game will be for premium tier+ subscribers but there will be free releases per 2 weeks as per NetoPhone.

Once I launch this game, I will expand the Early bird bracket slots by (I think) 50, so for those of you that are here, reading this now, you'll be able to have now until then and even then to upgrade freely into a higher tier for the same cost.

ETA

I'm fairly bad at estimating the amount of time but once I translate everything and see that it's all working, I'm going to put out the "pilot" or "alpha". It won't have much smutty stuff off the bat but it will let you talk to Mabel, and help me understand the update cycle, bugs that need fixing, language correction feedback loop, and so on.

What I have done, is week 1's story but not many images to go with it yet! And I need to pan out the side stories on the side and have them ready to go.

I'm going to say not this weekend but by next weekend, I'll have an upload of week 1's story.

Thank You <3

Thank you for reading this far and to all the supporters and members. You've all seen it come through all this way and I hope this post was enough to show you the level of ambition I'm about to deliver to this genre/niche.

Nothing below the best for all of you.

Now excuse me while I deal with the feeling that I forgot to mention something for a few days.

With the biggest love ❤️

~ Kuro