Malevolent Planet 2D - The Anxiety Strikes Back
Hey! I really hope I'll keep this one short, I'm pretty tired.
I've been crunching a lot during the past few days because there were many changes I had to make to the game and one thing I really didn't want to neglect was progressing the new content, even though there's a lot of other stuff that was added like the new intro CGs (6 of them, to set up the intro to the story better), updated a bunch of chibis, added new ones, added alien chibis, animated, saw some things didn't look or behave right, and so on endlessly.
Still, I did manage to have a new release at the date I wanted it to be and it's early enough so that I can actually check any and all bugs that people may report over the weekend and very likely provide a hotfix by the 31st (Wednesday next week) if anything is actually broken. I felt this was the most fair solution since I'm very grateful for the support I'm receiving and I don't feel comfortable with not doing all I can to provide you with the most polished, content-filled release I can manage in the span of a month.
Now to check off my list from Monday.
Bugs:
I've received some useful bug/QoL reports on a NSFW forum regarding older content and I'd like to go through them and have "fixes" for them in this week's planned public release. ⌛ I've accidentally fixed some of those, but there are a few more like the fact that keyboard movement speed and mouse movement speed "feel different", so I'll probably make a list with separate bulletpoints on Monday for each issue.
I want to compile a build that contains those fixes + the teleport ones and pass it over to the Patron who's able to feasibly reproduce the teleport into nothingness bug, it'd be great if it's solved. ✅ Somehow I did manage to provide a build to them without neglecting doing so and it turns out on their side the issue is solved! However, because I changed the way teleportation works in literally every instance of the game where you get teleported, there are possibly some issues.
Content:
Finish animating the new scene. ✅
Finish writing NSFW dialogues for the new scene. ✅
(Optional) Add an "enticing" illustration before the NSFW animation starts. ❌
Combine all of the above in a playable flow. ✅
Add avatar sprites for the aliens. ✅
(if time allows) Draw Melissa's Avatar to include it in the first dialogue with her. ✅
Regarding the above, there were way more things I had to do content-wise such as also providing chibis and likurieris robes for the aliens, new clothing items for Melissa's avatar and her chibi version so I didn't have much time for a new illustration.
There are some things I neglected though, which the new flow feel a bit smoother with the chibis moving around and so on but there were technical limitations I couldn't get past within a very short amount of time such as switching the camera from the animation's camera to the gameplay camera to have the scene play out a bit nicer. I might be able to get these done next week though, especially if there are no gamebreaking bugs.
Release(s):
I'm aiming for a Patron Builds update on 25-26th of January (2024) that includes the content from this month, bugfixes, the new intro cutscene, new female chibi sprites etc. ✅ Managed to get this done, so even have a few days before the month ends when I can provide a hotfix if necessary without going into the new billing month.
I'm also aiming for a public release around the same timeframe, but something tells me it might be better to have it next week since this week is the last in this month and it'd give me a bit more time to not mix up the changelogs for the Patron build and the Public build. ⌛ So I decided to do this next week, there would've been too much to take care of for this week otherwise.
Social Engagement:
I'd like to release more WiPs of my alien avatar art, Melissa's avatar art, etc starting this week. ❌ I promise I'll do this next week, in fact, I'm going to schedule some posts this weekend for the next week with art previews because a lot of new stuff has been added which may not be immediately visible in the newest content.
I need to edit the Patreon tiers since they're a bit out of date. ✅ I did update them and simplified them, and instead of promising too many things I'm going to try to "overdeliver" instead. For example, even though I didn't mention in the tiers anything about preview art and so on (or at least not yet), I'm going to start doing this pretty heavily because while text posts like this may be exhausting to read every day (and also to write), if you can catch a glimpse at some art previews that's different and provides you at least with some idea of what's happening every development day.
It seems I didn't keep this one very short... So I should end it here. Thanks a lot for reading this long essay and see you next week!