Dev Blog #3
It's the start of the second half of the year, and now is as good a time as any to check my Dev Map and see where we're headed, as well as make some announcements on the changes coming.
In the last Dev Blog, I laid out how the dev map had changed a little, based off the amount of extra stuff I had been able to squeeze into the updates. This next time around, I'm gonna start from scratch.
Another thing to note. In both previous Dev Maps, I clearly stated that those were estimates based off what I was capable of rendering at the time. The initial Plan was written when I was on my older PC, and was still waiting for the damn IRAY drivers to be released for DAZ. I was also working 60+ hours a week.
Well I got my new computer, the drivers have been released, and I've cut my work week down to a reasonable 40 (sometimes 50) hours. One thing that I didn't count on was in my initial estimates, was growth of content. When i wrote the initial Dev Map, Corrupted scenes had just been added.
For some perspective, In the last two months I've rendered over 1200 images. That's to put it mildly, an epic shit ton of renders. :P But even with that, I can't keep up my initial plan for two major reasons.
1. You may or may not have noticed that both Larson, and Sandra's unstable/ Obsessive scenes are a lot more detailed, than previous characters. These are more in line with the style I wanted for the scenes from the get go. I wanted them to be little stories of a slow descent into depravity, and the complications it can cause Billy.. The later characters portray that nicely I think. :)
2. Fetishes: Some character fetishes will be pretty simple, some may be pretty complicated. Every fetish is like a snowflake, but not the kind that needs safe spaces, and cries on twitter a lot. So some will require a lot of work. Some won't. It's hard to design a plan around that.
3. Combat: Sweet Jesus....It takes a while to render all of the combat scenes. 18 poses x (# of Outfits) x 4 different states = Lots of renders. And that's just for basic combat. When I add in more advanced stuff ....gonna be a lot of work. Before anybody asks...yes there will be the potential for you to fight all the characters you've so lovingly brainwashed into being your personal energy battery.
Now these three things bloat the amount of time needed to work on a character. Which completely goes against my intended plan of putting out a full character release while still releasing a new update each month.
There is also an issue that I should mention...Burn out. I love working on the function updates....New mechanics, new scenes, new stuff. Lots of fun for me. Working on characters however is a nightmarish slog. I just follow the checklist, and halfway through I want to burn my entire city down. It's mentally exhausting. And i still don't have enough time in a month, unless I go back to 60 hour weeks, which then increases the amount of Burn Out I feel. It's a downward spiral, and I'd really like to get off this train if possible. I don't want the quality of my work to suffer, because of unreasonable expectations I've placed on myself. It's not fair to all of you. The people that pay me to produce good work.
So the obvious solution is to break characters into two parts. But then that pushes the goal of finishing the school even further back. Now the whole reason I wanted to finish the school, was 3 part.
1. I wanted a foundation of characters that can be involved in the story, and for different effects in those stories to affect them.
2. A high level vote was made, and I like to stick to the polls when possible.
3. Finishing the school would be a huge amount of character content completed. Even in the RAGs game, the school was the most populated area in the game. Completing it, made developing outside the school so much faster, because there was always something for players to do. Globex isn't open yet? Go to the school, and try to get Mary to stop being such a bitch. Need some money? Go to the school and clean some bathrooms, maybe chit chat with the nerdy girl a bit between workshifts. It's a good time fill, that doesn't feel like a time sink.
So after a lot of thought I've decided to change the structure of updates. Here's what needs to added in.
Character updates will be broken down into 2 parts. It has to happen. I can't make a full character with all listed features in 4 weeks while also maintaining my sanity. It's 6-7 weeks worth of work at this point.
Function updates: I initially made these to help me decompress after a month of 60 hour weeks rendering characters. I like these updates, but their time length is a lot more flexible.
Finally Story..... I really want to start adding in storylines. Due to the speed of developing a character, the game will continue to feel like a Dating Sim with super powers until there are story lines to involve the player in something else. These can also be flexible in regards to time needed. I can add small branches of storyline, or new stories all together relatively easily. Now until, School Pop is done, most of the Storylines are gonna be high school oriented, but hey, those were the best seasons of Smallville...amirite? And no these won't be dating dramas. They will be more related to the superhero side of things.
This is the future development cycle I've come up with.
Even updates: 3 weeks of work on a character. 1 week of work on storylines.
odd updates: 2-3 weeks on functions & backlog renders. 1-2 weeks of work on storylines.
So a couple updates will look like this:
Version 0.26.00
Character part 1
New storyline with 3 branches
Version 0.27.00
New Location
New Combat power
New Job
Continue previous storyline with 3 new branches
Version 0.28.00
Character part 2
Conclusion of previous storyline with 3 new branches
Version 0.29.00
New function
Rerenders of shitty old content
More location actions for new location
New Storyline with 6 branches
Ect ect ect ......
So when does this start? Well....I'll just remake the Road Map for the rest of the year, so you guys can see. ;)
REST OF 2017 DEV ROAD MAP
0.16.20 Early update (two weeks)
Finish developing Denise
0.17.00 -July
Sister Part 2 (1 week)
Storyline as many branches as I can do (1 week)
Basic Combat (been working on this in the background for the last month)
0.18.00 - August
Sister Part 3 final(3 weeks)
Storyline continued (1 week)
0.19.00 - September
Advanced Combat (2 weeks)
Backlog: Kelly combat/fetish (1 week)
Storyline completed (1 week)
0.20.00 - October
Nikki part 1 (3 weeks)
New Storyline (1 week)
0.21.00 - November
New Powers: Polymorphism, Armor of Terra (1 week)
Backlog: Samantha combat/fetish (1 week)
Storyline cont.. (2 weeks)
0.22.00 - December
Nikki part 2 (3 weeks)
Storyline concluded (1 week)
Potential Additions if time permits:
New school jobs
New locations
New Power: Mercurial Speed
As you can see, I won't finish the school at the end of the year as I wanted to. But I'll be further along the game in other areas than I had planned, and you'll actually start to see what the rest of the game is gonna feel like once you get out of the school :P More importantly I won't be bat shit crazy by the end of the year with this new Road Map. Either which way, you'll still be getting the same amount of content, but my focus will be broader now than it was. I hope this doesn't disappoint too many people. I've been struggling to keep up with my desire to put out an update each month, and not go mad in the process for quite a while now. I think this is a good compromise.
Comments (47)
If you are interested in hiring someone, I am an English teacher in Ukraine. Most of my students are developers and being Ukraine, they work cheap. Would you like me to ask around? I've played the public version a bit and would love to see this become a finished product. Also, while I have no coding skills, I would be happy to volunteer my efforts! you can write my email kungfujustice@yahoo.com if you would like.
since there's 2 month per character now with a 2 month focus on other stuff, does that mean that the Chelsea Terri and Mary won't be finished until December next year?
Not necessarily. I'm working on hiring an additional person to help me render right now to speed up game development. I'll hopefully have them hired, and trained up proper by the end of this year :) I can't promise anything right now, but, I'm working on speeding up the process. It's an annoying fact that game development always hinges on the speed that art assets are created for the game, and the only way to speed that up is to buy better technology, improve rendering skill, and put more hands on it. I've done as much of the first two as I can already. :P
I don't even get email notifications for the community page anymore.
Bro, chill. The 'cheat mod' is just the dev console that's activated on tester releases, so it won't be active during any sort of public or typical release. As for the community page or w/e, those are typically wastelands on every patreon page, if you have a question ask it on the discord. All you have to do is make an account and link patreon to it. If you have an issue you just send a ticket into patreon. Not only that, but redirecting every single person asking for help to the community page would be mindbogglingly insane work wise, as he'd have to comment on literally every question to say 'no do it here, no do it here,' cause you can't just port the comments over. Not only that, but even if you could, it would be a ridiculous undertaking. There aren't a ton of devs for this game, like 2-3, but Baal takes the lion's share of the work, and personally I'd rather he worked more on making the game than answering questions for it.
Question: does Discrod work like a Forum or is it just a different version of the coomunity page here on Patreon, with unsorted entries about all possible and several impossible questions, posts, opinions and utter BS? Call me old fashioned, but I would prefer a proper Forum for discussion and bug reports and stuff...
Maybe it's just me, but I find the community page very unhelpful. There simply isn't any activity there and questions go long unanswered if they're ever answered at all. I remember seeing something about Discord, but I've never been able to log on to that properly for whatever reason. Any questions I ever had were answered here on this page.
For sanity, I suggest redirecting OT queries and discussions to the community tab. Maybe make it actually useful. I know the devs have to be going crazy with the explosion of OT discussion and questions that can be answered by other players that happen here.
AFAIK by reading comments, there was a cheat mod that no longer works in the current version. Another one may be in the works. There is no cheat mode in the "vanilla" game itself.
Is there any cheats choice on the game? Thanks.
When you say storyline concluded that is like just for that first storyline right? Not the story for the whole game?
Yeah just the starting story
Hey Baal, this game hooked me pretty hard! well done so far.
Is this game going to have any history? For now it's just meeting girls and having sex but no story
Read the developer's roadmap above. It has the broad strokes vision of what comes next over the coming months. That does include storylines.
Just found this game while browsing the web and downloaded the public version to test it out. I'm liking it so far. Noob level question though: How do you get influence? I know i can work in the school for global influence but that will take 84 ingame days to get 500 at 6 a day but how do i get school influence or initiative/globex influence? Kind of hoping there is a way to get those types in the current public V. It is exceedingly tedious to get it up otherwise.
Your style will give you public influence. ask someone to gossip about you. getting at least a 90 in school for the month will give you school influence. you can take that school influence and transfer it to intiatiave influence. once you have 100 initiative influence you can start doing missions for the intiative for influence. globex and logistics currently only way is to have larson write you letters using global or school rep
I am totally down with this. It should be a labor of love not a stressful job that you grow to hate. You will get no complaints from me!
Just a suggestion to tweak the RNG. I was halfway through my second year before I knew Sophie existed. Also, I tried for two hours straight trying to get unstable state scenes I didnt already have (only have a few) after giving different girls different states. Nada. I've pretty much stopped playing for now, because it was getting frustrating.
Sophie is slow (deliberately, as her story development is quite a way down the implementation list), granted. However, unstable states for characters are not that hard to get to as long as you are using the correct powers. Ideally, for "best" results, have the target affected by Psychotic Break (Psychosism 3), Willpower broken (not sure how low, but fairly confident that <75 is good, <25 is better, especially if you want the effect to last for a day or two), then hit them with Love Overload (Sympathic 3) for Obsession or Lust Overload (Sympathic 2) for Nymphomania. If you are really bothered about seeing the scenes, save the game first and reload if you don't get a "- Willpower" result. Once you have the effect you want on the target, just hang around & keep trying. Nymphomania will randomly trigger during the pre-class Hallway scene (morning or afternoon) for girls, or following a Mom's Night Out for her, Obsession will randomly trigger at night when you go to sleep. And bear in mind that some unstable characters interact with others (eg Kelly/Mom) if they are both Obsessed.
So are you saying that use mind control to make a gil loyal is aminor thing but is ok to use it for make her change clothes? Makes no sense to me.
We'll it's a good thing the game's development doesn't need to make sense to you to progress. Stop trying to start an argument. It's just gonna keep me from implimenting the thing you want, cause I don't like self entitled bitches.
How many places do plan on adding? This is an amazing game, reading that your adding more locations excites me. How any new characters are you plan on adding?
Well in the Rags version of the game there 36 characters, and many more planned, before I decided the engine couldn't handle it anymore.
Concerning your burnout, have you ever taken time off? Like a vacation where you don't log into the computer for any part of this?
Yeah, if you're a one person team you gotta decompress at some point. Your loyal fans will understand, except for the occasional internet jerk.
Suppression: Family Ties not working. I did want to be a decent guy and not a sicko, but I figured...ah, it's a game, not my real mom. But it doesn't work. Maybe the Lord is trying to tell me something...
Nevermind, just took a couple weeks. I'm guessing that's by design.
work
good word
I am very ok with slowing down on adding characters. There are plenty of characters already, the game needs more diverse things to do.
Thank you. That is a great plan. Marathon not a sprint.
If I remember correctly, that high level vote you took was right after you posted the concept picture of all the girls. I always thought that skewed the vote. You dangled ladies in front of us, so naturally we voted for the ladies.
All votes are not votes as to what gets added, just votes to what order things get added in. I'd have to do school sooner or later ;)
I agree with both the above comments. At the end of the day, the whole Patreon thing is a bit of a collaboration between those of us who are paying and you doing the work. I would much rather have you enjoying yourself doing this, as it will lead to a better end product, and the last thing we want is for you to burn out and give it all up as a bad job :-)
The rate at which you've released content so far for this game has often left me wondering if you actually have super powers of your own, so I'm not surprised to hear about 60 hour work weeks. I've followed SuperPowered since your early RAGS releases, and I've always believed that the game had the potential to be something truly special. What you have achieved since restarting the project has blown my mind, but I have often worried about burnout becoming a factor. I think your new plan makes a lot of sense.
My advise: don't listen to players too much. They are a greedy bunch and usually lack the "greater view". You're the guy with the knowledge where the game will be when "it is done" so it should be You to decide how to get there, without making the way a pain in the ass for You.
For my 2 bits the new plan and roadmap look rather exciting, will be nice to do more than just stat grind and see these characters personalities begin to flesh out :D
Batteries burn fast when the engine is on max all the time. Coasting down to 50%, will give a much longer lasting energy reserve. It's like that for EV and it's like that for us humans. I would much rather extend the "final release" with a year, and pay for it as well.. than see you burn out to please us patreons. I like the new dev map, and looking forward to the step by step progress.
Where do you prefer bug reports? Denise's booty call makes Sandra drop lust (and not Denise). Which makes me imagine Sandra peeking in from the window, but I don't think that was the intention.
Honestly I prefer Discord, but barring that, in the release comment section. Not here, where the post has nothing to do with the bug report. I did get that report earlier however, and have a fix for it in the next bug fix update.
Can i give you a huge single tip? finish sister and battle part, work more on finish what you got than add in new characters, i mean you got tons of characters already for a game in this type compared to many games out there. but it would be nice with sister since she lives at home with the hero (i belive thats how it is) and fighting, then the rank 3 jobs. herculean might before speed would also be good to change since then you can work on the 'cap' of damage dealth in battle making planning a fight easier. then mercurial speed help with other stuffs. You have Dialoges, you have a Prologue done and like chap 1 even almost a chap 2 done if we were to break it down into chapters you have adult stuff. And you got even power controlls and money income working. So adding sister for story and combat for game mech now would be great combat is both a way to earn points in being 'liked' and to actually be a 'hero' in a 'sense' and not just a guy thats bit different than others or can do a couple of things others can't or be a bigger asshole. (lol) :) I love your hard work ethics but please don't burn yourself out especially not for 1-2 more characters to have fun with and even less now that you already got several. round up the stuff you haven't 'finished' and add in more characters after that. Floating additions can be done if you want to but don't really do it if its taking too much of your time. I want game mechs and seeing finish sister part. once you got the battle part ready then it will truly be a 100% hero hentai game. Doesn matter that the hero currently isn bigger than school in work part, just having powers doesn make a guy a hero. Certain works like saving ppls or something like that is another thing. :)
Thanks for the hard work and detailed update. I don't really understand the concern about people being upset. You deliver timely and material updates. I am very appreciative of your work.
Some people get super worked up about very silly things (points toward earlier posts this week for easy examples). Some people get offended when the author doesn't immediately work on what they want to be done first, or don't re-order the game for them specifically. Etc etc. Honestly though you're right, Baal is one of the handful of creators that make concerted and tangible effort every single month, and most of us are thankful for it.
Thank you for your efforts. I'm looking forward to Terri most.
Sounds good. And anyway, you have to do what works for you. I often have opinions about what I want that differ from what game developers are doing, but I'd much rather have a finished game with a few (what I see as) flaws than a game that only gets 1/3 done before the developer burns out.
Story Mode !!!! :D