In Her Service - Half a year [Dev Diary]

Well it's official guys and galls.

22nd of February 2024 was the date when I officially announced my game and released first version to the public on 28th of February.. So it has been half a year since the release of the game. So on that subject I wanted to sum up development as well as share few thoughts about my work.

First some stats, in that half a year since 22nd of February:

Game version: 0.39 -> 0.62
Updates released: 12 [Roughly update every 15 days]
Gametime: 2h -> 5,4h
Events: 20 -> 63
Images[CG's]: 300 -> 1550
Animations: 5 -> 97
Lines of text: 2500 -> 16900
Erotic scenes: 2 -> 25
Added: Sound, Music, Gallery, Linux/Mac/Phone versions.

Overall looking at those stats I am pretty happy with what I accomplished and it I am almost exactly on schedule as I projected before I released initial version. For those who don't know I plan to release 1.0 of In Her Service around late summer 2025.

The plan for 'In Her Service' development:
2023 - planning, rough story, characters, first events, tooling, licensing etc.
2024Q1 - release of the initial version (v0.39)
2024Q4  - finish main game up until endings start
2025Q2  - endings and game polish
2025Q3  - 1.0 release
2025Q4 - fixes, additional polish, maybe expansions to 1.1, another project preparation

In addition to plan above I also had/have aspirational goals provided that enough people would support what I do 🥰 as those things are expensive, especially voice work and translation to other languages.

Additional aspirational goals:
- proper English proofreading by a pro.
- additional languages (French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese)
- English voice work for women in the game

If those aspirational goals would come it would be after release of 1.0 and it would be something like version 2.0 with additional polish and content expansion. In Her Service 'Enchanted Edition' or something like that. I would really love to hear Sylvia and Mistress 😍

About version numbering:
As you might have seen I started with v0.39 instead of v0.01 or v0.1 or whatever common numbering trope people do when they start projects like those. The reason was as you can see that I spent nearly a year for planning, writing story, preparing tooling, licensing, etc. in order to release initial version and v0.39 really covered actual development. Thanks to that work progress is rather quick and if nothing goes wrong by the summer of 2025 you should get 1.0 in your hands. Let me give you now ideas for version numbering and what they mean in my case:

v0.39 - initial release - [easy short work] ✅
v0.4x - Mistake Arc - [short work] ✅
v0.5x - Calm Arc - [medium work] ✅
v0.6x - The Message Arc - [medium work] ❌ - we are here
v0.7x - Unannounced Arc - [long work] ❌
v0.8x - Unannounced Arc - [long work] ❌
v0.9x - ENDINGS - [half a year of work] ❌
v1.0 - finished game

So each big version like 0.8x means new arc in the story. Moreover due to the game being roleplaying game with choices and consequences it means that gradually game will accumulate a greater need of work on each event, requiring more and more alternative scenes. It will culminate in endings which will require significant work as there will be a lot of those (planned 11 endings) and some of them will be pretty long in particular two of them that will be very long. As much my planning was spot on with current work I'm not sure if half a year will be enough for endings.

Bits and pieces about game dev:

- My choice in reducing my job hours irl to half was the right decision. If not for that I wouldn't be able to accomplish even 1/4 of what I did. The issue is that it takes time to get into roles after few days of work and sometimes you have to reshoot or rewrite which takes time. Once I have a whole week for game dev it is much better than doing it in the evenings or every other day.

- Good feedback go a long way. Initially I planned to add sound and music around about right now but thanks to initial feedback from some users it pushed me into adding it early and once I added it, it instantly clicked and now I can't imagine game without music or sound. The work on those two elements isn't done as I plan to expand soundscape of my game closer to release.

Something about You, my fans:
- 110 people decided to show support for what I do so far, I am thankful to you guys for that 😍
- Those first people at start who decided to support me when v0.39 launched are still there. Thank you guys for your support 🥰
- Thanks to your support I managed to gather around $1300 so far with your support growing every month. I can see reasonable pathway to become a full time dev (At this rate probably summer next year) which means more work done for you guys. So far I didn't spend singe $ from that as I await RTX5090 release early next year and I need money for those aspirational goals.

That's everything I had to say for this summary. I am immensely thankful for all of your support. As mentioned before I will be running polls in coming days regarding game. So tomorrow should be a poll about technical aspects of game.

Cheers guys and gals.
Perkel (Blue Factory Games)