Progress Update

Hey Everyone, Ste here

First of all, I want to apologize for being absent for so long. And I want to thank everyone who continued supporting me during that time. It means a lot to me, especially after such a long period without updates. 

There are three main reasons why this update took so long and why I didn't make any posts during that time. 

First, I’m still dealing with my burnout.

As much as I love working on Pan Hero, the game requires a huge amount of work, from writing and coding features, to rendering scenes and testing everything. I also made a mistake that I heard a lot of new game developers made, features creep. When I first started Pan Hero, I was excited by every new idea. Whenever I thought of a new mechanic that could make the game better, I wanted to add it. To the point where it’s overwhelming trying to code and implement them.

I still really love Pan Hero, especially the characters. Mira, Ann, Liz, Marie, Claudia, Naomi, Kat, and the rest are characters that I genuinely enjoy writing. One thing I struggled with, though, was dealing with criticism. The game receives far more support and encouragement than criticism, but I never really learned how to handle negative feedback in a healthy way. My instinct was to try to address every concern and satisfy every piece of feedback that I received. 

The problem is that not all feedback points in the same direction. Sometimes different players want completely different things from the game. By trying to please everyone, I ended up adding more work for myself and constantly second guessing my decisions, whether it was the story, the gameplay, or the features I wanted to implement. 

Over time, I started avoiding Discord and Patreon because I worried that every new comment would become another thing I needed to change or another problem I needed to solve. I’m not saying feedback or critics are bad, I just dealt with them in a bad way, and it affected me a lot. In the future, I’m thinking of using polls whenever there's a suggestion or criticism that could significantly affect the game. That way I can get a better sense of how the broader community feels instead of reacting to individual comments alone. 

I also didn’t want to post anything because I feel bad that there was still no update. Like I thought every post would just be a disappointing post because the update is not out yet.

Second, while dealing with burnout, I spent some time exploring new concepts, stories, and gameplay ideas that reignited my creativity and helped me regain some of the motivation and excitement that burnout had taken away. 

Because these games were still in the planning stage, I could simply experiment with ideas and write whatever excited me without worrying too much about expectations or feedback. And this helped me rediscover some of the enjoyment that made me start making adult games in the first place. There are three new games that went far in the writing and the planning.

One is inspired by a hentai called Serving Titty Monster. I really love the concept of really strong and deadly but beautiful and sexy women that would kill other men, but would have sex with you. I’ve planned how the gameplay would be, but for now I think I’m just going to release it in the Love Blossoming in All the Weird Places as a one-shot lewd story.

Another one is inspired by Attack on Titan. I really loved Sasha, Mikasa, Historia, and also Rico. I planned it to be some kind of Persona style RPG where different characters and titan types have weaknesses and skill types to exploit those weaknesses. Then, other than the girls, you can also recruit procedurally generated scouts, garrisons, military police to join your group. I also already mapped the skills, the titans' type, and the characters too. But it might be too hard to make the maps, and the titans with just koikatsu. So it’s shelved, for now.

The last one is inspired by One Piece. I love pirate themed games. And Nami is probably my most favorite anime girl growing up. The second is tied between Robin and Boa Hancock. The story that I’ve written will be set in an alternate universe where you can recruit the girls like Nami, Robin, Boa Hancock, Vivi, and Tashigi as your crew through story events, including sex events of course, and fight the other characters including some girls too, like Arlong, Alvida, Crocodile, and even marines like Koby.

Working on the minigames for Pan Hero also made me realize that I could make more than just a visual novel with it. So for this game, I’m making a typing action RPG game. Where other than your character and ship stats, typing will also decide whether you’ll win or lose ship battles and character battles. I’ve already finished the ship battles mechanics, and also the open world map where you can set sail and visit islands. At first in the open world map, it’s kind of a turn based where ships would move in turn. First your ship moves, then other ships move, which include marines, pirates, and civilians. But then, I managed to make real-time movement work. I’ll show you the teaser soon so you can see what I’m talking about.

And I thought that given how popular One Piece and its characters are, it could help in generating more interest in my games. And hopefully they’ll also learn to love Pan Hero and Natsumi Love Story since they’re all written in the same styles, wholesome and loving sex, with some danger. I hope that this will boost my growth so I can keep working on my games full time. And since it will be using sprites rather than rendering each scene, the workload would be significantly less. Only the sex scenes would be rendered. So going forward, I will work on this One Piece inspired game too.

That said, I want to make it clear that Pan Hero or Natsumi Love Story are not being abandoned and will still be continued. And to reduce more workload, I’m thinking of just using sprites for Natsumi Love Story going forward too, except for the sex scenes. And then when I have more time or even have enough income, I could hire someone to render each scene in Natsumi Love Story again. As for Pan Hero, it will remain fully rendered. It takes considerably more effort, but I believe the final result is worth it, and I want to preserve the visual quality and the overall quality that has been part of the game from the beginning. 

Third, I took on some freelance work. 

Game development is still my main goal, but I also need to make sure I can support myself financially. Because of that, I spent a good amount of time doing freelance work over the past year, which left less time and energy for development. 

Hopefully I can make enough money from this so that I can keep doing it full time. Once again, I want to thank everyone who has supported me throughout this journey. Whether you've been supporting me for months or years, your support has made a huge difference. The Daily Life of Pan Hero and Natsumi Love Story would not exist without you, and I'm incredibly grateful for that.  

Anyway, here are some sneak peeks from Pan Hero's new update, the character of Serving Titty Monster made in Koikatsu, the character of One Piece made in Koikatsu, and some screenshot of the One Piece inspired games that I'm making.