Halfway to the Wooden Door!

Alright! I've been developing a new writing schedule, in which I get in just a little bit of writing almost every day at times that I can be alone and comfortable, and so far it's been working pretty well getting content moving again. Part of me is saddened just to look at what I just said and realize that "making progress at all" is a big improvement right now, but if this can get me consistently moving in the long term, I certainly won't be complaining. The "bigger sex scene" I was referring to last time was actually an alternate version to the one that I finished before, and that in turn has split into two alternates-- a lot of the time, I try to write a single sex scene in such a way that parts can be swapped out to handle most issues of anatomy, but in this case, I decided it needed to go ahead and be written out almost fully as three different scenes. On the one hand, that means more fresh content if and when folks do a second or third playthrough with different anatomy, but on the other, it will feed more into the same problem I'm already concerned about with this update x3

Last update, I was worried the whole deal with the stone door would be too weird for folks. Happily, this doesn't seem to have been the case! This update, things are going weird again, but I'm not so worried about it. What I am worried about is that it doesn't feel to me like it will have as much content as the last update, and that will be partly because there's only one sex scene, even though it's technically three sex scenes folded into one spot (one of which will, for now, only be accessible to donators). This feeling will be amplified by where I'm putting the cutoff for this update-- basically, everything I've been writing has been "set up" for what's going on behind the Wooden Door. And once I'm done setting it all up very dramatically and getting the player excited to try out their choices for what's "actually" going on behind the wooden door... well, that's where v0.15 will stop for now. Worse, I plan to go back to the stone door for v0.16, so I'm already bracing myself for a lot of questions about why people can't "do" any of the stuff they're expecting to do through the wooden door xP I may have to include some very blatant placeholders, I suppose, as I did with the wooden door itself in v0.14 :p We shall see!

Now, with all that hassle, why am I cutting off v0.15 there? A couple different reasons. The first is that, a long time ago, I decided I needed to start forcing myself to make the updates smaller, so that hopefully I could push them out faster and keep a good cycle going between myself and the players. It feels great when the new update goes out and folks are excited, but when I'm looking at alll the things I want to do for the next version, I end up kind of... resting on my laurels for a while ^.^; So I'm hoping setting smaller goals will keep me working more often, keep people more interested, and get a good flow going all around. The problem with v0.14 was that the stone door didn't feel like something I could do as a small update... Every collar had a huge chunk to write out, so if I didn't write all of them, some people effectively wouldn't get something new that update, and if I only wrote half, it wouldn't have even had a sex scene. And I think it's a fair assumption that a new update without any sex at all wouldn't get people very excited :p Besides the most devout blue-collar players, perhaps.

The other main reason was mentioned briefly before-- I have several smaller things to add to the game along with the new content, and it's high time I get that stuff polished and out to you guys. I'm looking at ways to make dominant Lith and the pink collar easier to get, and I may adjust the game's overall difficulty some while I'm at it. Further, without the promise of an actual artist, I'm taking a hard look at redoing Lith's art myself-- replacing one placeholder with a marginally better one, at the very least. Also, I'm considering including a way to get feedback about how players are playing the game-- right now, I'm just kind of releasing it into the wild and hoping for the best, but with information on how it's played, I may be able to better refine its difficulty and flow. I'll get more into this later.

Anyway, all of this means that I've set my milestone for v0.15 a little closer than I might have once thought I would, and I've got the big sex scene past two-thirds written up, so I'm feeling much more confident when I add another notch to the game's progress bar today!

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We're halfway to the next update, and most of what's left isn't writing but game design, so it may well go a deal faster just for not having to depend on my fickle artistic moods. Thanks for sticking with me, folks! :3 I welcome comments and questions, do let me know if I'm being unclear about anything (besides the parts where I'm deliberately avoiding spoilers :p).