Weekly update: Revival (Patreon)

Okay, I'm back! Sorry for the lapse in communication. So I was sick, then got my final vaccine shot, which wiped me out all over again. That was the initial problem, but the rest... well... 

>.<'

Personal update

In the past year or so, I've managed to become quite productive and well-balanced despite being ADHD and a total social hermit. It has come down to developing a strict daily routine that keeps me focused without burning me out. It's been great, and I've managed to construct a 40+ hour work week that suits my personal needs.

What I didn't quite realize was how the whole thing is a house of cards, ready to collapse at any moment. Being sick disrupted the routine and essentially sent me back to the stone age. I've been clawing my way back to the routine, which is giving me the ability to be productive and social(ish) again.

Clearly, I need to work on making my routine more resilient to disruptions, cause fuck me this was devastating. 

SHF 3

I'm now doing everything I can to blast through the loose ends and any remaining errors. A lot of decisions are happening right now about what to finish vs what to put off until the next update. Some things were just too ambitious to do all at once, so it's better to just have it WORK for now. 

Decision paralysis can be pretty crippling with that stuff, so in general I tend to make snap decisions to avoid that paralysis. Sometimes that means I end up biting off more than I can chew, which happened here. So, I'm adopting a mixed approach for things like automating parts of the rigs, toy creation, and animation. 

Those new systems are awesome, and will save a lot of development time in the long run, but I can't waste time perfecting them while everyone's waiting for the update to come out. So they'll be partially implemented for now, and finished one at a time instead of all at once.

I'm not gonna make predictions about what'll be done when, but I'm fixin' stuff like a madman, I tell you.

Future games

SHF3 is my full-time focus right now. This is all stuff that comes after the current update is finished.

I've been learning the HARD way about the importance of making a vertical slice when developing a game or a feature. 

Love Collector was my first major game, and it suffered a lot from lack of clarity in what I wanted gameplay-wise. The gameplay changed drastically over the course of development, based on player feedback. In the final version, it still didn't live up to my own vague expectations. 

SHF3 is just a sandbox game, but the intended gameplay was pretty much there from the start: I wanted a mouse-controlled bsdm game like the game "Rack" by Fek. Boom, clarity. But as it grows, I find it suffers more and more from a lack of foresight when it comes to features. For example, we've been talking in the streams about a time-skipping feature, in which you can fast-forward hours of game time and see how exhausted/horny/destroyed your ponies are. It's an awesome idea, and I never thought I'd need to think about how to program that in the beginning. (I'll talk more about this feature later btw)

I'm now looking at the idea for Factory and am anxious about whether I'll be able to properly use what I've learned. I have the clarity sorted out- I wrote a full game design doc with all aspects of gameplay covered. I have the foresight- all needed features are listed, ready for prototyping. But am I really able to deliver on the idea? The last thing I want is to be stuck for 6 months on Factory with nothing to post.

I'm considering putting my energy into some smaller projects, especially if I can use the SHF3 code as a game engine to make little one-shot games. There's also a narrative game idea I have that would require relatively little code to put together. The purpose of these would be to practice the whole process of game-making, from concept to completion, without spending years of dev time. I haven't decided on anything yet, but I wanted everyone to know where my head is at when it comes to the future of my content.

This'll be something I want feedback on from the community, so we'll talk more about it in-depth after this SHF3 update drops.

That's all for now! <3