Published: April 25th 2024, 6:39:56 pm
Hi. It's been a while again, hasn't it? I am still alive and I'm actually doing quite well.
I have worked on the game, but it's going incredibly slow. Life is good but very hectic. Work, relationships and mental health come before adult fantasy and that often means I maybe can get an average of 30 minutes a week of development in.
This isn't permanent, it's just been a pretty intense year so far. I usually work this way where I do a whole month's work in one good weekend every once in a while, but even those weekends are rare now. There's a lot of shame and guilt for that, and when it accumulates I tend to be too ashamed and not log into the Patreon for months at a time sometimes.
No more Pay-to-Play
Anyway, I recently decided for sure that I am done with the pay-to-play, hopefully forever. I removed the password off MAiH2 and will not be putting it back anytime soon. The premium content will still be available to Patreons only, but I don't want to force anyone to pay for my games anymore.
Your money throughout HHHE's and MAiH2's development has truly helped me build my life back up from the depths of depression and I'm forever grateful for every single dollar you guys gave me. I wouldn't be where I am without you. But I'm doing well again on my own and while it's real fun to have this extra income, I don't feel good anymore forcing anyone to pay to play. I'll gladly take a paycut and get rid of the guilt a little, as well as have more people enjoy the game.
So where are we at with development?
Well, I'm still working on the movie making mechanics. It's a really big feature and I don't want to have to redo it later on because I rushed it. Right now it's coming along nicely, but there's still tonnes of writing mostly. Movies will have 'events' during production. Some might pause production until the player intervenes, others will be missable events that require you to visit the production site. Movies go through several production phases (writing, casting, shooting, post, marketing etc.) and each can randomly incur several events. There will be one or two events per stage at first but I have ideas for dozens someday in the far future.
Good news is that I can re-use a big part of this movie framework for things like the show production, adult video production and possibly the music (I haven't quite worked out how I want to tackle music yet). So this is a lot of frontloading and then things will hopefully go smoother.
When!?
I'm just gonna stop giving date predictions because they're always wrong. I'll drop it when it's done!
Bonus question: any AI writing experts?
I kind of didn't want to do this, but using AI might just help me deliver a better experience until I have the time to write more. I have tried finding writers but I have a hard time keeping up regular contact with people and it'd be pretty amazing to just stamp out a placeholder scene within a minute whenever I need.
But I honestly kind of slept on AI and I am pretty out of the loop mostly. If anyone knows of a good site or even a local run instance of storywriting AI that would be good for short adult scenes like in the game, please send me a DM. Paid services aren't an issue. I might also need some pointers for prompts etc.