A look back at 2023 and an outlook at 2024

Hello everyone,

for those who don't mind some reading, it's the end-of-the-year Wall of Text time :-)

I don't know what 2023 was like for you, but for me, it was a pretty exhausting year.
There were many ups and downs, some serious slumps, but also a few highlights.

Very early in the year, right after the Christmas Special 2022's release (Release 0.10), I began refactoring a part of TM!'s code, to move away from dialogue menu-based room navigation to a proper room navigation system.

Long story short, it was a bit of a disaster...
Due to limited Ren'Py coding experience on my end, and the difficulty of getting my (stressful) job, new content to TM, and basically operating on the games' open heart, under the same hood, this led to lots of bugs. 0.12 brought the first version of that new room navigation, but it took no less than 2 major updates -  and some bugfix releases in between - to get the stability back to about 0.10 levels.

Since the complete lack of any hints system was also an issue, I band-aided a basic hint system onto 0.14 and released that as 0.14.5.

Frankly speaking, between October 2022 and about spring of this year, I was *this* close to throwing the towel, multiple times.
Low levels of patron support (in the 80-110$ range), low confidence in both myself and the games' longer-term potential, and on top of that a ton of stress at work can do that to you.
If you like TM! the way it is now (especially the Chapter 2 content), you have mostly my co-coder/-writer xtone and a few Level 5 patrons to thank for that; without them, TM's development would've ended as early as late last year (after the Christmas release).

But in spring of this year, after xtone's delayed involvement on the coding side finally got off the starting block, we decided to give TM! another bigger overhaul from the ground up (on the coding side, at least).
This is what brought you the further improved room navigation we now have, the stat systems, and the girl info/hint screens in their current form, among other improvements.
When we released another stop-gap update with some new content based on the old code as update 0.15 - which previewed Iris, whose design I'm still quite proud of -, the overhaul was internally already in full swing.
I think it took us nearly 2 months to get the code to the point of update 0.16, and some last puzzle pieces, bugfixes (and more content) didn't arrive until 0.17.

But I believe starting with 0.18, the amount of new content per update has been fairly solid again, and the gameloop is on a solid foundation as well, even if there still isn't that much "gameplay".

I think I mentioned this before, but originally, I had hoped to bring the full 0.21 update featuring the next new maid as early as a few days before Christmas, but as I've also mentioned in that previous devlog, it didn't work out, mostly because my job tied me down almost the entire first half of the month.
These moments are kind of disappointing to me too, but sometimes you just have to accept when life has other plans than you do.

That being said, on to the

Outlook on 2024

More dev time and how it will be spent

I have mentioned it before, but after I kind of had to fight for it, I finally found an agreement with my employer to reduce work hours starting from January.

This additional time will go fully towards game development, so you can definitely expect more content per month.

That being said, as the patrons among you could probably already tell from a certain poll, most of the additional time will not go towards Total Maidness. Some of it sure, just not the bulk of it.
Let me explain why.

Over the past year (and occasionally before that), I've done some 'investigating', to figure out why Total Maidness! lags so far behind some other games in popularity.

I'm sure some of the most obvious explanations will have played a role, like

• not as much new content per month as some other games (this is a valid point, although some of these other devs can afford to develop their game fulltime precisely because they make enough money to do that; this 'issue' is also the reason for our moderate tier prices, especially for the 2 lowest tiers)
• not enough engaging story (this feature wasn't really asked for that much by voters last time we included it in a poll, but visitors of this page are mostly people who already sort of like TM! the way it is I guess, so maybe more/better story would've helped more bringing in additional supporters than the polls suggested)
• not enough girls (see point 1, although I must admit this is in part the result of lack of planning, as TM was originally not meant to become such a big game to begin with)
• not enough gameplay (repeating sandbox scenes to farm stats becomes boring after a while, I know that)
• less cross-promotion than some other devs do

But all of those possible explanations don't adress the elephant in the room, which is hard to confirm for the very same reason why it's hard to tell if more/better story would've helped, namely that the people who could confirm or deny it (the people who are skipping TM on itch, or drop it early into the game) probably rarely visit this page:

It could be that the games' very concept and theme simply isn't good or interesting enough to become a huge success, even if we somehow doubled the content per month, or added more gameplay, story and maids, did more cross-promo etc..

That being said, it's not like TM! is the least successful lewd game out there either, so there's obviously enough people - like you - that like it the way it is (despite some of its shortcomings), and I believe that particularly Chapter 2 is actually quite a bit more fun than Chapter 1 (which may very well be part of TM's problem, too: Chapter 1 is admittedly a bit shallow).
Therefore, TM's development will continue as usual for now, approximately at the content pace you've seen from release 0.18 onwards.

Still, in part because I feel like this is the only way to really find out how much of the relative lack of success is really down to the games' concept, rather than specific other issues, and in part because after more than 20 months of working on TM, my brain simply needs something fresh and some variety to stay motivated, I will soon launch a new side project, based on the concept that won the patron poll (by a large margin at that).

And for the record: If you're one of the patrons who voted for concept 2 or 3, let's just say concept 2 is something I absolutely want and will do eventually (in some form), and concept 3 will probably be released and run by my RL friend who came up with the idea, with me helping them out.
No timeline for either of those yet, but if you preferred one of them over concept 1, don't give up hope :)
It's also possible that after TM development ends, I'll switch to Concept 2 as new main and continue Concept 1 as side-project, the poll results made it clear you patrons kind of agree that a more story-focused bigger game is probably better suited as main project.
We'll see, I think this will be easier to figure out once I've got something tangible for you, so you get a better idea of what these games will actually be like.

Anyway, if you care more about TM than any side projects, don't worry, TM will continue at least until all of the more popular content poll choices (as well as some stuff that I want to do regardless of poll results) have been taken care of.

Speaking of polls:

Content polls - summary of current standings

As the non-patrons among you might have noticed as well (especially if you're also on our discord), we've been running some polls to see what players want to see next.

There were a few interesting differences between patron and discord results, but when it came to the top choices, patrons and discord were pretty much in agreement:

• For character content priority, among the maids people mostly want more Iris, more Emily, more Kate (in that order), and particularly patrons also want the introduction of Claire's 19 yo. daughter as sidegirl. Also, Mary and Claire are in shared 5th place, and if we combine their votes, an argument could be mai- I mean, made that players want to see more of the motherly figures as well.
• For kink priority, FFM (multi-girl) was the clear winner (hence the recent combo follow-up poll), followed by exhibitionism and pregnancy roughly tied in 2nd place. More ****jobs are relatively popular too, although these can to some degree be combined with FFM.
  Noteworthy: Wholesome SFW interactions were only popular on Discord, not among patrons. As patrons are footing the bill, I'd rather spend most of the dev time on features that were more popular among patrons for now, but I'll try to squeeze in a handful of simple interactions like headpats, hugging and kissing for more girls (Iris already has those) in a later update.
• For FFM priorities, players basically confirmed again that they want more Iris :-)
  However, a scene with all maids, as well as a scene with Claire's 19yo daughter, were also very pop

And for the record, directed at patrons: I don't know what causes it, but Patreon's poll system seems to be at least somewhat bugged: When I download the statistics for the polls, some options got notably less votes than what's shown in the poll interface.
In those cases, I trusted the downloaded statistics rather than the web page, as it might be some browser incompatibility issue.

Tiny 1-off side project release for patrons soon

If you played (and liked) My Naughty Neighbor, well, later today I'll be releasing Mia's Bad Hair Day, its sort-of successor. These two are basically simplified versions of what were once meant to be episodes of a bigger, episodic project, which I've shelved for various reasons.
MBHD is again very short, and a bit different from MNN. It'll also probably get at least 1 content update at some point, but only when I have some more time and the right mood; it could be days after TM 0.21, or it could be months off, I really can't say for sure.
MBHD will launch for Level 3/Maid Charmer upwards today, trickle down to Level 2/Mansion Heir tomorrow (I just wanted Level 3+ to have at least some advantage here...), and stay there for a little. It'll trickle down to Level 1 patrons soonish, too, but I'll probably synchronize that with when TM 0.21 becomes available to lower tiers.

Patron tier/level changes

Just want to mention these are going to happen when the new bigger side project launches, and probably again when eventually later Concept 2 is also turned into a game.

What I can already say is: You should look forward to this.

I'm determined to increase the amount of monthly content/benefits per $/€/yourcurrency.
In some cases by adding benefits (like early access to both TM and the new side-project to the Level 4+5 tier), in some cases by phasing out an existing tier in favor of something cheaper, etc.

More on that when we get there, but I want to "beat" most other developers in terms of bang for buck, and I know we currently only have about parity with many of them, so that will require some changes.
Stay tuned for this.

Anyway, that's it from me for now.
I wish you a good start into the new year, and hope to see you around in (and hopefully throughout) 2024!

- OCN

P.S.: If you really read all that, color me impressed :)