Meet Madison - The Housewife

This week is another housewife who lives in the neighborhood you start the game in, and the first dark skin girl. Since last week's post was late, I decided to make this one early.

This is Madison, she lives one street over and is a good housewife. She's generally found cooking or cleaning the house while her husband is at work.

While Madison is devoted to her husband, she's also very submissive. She'll let you into seduction mode, just because she doesn't like confrontation. She initially will only give you a BJ, because she doesn't want to cheat on her husband, but she's also never been with someone with a big penis before. So if you keep trying, eventually she'll be willing to give it a try.

That makes her a little different than other random characters in the neighborhood. Since she's not a one-off character, but doesn't really have a storyline either. She's mainly there to show the player that you can sometimes unlock more scenes by doing the same scene multiple times. To add an element of surprise and mystery to the game. As well as give people a reason to repeat scenes. If you don't know if you'll get more or not, then that gives a good reason to repeat scenes when you can. There's also planned to be some short storylines later that require you to repeat scenes a certain number of times to unlock their story, and/or other women, and this is meant to be an introduction to that possibility as well.

Madison's Inspiration - 

Madison was inspired by Marika O'hara from "Big Black Cock & Big Black Butt & My Sweet Wife" or "Otonari no Kokujin Otto ni Dakarete Nakimodaeru Saiai no Tsuma. Sono Hikikae ni Ajiwau Kokujin Tsuma no Hada. -Biggu Burakku Cock & Biggu Burakku Butto & Mai Suiito Waifu-"
I absolutely love absurdly long names like that. I always have to resist naming my projects insanely long names like that. Since while I would think it's hilarious, it would make them harder to find.

Anyway, the design was changed a lot here, but I wanted to keep the basic idea of dark skinned housewife. The game really needed some darker skin girls, so I made her even darker than her inspiration. I originally gave her a purple blouse, but I also wanted a character with a green theme, so I tried out green and it worked out well. In my experience, green and purple are generally the two colors that work best with darker skin tones, and since there aren't any green themed characters yet (outside of Ivy), I'm glad it worked out here. I did end up giving her blonde hair, like her inspiration, but I did change the style a bit. I did end up keeping the soft beige color for her skirt too, because it gives her even more of a unique look. I realized I've done pretty much exclusively dark colors for skirts so far, and wanted to change things up a bit. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again, I really just want to make sure there's variety. I feel like without variety, there's no point in having the game filled with one-off characters. The next character will have a darker color scheme again, but it's necessary for her. She's a real estate agent, so she'll be wearing a suit. And I just think brightly colored suits are a bit weird. Well, she's probably the next character. That's who I'm planning on right now, but that can always change.

Anyway, unlike most characters, I decided to change the name here from Marika to Madison. I just honestly don't like the name Marika.

Sprites, Sprites, Sprites - 

I've also caught up on sprites like I had planned to do over the break. Unfortunately I haven't been able to do much more than that though. I've had to spend too much time working on my normal projects, because they all got behind thanks to Rebirth too lol.

We're also at the halfway point for character art now!

Madison makes for 14/28 character CG done! Which is pretty exciting. With the sprites caught up, we're also at 40% total completion. Although admittedly, I'm considering slashing some scenes again. The more I think about it, the more I think it would be better to just have the game out there with less content. Cutting out a bunch of stuff I already did would be a bummer, but being able to finish scenes then immediately put them into the game would make for a much better workflow. I also wouldn't have to be limited to working on what's already in the game. Having an actual game would also make it so I know if people were interested or not. In my experience, people also really don't care about 0.1 versions of games. Regardless of how much content is there, they see the 0.1 and just ignore it. Which is completely understandable. A lot of 0.1 versions launch with basically nothing in the game. A lot of games with multiple updates have basically nothing in the game. But of course, that's a bit of a catch-22. I could launch with little content, because that's what's expected, but that could alienate people from the project. But if I work for hundreds of hours across almost an entire year and put it out with a decent amount of content, it could come out and no one will play it because it's a 0.1. Either way I'll need to work for another year or so to put out enough updates for people to give it a shot. But if I already worked for a year to put out that initial release, then another to get people to even start looking at the game, that's basically two years and potentially over 1000 hours working on something without any support. And I don't just mean support in terms of making money, I also mean in terms of number of people who play the game, vote in polls, and interact with the project in any way. As an artist, there's nothing worse than creating something, and being met with silence. But even if something isn't making money, if people are enjoying it, then that makes it worth the effort. 

So yeah, I may cut some more scenes. Primarily 2nd or 3rd scenes. Like Marika is planned to have 2 scenes in 0.1, but if I cut more, she would just have the one. And I may just have some stuff not have a scene, but still be in the game. Like instead of having all 6 of the hooker scenes in the game, I'll just have the one that's done and then the HJ scene. You can still buy the other packages and still get the exp for them, but the scene will just be a black placeholder screen. I'm also considering cutting the lab area entirely from 0.1. It would be a bummer, since Almiranda is already done, but that would cut out 3 scenes and 4 character CG. The quest is also broken right now and needs fixing. For some reason it's looping back to an earlier state, and I would need to fix that to include in 0.1. 

For context, if I cut out everything I'm thinking about cutting, that would cut out 23 scenes and 10 character CG. 12 of those are for Sandy/Ivy/Valentine, so it's really 15 scenes. At the current pace of doing one piece of artwork a week, that means cutting these would cut 25 total weeks until 0.1's release, or 6 months and 1 week. And, as of now, would only leave 4 characters, and 9 scenes until 0.1's release. The game would still have 17 characters in the game and 20 scenes, but that is significantly less than what was initially there. We'll see how I feel at the end of the month though. I'll make my decision before the April monthly update post.

That's probably enough rambling for one post. Just wanted to let people know what I was thinking about doing. If anyone has an opinion on it, please let me know! Next week should be Madison's BJ scene. Hopefully people enjoy it.