March 24 Progress Update

Alright, we're now a solid 2 months into the development of Waifu Wonderland, and things are progressing pretty smoothly!

When I first started this project at the end of Dec I laid out a plan to get through the illustrations and get the 0.1 version out this year, and even with some setbacks, it's still on track to come out this year. Let's take a look at the numbers.

Character CG - 13/28 - 46%

Scenes - 11/44 - 25%

Sprites - 5/28 - 17%

Total - 26/100 - 26%

These percentages are all rounded down. For fun I added in a total count, but it's honestly not very representative of the time. Since the sprites generally only take maybe 30min, but scenes can take more than 10 hours. Still thought it would be a fun stat to track though. Especially for once I catch up on sprites and it jumps up. I did think it was kind of funny that it just happened to be exactly 100 total.

Changes to Totals - 

Any eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the numbers have changed again.
To start, I was play testing while putting in some finished illustrations and decided to cut three of Ms. Hartley's scenes. The battles are just way too hard and would take a ton of grinding in the initial version to beat. I designed them to be beaten much later in the game, so it's extremely unlikely for anyone to be able to beat them in the initial version. I'll honestly be surprised if anyone gets her first scene, let alone any of the others. So it just kind of felt like a waste of three weeks to work on scenes that basically no one will be able to actually unlock until later. So I just removed the flag needed to unlock later scenes. Instead her BJ scene will repeat until later versions.

And then the other change was from adding in the two hookers to downtown and the university areas. Each will have 6 scenes, so that added a total of 12. Just being color variations they'll go very quickly once I'm done with Sandy's scenes. Then of course that also adds 2 character CG and 2 sprites. The character CG is done, so that was just a bonus.

This should be the last time that anything gets changed, unless I end up adding another hooker to another area. In the currently available areas, there's planned to be just one more. So I may end up doing another poll to decide who gets added there, but we'll see. It entirely depends on how long it takes to get everything else done.

Possible Gameplay Changes - 

Originally the game was designed to work in a day-to-day system. Different women would appear on different days and some women would appear in different areas on different days. But I'm thinking about scrapping this in favor of creating more areas instead. Having to fully populate a whole world for a full 7 days would just be a staggering amount of work. Sure, some women would be available every day, but areas like the beach were initially designed to have completely different characters every day. Even if there's just 3 characters, that would be 21 total characters for the beach alone. Even if the game gets some support and I'm able to start doing a character and scene each week, that's 21 weeks, or more than 5 months, just working on characters for the one area. And on top of that, if you're doing something like trying to beat one specific character, and they only appear on one day, but you run out of stamina, it will create a bit of an annoying situation. You'd have to go back and sleep over and over until you get back to the day you need.

Of course getting rid of the day-to-day system would also change a lot of the planned ideas. I have a couple ideas that are pretty reliant on it. Like one story where different women appear on different days, and having to seek out certain women in order to advance the storyline. As well as another where you have to find someone on their day off in another area in order to get them to talk to you on a different day. These storylines could still be done by changing them so that they instead appear in a specific order, or having you sleep a certain number of times, but I'm worried that would get rid of some of the fun.

I'm mostly just worried about that larger scope being too much for just me to do. I do want the project to go on for a while, but having a 7 day system would extend the project out waaaaaaay too long. At the current pace, it would likely take around 5 years just to populate the starting areas. Which is a bit ridiculous. Of course, the catch is that if the project does go that long, that means it's being supported and I'd more than likely have hired on some people to help make development faster. Making the point moot.

We'll see, that change is something I don't need to decide on until the first day is completely populated. Which should be after a couple of updates anyway. So there's still time to decide. It's just something I wanted to talk about now, in case it happens later.

More Specific Progress - 

I thought it would be fun to talk more specifically about what's been done and who is going where. Just so people have a better idea on what's going to be coming. The bold characters and scenes are what was added in Feb. So let's go area by area, starting with 

Neighborhood - The area you start in where you live with Ayako and Seika.

Ayako -
Char CG (done)
BJ Scene (done)
Sex Scene

Seika -
Char CG (done)
TJ Scene (done)

Kaori -
Char (done)
Sex Scene (done)

Shiori -
Char (done)
Sex Scene (done)

Angela - The Mysterious Girl
Char CG (done)
Sex Scene

Marika - The Housewife
Char CG
BJ Scene
Sex Scene

Meredith - The Housewife
Char CG
Sex Scene

Judith - Meredith's Sister
Char CG
Sex Scene

Misaki - The Housewife
Char CG
Sex Scene

Aoyagi - The Housewife
Char CG
Sex Scene
???? Scene

Sakura - The Housewife
Char CG (done)
Sex Scene (done)

The University - Where you go to school.

Ms. Hartley -
Char CG (done)
BJ Scene (done)

Rinko - The Teacher
Char CG
Sex Scene

Rinko - The Real Estate Agent - She'll be in the University area selling apartments at first, but she'll appear whenever you buy a new type of housing.
Char CG
TJ Scene

The Beach - It's the beach.

Alicia - The Beach Babe
Char CG (done)
Sex Scene (done)

The Hospital - Where to go if you get sick. If you can afford it.

Nurse Hailey - The Hospital Receptionist
Char CG
Sex Scene

Nurse Miharu - The Gyaru Nurse
Nurse Char CG
Casual Clothes Char CG
BJ Scene
Sex Scene

The Lab - Where to go to be guinea pig for experiments in exchange for some cash.

Flare - The Lead Scientist on the Portal Project
Char CG 

Almiranda - The Demoness
Char CG (done)
Sex Scene (done)

Butterfly - The Demoness
Char CG
Sex Scene

Calvia - The Demoness
Char CG
Sex Scene

Hitomi - The Demoness(?)
Char CG
BJ Scene

Shopping District - Where you go to buy stuff.

Convience Store Girl -
Char CG

Other Stuff - 

Hookers -
Char CG x3 (done)
HJ Scene x3
TJ Scene x3
BJ Scene x3
Basic Sex Scene x3
Deluxe Sex Scene x3
Special Sex Scene x3

Male Char CG

What was the ?????

I could have just put this in there, but I thought this would be more fun. Not sure if I've mentioned it yet, but some women you'll be able to get pregnant. In this world, for the woman to have the baby, they need to have sex with the father once they come to term. Only then can the baby be delivered. Because of reasons. Mainly being that I always think it's weird how games will have a pregnancy mechanic, but then no pregnant sex scenes. The way it will work, is that once you have sex with them, they'll immediately tell if if they're pregnant. Then you have to wait 5 days. During that time you can't do any scenes with them. After 5 days, you can back and have sex with them again, and they'll deliver the baby. Then you can repeat their normal scene. Some women will basically force you to impregnate them, like Aoyagi, others you'll get pregnant on accident, and others will be entirely your choice. I thought it would be fun to mix it up a bit and make it a little more of a surprise when someone gets pregnant.

The game is playing by haramase simulator rules, so the government comes and takes care of the baby and you get paid for helping to continue the human race. The amount you get will vary depending on the woman. Basically, women in later areas will pay more. This is mainly a balancing thing. I was going to have them all pay the same, but if I did that, either this first one would give absurd amounts of money and completely break the game, or later women would give basically nothing. There are exceptions though. There's planned to be short storied involving you getting women pregnant, who then keep the baby. 

Change to Tiers - 

I've also changed the Patron tiers a little bit. From now on, polls will all be public. Mainly to get as many responses as possible. However, to make up for that, I've implemented a weighted system for polls. Basically, patrons votes are worth more.
So for the basic $1 tier, a vote is worth 2.
For the Supah $5 tier, a vote is worth 5.
For the WIP $10 tier and higher, a vote is worth 10.

I had thought about doing 25, 50, and 75 votes for the higher tiers, but once it gets above 10, it just starts to get a little too crazy. If anyone got the 50 or 75 tier, they could very easily just win every poll. And I do want there to be a chance for something else to win. So I thought 10 was a good max.

I may also make a discord server for patrons soon. I don't really go on discord that much though, so I'm not really sure what kind of content would be expected there. Until I know, I'm going to hold off on making one.

Also, just for transparency, I vote in every poll as well. Up until now, of course my votes only counted as 1 like everyone else. But with the change, mine will be worth 2. If people start becoming paid patrons, I'll eventually increase that number, but for now, it's just worth 2. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons, the first is that while I do want the game to be shaped by the community, I also want to make sure that things don't get too stagnant. As odd as this is going to sound, a big part of what makes games fun, is having things that people don't like included. That's why there's stuff like stealth sections in action games. It slows everything down and keeps the primary gameplay from getting old. By giving people something different that they may not want, it makes the regular game feel fun and fresh again when you return to it. When it's the same the whole time, it can start to get repetitive and when that happens a game will get boring. So I want to help ensure that doesn't happen by voting as well to tip things in a direction that may add a bit more variety. The second reason, is that sometimes there just needs to be a tiebreaker. By having my vote worth 2, there shouldn't ever be another 5 way tie, like in the most recent poll.

Update Conclusion - 

And that's everything for this month. No huge changes this time. Just going to keep on working through the remaining scenes. I do get a week off this month, so I'm planning on getting as much done as possible. At the very least, I want to get the sprites caught up to the completed characters. So unless something bad happens, there should be a considerable boost in total completion in next month's overall update. I'm also considering bum rushing through the character CG. I've gotten to the point where the process is fairly refined, and the most recent character, Angela, only took me about 2 1/2 hours to finish. Now that I've got a solid system for those, I figure I could knock them out even faster by doing them back-to-back. Then maybe by doing the scenes one after another, I'll develop a quicker system as well, and get those done even faster. We'll see though. The main goal for next month is to get total completion up past 40%. If I do the main 4 art pieces for the month, and keep doing the alternating character CG and scene CG, then I just need to catch up on sprites to hit that mark. With any luck, I'll get more than that though. But again, we'll just have to see. As long as the game isn't getting support, paying work will always need to take priority. 

That's all for now. If you got this far, thank you! I hope you look forward to where the game goes next month.