POLL TIME!

Hey everyone!

Pardon my dust, this one's a little long!

It's time to pick what I work on next and that's going to be a little different this month, because I'm starting up a new project.

For a while, I've been struggling to get the paper doll system for Play Things to work. This has been for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one I can do something about is anxiety and scope, and anxiety ABOUT scope.

Even just doing a paper doll for Candy in Play Things will require a considerable amount of work.

Play Things is large. It might only take place over a week in game, but it's about 600 000 words right now. There's a lot of stuff going on.

In addition to just getting the core systems up and running - Candy has two main models (SUGAR and SPICE), and about a dozen outfits, plus animations, and... It's a lot, and I wouldn't feel good with JUST doing Candy. I really want to include Riley as well, as she's the deuteragonist, but including her doubles the amount of work.

So I've been sort of intimidated out of even starting this process due to how big it is. It's months of work, at least, and that's for the most basic version. I don't want to do the most basic version, I want it to be good, and that's even more intimidating.

You can't fuck something up if you never actually start working on it!

I know this is not a good way to think, but my brain does it's own thing most days, and this is the gear it's been stuck in for quite a while!

All of this is further complicated by the fact that everyone is split on what I should work on. I always include a question in my questionnaire about what you consider the most important thing for me to work on, and every month it's split roughly evenly between "Finish the main story" and "Work on the art", with 'More specials!' as a distant third.

Much love to Purple here and I appreciate Green's enthusiasm. I'm not sure that going out and getting pounded would really improve the game much.

Maybe it would!

I dunno!

I have been stuck on how to approach the art on this project for a while until I talked to some other game developers and they gave me an idea.

I need to break this problem down into chunks, and a good way of doing that is to make a smaller project to act as a stepping stone. So that's what I'm going to do!

This new project is called 'Is Trixie there?'

'Is Trixie There?' is a short Kinetic Novel, with a 3D character and a mobile camera. The story is about a Normal Office Worker Guy who gets a strange phone-call from a odd woman named Amber who insists that he is actually her best friend and horny gal-pal Trixie!

This is obviously incorrect. For one, you're a Normal Office Worker Guy not some horny girl, and for two your name definitely isn't Trixie....

You can't precisely remember what your name is right now... but you know it's not Trixie!

Probably.

It's probably not Trixie.

Right?

You are getting kinda horny though, and Amber is very convincing...

I've been pretty careful on the scope for this one - I only need three character models, and one room. It's going be between 10000 and 20000 words long. The main kinks are bimbofication, TGTF, corruption and reality warping - so a similar profile to Play Things but without the Toy Stuff.

The purpose of building this smaller game is to solidify a character design, production and animation pipeline, work out the submission process for store pages, and do a bunch of other technical back-end things that I need to do for Play Things eventually without the stress or scale of doing them for a game that is sixty times it's size.

It think it's going to be pretty cool!

I will be posting production updates here, which will be available to everyone, but prototypes will only be available to patrons.

I will be releasing a narrative HTML prototype for Patrons with the full script for 'Is Trixie There?' in a couple of weeks.

Patrons will also be able to play the finished game as soon as it is done, but everyone else will need to wait to play it for free on itch and Steam - it will probably be a month or two after Patrons can play it.

That's the plan for now! It may still change in the future!

So where does the poll come in? Excellent question!

There are basically two options: I can either work on 'Is Trixie There?' alongside working on the next chapter of Play Things, or I can do it instead of working on the next chapter of Play Things.

The option where I only work on 'Is Trixie There?' will mean that it gets completed a lot faster, but it means that Play Things will be delayed until it's finished. The version where I work on one of the Play Things chapters as well will mean that both of them take longer, but there will be a chapter of Play Things released alongside 'Is Trixie There?'

So! What do you think?