What goes into releasing a new version of Lust Theory

Hi, we get these questions a lot: When is the next update? What's thanking so long? Can you do it faster?

So, we thought we would give you some insight on what it takes and what goes into creating a new version of Lust Theory. (Some steps are not mentioned here)

1. Write, re-write and proof-read the new dialogue and story for the version.

2. Once this is done, decide what lines of text get assigned an image (Render) or an animation.

3. Create all the new images (This takes the most time since one person can do 30-50 of images per day at most)

4. Create all the new animations (This takes a long time too. A person can do 2-3 of these per day, depending on complexity. Then run "test animations" which are low quality. If they seem good, we render them out in high quality which can take up to one day per animation. In some cases, even longer)

5. Render out all the images and animations.

6. Check all the images for clipping (Things going trough things, for example. Finger going through a door or clothes going through skin.)

7.Fix and re-render the bigger clips. Try to fix smaller ones in Photoshop.
8. Write the code for the new version and insert all the new dialogue.

9. Touch up all the images in Photoshop. Then convert them from PNG to JPG.

10. Run all animations trough Premiere to check all the frames and fix things if needed.

11. Convert all the images from AVI to Webm.

12. Import all the images and animations into the game.

13. Run the first test of the game. Check if all the images and animations fit the text. If not,
re-render and re-convert. Check again. Repeat if it still doesn't fit.

14. Play the new version again and try all the branching options, look for possible inconsistencies in the story and bugs. (Fix all of these before moving forward)

15. Add the Hint system for the new episode, add new sound effects and new buttons.

16. At this stage, the Lead game designer and the Lead coder sit together and play the game to see where we can add blinking effects and "slut mode" images.

17. Create the blinking images, slut mode images and gallery images and import them into the game.

18. Deploy the internal pre-alpha version of the game. (You'd be surprised how much time this amounts to when you have to do it 15 times per version)

19. At this point, 5 people start playing the game from the beginning. So, from Episode 1 to the current Episode, in this case episode 8. Look for bugs, check if old saves work, try all the branching options, then try them again in different order to see if any of these breaks the game. Fix the new bugs. Re-deploy the game and send it to testing again. Get new bug reports, fix them and re-deploy... And so on until we can't find any more bugs. ( In a game with a repeating day and a complicated game code, bugs can always happen. Now it's up to you to find them and report them.)

20. Now we have a game BETA of the new version. This is the part where the Lead game designer and Lead coder go through new content of the game together and check once more for spelling errors, inconsistencies and they add dissolves, fades and other image transitions. Once this is done, we deploy the release version of the game and upload it to Mega (Uploading also takes a while since we have a shitty ISP).

21. At this stage, we create posts on Patreon. One that explains what's in the new version and one download post for the game.

22. We FINALLY release the new version of the game on Patreon.

(Extra bonus step.)
23. 10 minutes later, watch the hard work of 8 people being shared for free. While thinking how will we pay all the people that are working on it. Say fuck it and go for a beer. Next day, start working on the next version because, in the end, you're making games that people enjoy so there's that at least.