Update 15 Post-Mortem

Hey everybody. Today was supposed to be a Roadmap for Update 16, but I'm not quite done with the outline for Update 16 (It's big) and I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to talk about with Update 15, so I'm posting this instead. It's long. I'll forgive you if you don't want to read it.

Short version: This update was really hard.

Non-Spoiler Behind-the-Scenes Stuff

I don’t remember if I’ve ever written a post-mortem for an update before? Maybe?

I had some things I wanted to talk about with this update though, so here it goes.

This was probably the most difficult update I’ve done with the game so far. Not only  because of the content, but because of all my personal circumstances. I started working on this update in February.

In March, we started looking for houses. Also, my Mom went to the hospital with a pulmonary embolism and is now no longer working. This was a big change for us, as my Mom is now on an oxygen machine and needs more help with things than she used to. So, I’m having to go over and help with things and visit her more frequently than I used to.

In April, we found a house we liked, we went through the entire process of buying it, but RocketMortgage screwed us in the end and at the last minute, after preapproving us for weeks, told us that the previous agent we had been working with was doing things wrong and that we were no longer approved. So all the house stuff fell through, which was really a gut punch. A huge disappointment for us, as we thought we were going to be able to move in May. We had already started packing, we had bought things to go in the new house, and we had already told all our friends and family and my roommate that we were moving. Then the mortgage company pulled out and I found myself unsure of what we were going to do.

We also found out that my partner’s Tia was sick and shortly later was diagnosed with cancer, then passed away two weeks later. May was one of the worst months of my life. My partner losing her Tia was excruciating. It still is. We still cry together regularly about it. We cried about her last night. I spent much of May driving back and forth to visit my partner and her family. My partner stayed with them for most of the month and I had to take care of everything back at our house. Working on the game was just about the only good thing I had going on in May.

After all that, in June, I wanted to get back to looking for a house again. We weren’t expecting to find one so quickly, but I stumbled into the perfect place with a perfect landlady, and then everything happened so fast. I found the place on a Tuesday and we were moving in on Saturday. After 10 years at the previous house, we were finally free.

June was just a bundle of chaos. Between moving and mourning and packing and family stuff and still trying to work on the game. It was hard. But it was good.

Which brings us to the present. There’s been several moments that I’ve sat here in my new house, with a working air conditioner, on my new furniture, streaming a movie from my high-speed internet, and I’ve thought “Wow… all this from a silly porn game.”

I love my life. I’m very happy with the things that this game has brought me. Even though this was the hardest update to make, I enjoyed every moment of working on it. It was nice to have that distraction from my real life during this hard time. It was nice to have the constant routine of waking up and working on the game.

I’m very proud of how it turned out. I’m very proud of the game I’ve made and everything that it has allowed me to do. I truly love this game and I love all my supporters.

Okay, so let’s talk about some of the content in the update. I’m going to get into spoilers now, so if you haven’t played the update yet, maybe come back after you do.

Spoilery Stuff

I’m serious. Here comes the spoilers.

They’re coming.

Almost here.

Alright, here they are:

Kendra’s Skydiving Scene

This scene was probably the most difficult scene I’ve made in the entire game. I don’t think I’ve seen a skydiving scene in any other AVN or Daz created game. It’s hard. And I wouldn’t say that I’m ENTIRELY successful with it, but I did my damn best.

The skydiving scene was one I’ve had in my mind for the climax of Kendra’s story from the very beginning. I wrote it in the very first outline I ever made of this story, around three years ago now. I loved the idea of Kendra pushing herself further and further, doing more and more dangerous things, until she does this and there’s a mishap and, in mid-air, she has to really confront the idea of dying. I had the idea in my head of her falling and saying “I don’t want to die!”

I’ll be honest, I cried a lot working on that scene. I’m crying now. One of the last things my partner’s Tia said to me was that she didn’t want to die. I have a hard time reading/writing those words now without thinking of her and how she said it. But at the time I wrote the scene, it was before Tia died. It just feels like everything has more significance now.

Anyway, the scene. With Daz, you mostly use premade assets. But there’s never been any sort of asset pack released ANYWHERE that I could find that had skydiving assets. So, I had to cobble together something. I don’t believe anything that I made in that scene is “realistic”, but hopefully it was at least “believable”. That’s all I want. I’m trying to tell a story with the tools I have, and sometimes the player must use their imagination just a little bit.

So, the jump suits are just mechanics coveralls, the parachutes are just backpacks, the helmets are just motorcycle helmets. I don’t think most people jump with helmets on, but I had no way to make their hair fly up, and I wanted them to be able to speak to each other during the jump, so a helmet with a microphone in it made sense.

Then there was the complication of trying to show the ground that they are falling towards. This might have been the toughest thing about the scene. There are a few options I could have done really. If you made the ground be an actual 3d object and stretched it out, then put a texture on the object. That’s something you could do, but it would be very difficult to hide the edges so that you couldn’t see that it was just a flat plane on the ground below. The other option is HDRI’s, which I use a lot of for backgrounds. So do most other 3D artists.

An HDRI, for those who don’t know is a spherical image, along with the lighting captured in that image. If you were to create an HDRI, you’d get a 360 degree camera and set it up somewhere, then when you put it in the 3d program you’re using, you should be able to look around and it would be just like you are standing wherever the camera is. You can’t actually move around in an HDRI though. It’s like a sphere with an image displayed on the inside of the sphere. If you move anywhere besides the center of the sphere (where the camera was when the HDRI was taken), the image will look distorted and wrong.

If you think about this, you can probably figure out what the problem is for an HDRI of skydiving. It would mean that the camera would have had to taken the HDRI from way up in the air.

Finding HDRI’s taken like that proved VERY difficult. I almost considered just buying a drone and a 360 camera and taking one myself. After many days of searching though, I did find some aerial HDRIs. They weren’t quite as high as what I wanted, but I found one that would work and that’s the one that I used in the game. Through some lens distortion, I tried to make it appear further away than the image actually was. I was not especially happy with the outcome, but it’s the best I could do with what I had.

Lastly on this scene, I saw Kingsman: The Secret Service last year, and there is a skydiving scene in it that inspired me a lot. There’s a shot in it that I loved where the camera is zoomed in on a character’s face as they are falling and the sky and the ground are just spinning wildly behind them. I looooved that shot and I wanted to do something similar, which is why there’s a shot like that in Kendra’s scene.

I hope y’all liked it. It was a tough scene to make, but I’m pretty happy with it.

Suzy & Lisa

Okay, here’s the other really tough scene in this update. I had a REALLY hard time writing this one. So, when I first started the story, I was planning on this being a threesome scene. First and foremost, Come Home is a porn game and I know that a lot of people like the mother/daughter thing.

But Patreon has rules against that. And I don’t want to break those rules.

So, I started thinking of how I would handle this situation. Eventually Lisa and Suzy must find out that they’re both sleeping with the same guy. How do I handle that in a way that doesn’t break any rules, doesn’t seem extremely forced, and makes sense for these characters?

I struggled with this for a LONG time. I wanted to push the boundaries a bit, but not break anything. I also wanted to make the focus that Suzy is Lisa’s number one priority. I think if I was writing this story completely true to the characters, Lisa would have broken things off with the MC completely. Suzy might have broken things off with him as well. They might have kicked the MC out of their house. I don’t think either of them would have trusted the MC again and they would have both been disgusted.

But this is a silly porn game. So instead, they’re accepting and trying to move past this so we can continue with the fun sexy stuff.

I know some people are going to be disappointed by this scene. Some people are going to want more drama from it. Others are just going to want a threesome. I get it. I would have liked to just put a threesome in there, honestly. It would have been hot, it would have made a lot of people happy, and it would have been a lot EASIER than what I did.

But it’s not going to happen. I’ll continue to push the boundaries a bit, but there’s not going to be any sex scenes with Suzy and Lisa together in the game. Not only would that possibly get me kicked off Patreon, but I don’t think it would make sense for the characters either. I can’t picture Lisa being okay with that.

Random Events / Hidden Content

You might have noticed, but I have been slipping some hidden content and random events in the game. I think the first was the Mari BarnSex scene. I added that one to the scene list, so it’s not really hidden. It is random though, not happening every time you stay the night. The Suzy bathroom scenes are kind of like that too.

Last update, I also added the repeatable Suzy/Tammy Threesome, which has randomized content. Not every threesome you have with them is going to be the same. There’s a few different variations. This is truly hidden content, as I didn’t put these on the sex screen list as well. Same with the Suzy pigtails variation for the doggystyle sex scene and the pigtails facefuck.

In this update, I added a few more variations to the Suzy/Tammy threesome scene. I also added a random Tammy blowjob in the morning. Also, the Kendra/Adrian gokart date has 3 different outcomes that are chosen randomly.

Mrs. Mills also chooses her domme scenes randomly.

I know some people aren’t really into the randomness, but I’ve always kinda liked it. I want to be surprised sometimes by things when I play a game. I also want conversations between players. Like, I want to see one player talking about how hot the morning blowjob with Tammy was, and another player be like “I finished everything in the game and I didn’t see that scene!”

I’m hoping it adds a little replay value to the game, and I’ll be continuing to add more random events and hidden scenes as the game grows bigger.

The Menus and Percentages

Removing the percentages from the menus was a huge decision for me. I thought about it for along time. I talked to my alpha team about it. I put the idea out on my Discord a couple times very early in the development of the update. Still, it’s the thing that I’ve heard the most complaints about from the update, and I get it, for sure.

I’ve had a few people who like that I’ve removed them. I’ve had some that HATE that I’ve removed them. And I’ve had a lot of people in-between. I’m in-between myself. I’ll be working on something in the future that I think will be a good compromise that should make most people happy.

The menu changes were something that I’ve wanted to do for a while. You might not notice a lot of the changes I made, but I basically rewrote the entire character menu for the game in this update. Before, the character pages were one single image with clickable spots on it, called an imagemap. Now, the character menus are all individual buttons. This means that I can change one part of the screen, without changing the entire screen, which is really nice. It also means I can do things like have the character portrait change throughout the game at certain points, or let the player choose the portrait to display there. It allows me a lot more flexibility and customization, which is great. Plus it’s a lot easier to work with on the coding side.

The downside is, I did have to spend about a week of work coding non-stop to get that done. It wasn’t fun at all. But I think it was worth it.

Still not done with the menus. I do plan on making them quite a bit better with the next release. And continuing to improve them over time until the game is finished. I like them much better now than I did last update though.

Conclusion

I think that I’ve rambled long enough. If you’ve stuck around this long, thanks for reading. I’m glad this Update is out. I’m proud of it. I feel like I did a good job on it and most of the feedback I’ve gotten about it has been good. I’m hoping that Update 16 won’t be quite as difficult for me to make. I’ve been working on the outline for it, but I’m not quite done with that yet. It’s going to be a lot of content I know, but I don’t think any of the content will be as difficult as some of the things that I did in this update. I hope not anyway.

Next week, expect the Roadmap for Update 16 as I expect I’ll be finished by the outline then and really get going on the new content.

Love y’all. Thanks so much for all your support.