0.9 Retrospective, Part 2

Greetings! Last post I discussed why the release took so long, but now I'd like to talk about what I wanted 0.9 to be, what it ended up being, and what the differences were. It's another pretty long post, but I wanted to finish saying everything I have to say about 0.9.

Features

First - the features. The game up to this point had been a bit thin on rewards, cool stuff that you, the player, get from playing. It doesn't have levels so I can't give xp, there isn't much to buy so gold is out, and character have only a small number of equipment slots. Besides, most of those rewards are combat-oriented. Combat isn't a huge focus of this game, so giving you a lot of combat rewards would be sort of like giving someone scuba diving gear for winning a yodeling competition.

Rewarding the player for playing your game is important, and I'd been looking for new ways to do that. The first idea I settled on was cosmetic rewards. People love them in Overwatch and Fortnite, so why not here? But if outfits were going to be a reward, you'd need to be able to both see more of them and wear whichever one you liked without taking a stat penalty.

These considerations were what led me to create 3 of 0.9's new features: transmogrification and the two character views. Like in WoW, transmogrification would let you make your outfit with the best stats look like whichever outfit you wanted. And since I reasoned that simply having a slightly different character sprite might not be all that rewarding, the character view features would let you see what your outfit looked like in more situations.

Thinking about rewards - and also that combat might play a slightly more prominent role in the future - led to another feature, the equipment slot revamp. Before 0.9, most characters had only 5 equipment slots. In 0.9, this was increased to 8. More slots means I can give you more stuff before you'll have to throw something out!

Story (Spoiler warning if you haven't played 0.9!)

Going into 0.9, the only things I knew for sure I wanted to do was introduce Emily, open up the Military District, and do a bit with the Ned Danger quest. I'd always planned on having Emily join Alex and Ana - that's why there were 3 pods in the company building! I'd actually wanted to do it in 0.8 but I ran out of time. I also knew more or less what I wanted to do with the Ned Danger quest. The Military District stuff was what I wasn't really sure how I was going to implement.

Obviously you're supposed to get The Hell's help there. I wanted you to spend a fair bit of time with The Hell in order to do that, and I thought it might be too much to try to fit that and all the other stuff from this release in, so I decided to make the main story mission about getting Sourfang's help. Other than the fact that you'd be recruiting for the Army, I had no idea what the quest would look like until I started working on it - my initial ideas were pretty generic. "Go to a village, kill a monster, grateful villagers decide to join you," that sort of thing.

If you're trying to write a scenario, a useful starting point - especially in a comedy - is to ask: what could go wrong? Given that the objective was to recruit for the military, all the prospective recruits being pacifists seemed like a splendid thing to go wrong, so I went with that. I then starting asking why they're pacifists, how you might convince them to join anyway, etc, and the basic outlines of the story started to take shape.

By the time I'd started work on the recruitment quest in earnest, I'd already done the plot work I wrote about in a previous post, and I was really itching to start weaving in a few threads from that. A little bit did make its way in, and I think that's all I'll say about that for now :)

Getting to know The Bunnies a little more was another objective (for reasons I can't yet disclose,) which is what led to the nightclub. The nightclub was sort of a nightmare; there were so many conversations, so much movement to add, so much lighting stuff to do - I thought the work on it would never end. I wanted to do more with it than I did - different group conversations for different permutations of Bunnies you'd invited back, for instance - but it became obvious that I could spend as much time as I'd wanted to working on the nightclub and it would still never be done. I decided to simply call it good for this release, but you'll be seeing more content there in the future.

Finally, there was another quest I was going to add dealing with Ogremarsh's intelligence organization, but it got cut in the interests of getting the release out. Perhaps in a future release!

Sustains and Improves

So how'd the release go? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts! Overall, I liked this release very much. I probably liked 0.8 a little more (mostly because of Val's Quest,) but I still liked 0.9 quite a lot. 

Let's start with the bad: my biggest complaint about this release was that it was long-winded. Some parts were worse than others, but in general, many conversations just went on too long. I think some judicious editing really could have improved this. I'm reminded of that Pascal quote: "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lacked the time to make it short." I tinkered around the edges with editing, but because there was so much dialogue whittling it down as much as it needed was a big job. I may revisit this task in the next release; I'll have to do a full playthrough as part of testing the MZ port, and that might be a good opportunity.

Now on to the good stuff: I thought Emily turned out well. She was fun and memorable, and I see plenty of opportunity to make her a foil to both Alex and Ana. Her sneaking quest after the nightclub also turned out pretty well, I think (which surprised me, since that's the one I spent the least amount of time on.)

While it could have been better, I think the recruitment quest also turned out pretty well. The little town felt pretty alive (it took a ton of effort to make it that way, though!) I'm pleased with Val's role in the whole thing, I liked the band, and I even liked some of the more minor NPCs (specifically the fortune teller.) I thought the Dranax battle was fun, and that the quest itself had some fairly amusing moments. Finally, I'm glad the whole thing left you with a mystery to ponder!

The Ned Danger quest was also pretty neat, and I thought it was fun to head back to Darin's Mill after being gone for so long. (You did remember to visit Celie and Elian again, didn't you?)

On the H-scene front, I very much liked the one with Sami. The renders are among my favorite so far, and the scene itself was pretty sexy, though it was a bit too verbose like many other parts of this release.

Lessons Learned

So, overall, what have I learned from this release cycle? The first lesson is that I should avoid cramming so much into a single release. Between all the features and the length of some of the quests, it took a *long* time to get everything done. And when you're dealing with a project of that length, it can be easy to get bogged down and feel a little lost. Far better, I think, to take it in smaller and more manageable chunks.

Another lesson is that I shouldn't spend too much time away from the story. New features and such are fine, but they should be spaced out among releases. After long enough away, you begin to lose the plot (literally!) and it becomes hard to get back into it.  After further consideration, I'll probably not do the combat revamp in the upcoming release, and this is the reason why.

The final lesson is specific to me personally, but I really should have deadlines. Even if I blow them by ridiculous margins, they still force me to prioritize tasks and make hard decisions about what to spend development time on. They have one major downside, which caused me to stop using them - the fact that people (understandably) get mad at me when I miss them... repeatedly. They can also be a little demotivating if I miss them too often or by too much, but at the end of the day, I think it's far better for the project that I use them.

Conclusion

So, that closes the chapter on 0.9. It could have been better - especially with more editing - but overall I rather liked it. What did you think? Please let me know! And thank you for your support!