MessyAcademy
patreon
September news post #1
🕑 Added 2020-09-05 12:21:18 +0000 UTCIs summer already over with? Time sure does fly when busy! Either way, we have some news to share for our plans in September for MA, with update 0.15. Thank you once again to all of you who chose to stick with us going into September, we hope that update 0.15 will prove worth the wait.
So let's hop to it! Update 0.15 has a set release date for October 5th-7th. Most likely it'll be October 5th, unless something majorly goes wrong to cause minor delay. Which luckily hasn't happened really, aside from once or twice by 12-24 hours.
Let jump into it.
(1) Update 0.15 content
October 5th-7th will be a little odd and I hope everyone will understand, as I'll be trying to explain exactly what is taking place. So the last two updates (update 0.13 & 0.14) focused on bringing all the girl's route part 1's into the game. It also took it's toll on me writing and I began to notice it by the time I had Zoey & Lola's part 1 written up, I was stuck with Bridget's part 1 with what I can only describe as "writer's block" or simply put "drained, burnt out, etc."
Of course I still managed to muster up the mental will to power through and finish the writing for update 0.14. But I'm a bit worried with how things felt when trying to push myself to write and of course I don't want to have the game suffer in quality because I'm forcing myself, but rather that I'm enjoying the process and what takes place in the writing.
So before I cause any major worrying thoughts... I am still 100% going to be writing for MA, but I think in order to ensure I don't feel drained or burnt out. I've decided that right now is a pretty good time to go back through older existing content and adjust the writing to bring it up to what quality of writing is seen during the routes so far to compare.
There is clearly some awkward dialogue pacing issues, some lack of scene details to get a clear idea of what really is taking place at times and possibly grammar issues in much of the older content. I think the worst is seen in days 1-5 as they're roughly 1 year old since they've been written in a sense. But along with the mentions above, while looking through and making said adjustments to bring older content up to speed. We'd be looking at expanding on moments and adding new content moments that feel fitting for the game.
One element that I think could be seen played out better is seeing the main academy storyline show itself and be around in the foreground a bit better. We're not talking super serious, main focus. But it'd be brought into the foreground of fitting areas and some of this would be some small additional areas. So think of maybe between day 3 & 4, there might be something fitting to have show up during this to keep the main academy storyline plot around. As it stands right now, I think many can agree outside of some background brief mentions during days 1-19. There really isn't too much brought up, so it'll be something we keep in mind.
There is going to be expanding of key moments that we'll be asking you all about and some of that we have asked last month I believe? About days 1 & 2 adjustments and seeing what should receive some extra expanding. An example of this is on day 1, when Brandon, Joey and Nathan run into John for the first time. When he's explaining about the academy and going over rules. It's one of the most requested expanding moments voted so far, to learn more in depth about the rules of the academy. What deems a punishment worthy? What is breaking certain rules? Why don't students just call their parents and tell them about the odd academy and get it shut down? etc.
Let's go back to the start.
Question: Why is now a good time for us to focus on adjusting older content?
Answer: Well part of it is to ensure I don't burn myself out with consist new writing and pushing myself too hard. Without trying to come off rude or misunderstood, I think in general. It's always easy to sit back and watch someone else do work on something with the mindset of "If I were doing it, I'd do it like this and produce this and that! It would be done quicker, easy, etc." But when put on the hot seat, it might be alright at first. But you'll now find yourself in a similar spot when trying to push out work and if not, more power to you! ^^
To sum it up, I try to push myself while juggling a job outside of the project and still balance personal time for myself. There's times where I set my goals for a update's content too high. But the goal is not to burn out and have major issues, I don't want to see MA unfinished or delayed, etc. So I'm trying to be careful, while still providing new content.
Question: Okay, but is that really the only reason?
Answer: So along with my own personal writing stuff to be careful with, it feels like while focusing on older existing content that isn't 100% new writing, but rather taking what is there and adjusting things, with roughly 25-30% expanded new content or new moments completely that fit between sections. Clearly going through days 1-19 would take a while and I don't intend to purely focus on this for months without slowly moving forward on the route stuff still.
As many of you might know, our cg scenes are uh.. Well... Lacking sadly. Not to mention variety *cough* day 5 scenes *cough*. So with the focus above on writing and content, we could make use of this to allow our cg artist/artists to catch up to where we are currently for the latest areas of the game. We have 6 cg scenes needed for day 17 still and of course route part 1's have scenes missing. One thing I get the feeling from some fans is that we release say our most recent update 0.14 and while it might be enjoyable as it stands. There's clearly that moment missing on it's visuals, imagine having the cg art caught up so that we can release a update and also say "Hey this update features all the new cg art needed for the new content added with it too!" That'd be awesome! So we hope to make use of this time for that.
Question: So let me get this straight... You're not going to make new content that's moving forward into the routes, because you want the cg art to get caught up?
Answer: Just to be clear, the adjusting of old content with days 1-19 should be seen as a mix. Roughly you'll see a newly fixed up version of say day 1, it's dialogue flows more smoother and the pacing seems much better. The details of actions and things taking place that feel important are added or expanded on better to understand. That stuff can be seen as same, but new same content.
It's the expanding and some filling of gaps is where some new content will show up. Let's just pretend for a moment, it's been a while since day 1 content. But recall after section 1 how section 2 picks up pretty much right after Brandon and Erika left the classroom from the looks of it? Well we'd like to get a more closer sense of this for other days and sections, I'm not saying we'll see from the break of dawn to sunset every single thing Brandon is doing in a given day. But we might see a more gap closed feeling where when a player goes through day 1 it feels like the day flowed through flawlessly, felt fulfilling and you nearly forgot how quick time passed by without the game reminding you.
It's hard to explain I think in text, but the short version is think about 50% "new" samey content with 50% actual new expanding or gap filling content. (Not filler content, but stuff that feels fitting.)
Question: So about 50/50% then? But what about moving forward with 100% new content?
Answer: As mentioned earlier, this adjusting of older content isn't something we're looking to fully focus on for months moving forward. We want the game overall to feel smooth from days 1-19 into the routes leading to the end of the game, there shouldn't be moments that feel like "Aw.. but what about this? Or that went by too quick!". September will focus purely on adjusting content, but it's possible October might be a fine mix of some adjusting vs 100% new moving forward content. We don't want anyone feeling like we're going 1 step forward 2 steps back in any sense.
~End of the mock of Q&A~
Sorry for the long explaining.. I simply wish to be 100% open with everyone and not mislead anyone with how we plan to proceed. I want everyone to be aware that we're going to ensure that the game as a whole feels great. Sadly I think many of us have to admit a little, if you've read the more recent route parts. The quality is quite a difference if you play through the early days again.
Enough talk of that, let's list some rough goals on said adjustments being made shall we?
(1) - As a small goal just to be safe, I'd like to shoot for having days 1 & 2 fully adjusted as mentioned above. The whole 50/50% thing going on, it might not sound like this is a lot of content, but this is just a fail safe. I don't want to say "Hey we'll shoot for days 1-5!" Then only come out with possibly 3 days done, which is sadly how I personally am with new updates. I like to set the goals high and really aim for them being done, but it always looks easier when written down as a list.
(2) - What I didn't mention above is that while adjusting older content, we'll also fix up choices that might be new. Along with seeing the diaper accidents for both Brandon and girls, later to be linked to our mini game feature.
(3) - Another thing not mentioned above is NTR. We've had complaints and mentions about NTR in the past and still actively do. To keep it simple, Bridget and Lola were first intended to have story elements that naturally felt like NTR/cheating elements would fit into what's going on without spoiling things. But we're hearing a lot of dislike for NTR even with just those characters having it linked to them, we're trying to be careful because most of what we've heard is coming from public forums.
Not to say they're opinion on the matter doesn't mean anything, but our worry is that some of these vocal ones are possibly trolls. We want to ask our supporters in this voting poll here about Lola's part 1 and the whole NTR element. We figure that by asking all of you who choose to go out of the way and help support us in funding, it gives us a good sense that "Okay, we're getting a good reading on this."
The take away here is we're trying to see if the efforts of removing NTR from Bridget and Lola's moments in the game already that has said elements. If it would be liked by not only our supporters, but also would it benefit us? Are there people not playing because they see NTR in any shape or form and simply will not touch it? Hence why we're trying to ask supporters, rather than public since sadly we get some really vocal and almost troll sounding posts on other forums about it. It wouldn't shock me if some are simply doing it out of boredom, while some do actually mean it.
-Day 1 has been fully adjusted/reworked!
-Day 2 has been fully adjusted/reworked!
-1 new cg scene added.
-OC background character's added? (finding fitting spots)
-Music has been added to days 1 & 2!
-NTR elements have been removed/fixed out of the game. (Bridget & Lola related)
This is of course a rough idea, we could possibly have day 3 done and other content added. To explain briefly, this month won't be a big push on cg art. Simply put we're in the middle of testing our artist to see if they can handle the demands put on them moving forward or if we need to hire another artist instead to either take over, or just help them out on the workload.
A lot of funding right now is paying for the music and luckily we have 10 tracks of 13 paid off. We'll most likely have the music fully paid off as we head into October and by then we'll know how to proceed with our cg art on pushing it big time on requests.
(2) Kickstarter launch news!
This will be brief, as we've started doing our own separate posts "Kickstarter news #X" to keep everyone informed on the situation.
To keep it short and sweet.
Launch date for kickstarter is 100% confirmed for October 5th!
We have someone in the middle of creating the video trailer and they're well known on their history of work. Along with turnaround finish times for their trailers, while being professional quality. They feel they can have it finished by the end of September, so with a little wiggle room for ourselves. We're dead set on October 5th and hope that a month heads up will allow for time to prepare for those interested.
Our main take away from the kickstarter if funded is that about 85% or so of the base goal is going towards funding the cg scenes needed for the base game. This would put the money in our hand at once to demand the max supply/demand from our artists each month without running into falling short of monthly funding for a month.
But if kickstarter funds can cover the cg art... What will patreon monthly funding go towards then?
If all goes well, then we'll be able to hire on a programmer to help me out with the engine work and free up more time on that end for myself to focus on writing a bit more. Plus they'll be able to do more with the engine programming than I can sadly.
Now in the event our kickstarter doesn't reach it's $4000 goal, we do have plans to try relaunching a 2nd time and lower our goal. We hope we won't have to do that, but we're prepared for the thought, as MA does focus on diapers and not everyone will wish to help fund such content.
(3) Surprise! 1 year milestone
So I have some very fun news to share, if you're a long time fan. You might have a rough sense of when everything began for MA.
September 6th 2019 was when I first released update 0.01. Crazy to think it's been a year already... Of course work began on MA before that during the summer of 2019, but still it wasn't officially out there yet.
With this said, tomorrow. On September 6th, we're releasing a public post that will be celebrating our 1 year milestone reached. It'll include some fun little goodies for fans and a huge long reflection, look back on, behind the scenes style post where myself, Uncle Artie and LisadiKaprio bring up things from that fabled beginning.
It'll go over the history of MA from the very days of being a pretty badly made 3d "comic" if you can call it that. How that led to becoming a visual novel and just how everything led us into the year 2020 with the reboot of MA.
It should be a fun post and we highly encourage everyone to feel free to jump in on the comments for that post tomorrow, ask us questions or even mention how you stumbled upon MA, which update was your first and a little reflection of your own in the comment section. ^^
-Conclusion-
That ends our news post for September! We'll see more during the month talking about and updating information to get a more solid idea of what to expect in the next update.
Now that all the girls have their first route part 1 added to the game, it feels like a nice end point for the game for right now. Of course I know many of you want to see where things lead forward with characters routes and we want to share that with everyone too.
It's just trying to strike a balance and find a little breather moment to ease my mind with the writing of 100% new writing in such massive amounts. (We're talking 15,000 word count for the 3 side girls so far and 30,000 for the main girls so far in the past 2 months.)
So right now for September, looking back and revisiting our earliest content for a little break should be a nice change of pace. Plus if things go well, we can try allowing cg art to get more caught up to the most recent route content. That way we'll be able to release new updates that move forward with the finished cg art to play with the new content.
The thought from some I've chatted with is that while new content is fine right now, it can't be helped that if you played through Nova's route part 1. You get towards the end and are greeted by that damned "CG placeholder screen" with Miki taunting you while reading and imaging the scene play out in your head.
Then of course by the time we would be able to add said finished cg art, it could be months later and the thought being. "Well that's nice... But sadly I already know what's going on, it's just rereading things again to see the new visual with it now." Where we want things to be seen all together as new. It should be fun and rewarding the first time the content is released, so that's kind of our thought process and what we've gathered from fans here and there.
Anyways, this news post is too long! Hope everyone stays safe as we head into the fall season and hopefully those struggling from world events will receive help soon too. <3
