Keisi
patreon
Dev Diary #108
🕑 Added 2024-04-14 16:00:51 +0000 UTCI haven't written or thought about work for so many days that I don't know how to start this post... Ha-ha, so funny, bruh.
This diary was planned for almost a month ago, then three weeks ago, two weeks ago... and here we are, at last.
It's going to be a long diary, if anyone doesn't want to read it all, I'll try to summarize it here:
I've been sick for a month, still there, but almost fully recovered.
I'm going to delay the next version (v22). How long? ~2 months. Not only because I have to finish solving my health/physical/mental problems, but also because it has a lot of content, and although I have some of the work done, there is still a lot to do.
On the anniversary (24/4), I want to do something a bit different (that I will explain again in another post): instead of doing short "random" games, I will do a series of very short stories to get to know better the girls of LA (at the moment I only plan to explain stories about the main girls). These stories are not future stories but past and present stories in terms of the timeline of the LA universe, so they will be stories that tell something about the present or past of the girls.
That being said... Let's get started.
Honestly, as the days go by I feel less and less like talking about what happened these past weeks, because every time I get sick, I'd rather forget about it and focus on getting well. Still... I'll summarise a bit, obviously: I've had two weeks of pretty fucked up gastritis with a lot of stomach pain and all that goes with it, including feeling weird things in my heart to the point where I thought I was having a heart attack and had to go to the hospital. It turned out to be an anxiety/panic attack because I didn't know what was happening to me, not to mention all the accumulated stress I'd had since May last year and not to mention how the car accident I had in December affected me on a mental and emotional level... All that mixed with not knowing what was going on in my body ended up exploding. It helped me to release a lot of stress that I had, solve some personal problems, among other things. Fun fact: At the hospital, they never told me that it was caused by gastritis, something usual, but instead, when I finally saw my doctor a few days later... he explained that it was indeed something usual due to stomach inflammation/reflux. Got checked my heart, my stomach, my blood pressure, a bit of everything... I'm healthy. Even so, at the end of the month, I have several tests pending to make sure that everything is fine, as I have had constant headaches for some time now and it seems to be a cervical problem, which needs to be solved, otherwise, it makes it very difficult for me to work and/or sit here at my pc. Luckily I am feeling better now, although I am still on medication, and all this has come together with the arrival of spring and I am always affected in one way or another by the pollen, but oh well.... As I say, I'm feeling much better, little by little I can think more clearly and finally I don't have the strange confusion in my head that the medication was causing me (I was taking a simple fricking antacid, nothing more, but the body is... complicated).
Before I had to go to the hospital the first time, a week before, I was working on this new version, and in fact, I have quite a few things written down in the change log as I focused on the little things first, bugs, and all that. Like for example, for a long time, I wanted to animate the rain on the main floor at night, which will be implemented in the next version. I was also working on the secondary girls, and although I would have to check again, I think I have it all finished and just need to implement it (code, dialogs, etc). And I didn't have time to do much more because I started to feel sicker and sicker to the point of having days when I couldn't sit down because of the pain in my stomach... Fortunately, all that is over now, and hopefully, in a week or two I will be completely recovered from that and the only thing left to do is to finish solving the neck problem.
As I have explained in summary, because of this, the new version has to be delayed. My idea was to release the new version at the end of the month to match with the anniversary but... there's a lot of work to do, and I'm getting crazier and crazier every new version and... and... etc. That's over.
I know this may be counterproductive for me, but honestly and from the heart, if I end up having more health problems because of this kind of work, I will inevitably have to leave this job and find a more "average" one. Being your own boss can be cool if you're a cryptobro or something, but being self-employed and your own boss sucks because you can do whatever you want but at the same time you're the one being hard on yourself to follow deadlines, schedules, etc. Honestly... I'm sick of it all. I was really "happy" and motivated to work on this project and others when years ago I wasn't so hard on myself, let alone trying to release new versions monthly.
The main problem was when I started to demand to myself that everything should be "professional and serious" so I had to offer an update every month with as much content as possible, blah-blah... In the end, that has been a double-edged sword and has ended up being more negative than positive for me, especially in terms of health (I would go into more detail but I think such things are always perceived as intentional pitifulness).
So I'm really sorry but... from now on the updates will go at a much slower pace, we're talking about 2-3 months per update. The good thing? There will be more content. The bad thing? It will take longer. Even so, for me, it's a good thing because I'll be able to take all this more relaxed and I'll be able to dedicate more time to things that I'd like to dedicate more work time to but I never do because I have to adjust everything to the deadline.
I've always thought that when a dev says he's taking a long time because he's working very hard on new content and all that stuff... well, yes, I've always thought it's just an average excuse for milking money's people, but... the last weeks, I've been out of the whole nsfw thing, and especially out of Patreon/Itch, and I've realized that sometimes things take time and it's not an excuse for milking money, because for example in Steam you buy a game and the free updates keep coming if the game is not finished, even so, it takes time, right? I don't know if I'm making myself clear, and I'm not saying this to excuse or justify myself. It's just that I'm trying to change my mindset prioritising a bit more my mental and physical health. Until now, I always thought that if I didn't have new content every month, I was going to disappoint you all, not only those of you who support me financially, but everyone, and it was myself who was being hard, my worst enemy (boss) it was myself... It was nobody, it was me. Understandably, some people come to me sometimes and tell me that there is too little new content even if it's monthly, and I know that. I wish Crush Crush had more new content every month or... insert a game that you like and you always want more content. But in general, I've always been the one who thought that if I take more than a month to release content, I'm going to disappoint people, people are going to lose interest... etc.
When in reality, taking a little more time to bring out new content allows me to spend time on things that require more time, and at the end of the day, I can plan everything better. I know you all would like there to be a lot of content every month, and so would I, but let's face it, I work alone, and no one else helps me in any major aspect of development, so it's quite a lot of work that I have to do on my own. Obviously, there are people who help me to find bugs during the betas, or the proofreading, although this last one... is more delicate since my proofreader has been sick for a few months and well, she can't work on the project, so at the moment that could be the reason why the quality of the writing has dropped a little bit. And btw, if anyone really wants to help me with the proofreading... you can send me a DM on Discord, I'll be grateful to anyone who wants to help correct some things here and there in the dialogues.
So... well, as I say, from now on the updates are going to come at a slow pace of a maximum of three months between betas. Hopefully, it will be two months instead of three, because otherwise, it means there's too much work to be done. Still, I'll try not to overdo it as usual and I'll take that those 2-3 months are for better work, not for more work.
That being said, let's move on to the almost last point of today: the anniversary game. As you know, every year I make a short game for the anniversary that includes a code and an achievement for LA, this year I plan to do something a bit different but the same. My idea is to keep including achievements/codes in LA to reward those who play all the games so the completists always have something to do.
But here comes the different part: The idea is that from now on, I would like to start a mini-series about the lives of the girls in LA. It can be about their current life, or their past life, but never about their future life, because we will see that for ourselves in the future duh. To give you a quick example: I would like to tell you about Yuna's life before we met her in LA when we moved to Gold Valley. In the same way, I would like to explain the story of all the girls, trying to avoid the bad or fucked up part of their stories. My intention with this is that you can get to know all the girls more in-depth, or maybe get to know better and more details about your favorite girl. As I said, they will be short stories using the narrative of classic VN style, although I would like to plan some simple mini-games or some RPG elements so you can unlock spicy stuff inside the game, and of course some codes for the anniversary.
What changes in all this from the rest of the short games? Well, this mini-series will be divided into anniversaries, and on each anniversary I will release a new version with more stories about the girls and more things to unlock. Let's say it's a secondary game but not really.
But there's more: Whenever I can, in every new version of LA or every few versions, in between that time, I will try to release a new update for the mini-series where you have something new to see, a new story, something new to unlock, etc. The difference is that this will only be available for Patreon from the Aspirant tier onwards. Why is that? It's simple, this way I can compensate a little bit for the fact that it takes longer to release new updates. "But Keisi, why not focus those efforts on LA then? That way you get more content out..." No, no, and no. What I need for years now and as I've already said several times is some fresh air, and work on other things. That's one of the main reasons why LA 1 will be divided into two parts.
So in order not to make a mess like I did with Lisapi's Adventures, I've decided that I'm going to do this mini-series as a "side project" for anniversaries and for patrons who will have a year's early access.
I'm looking forward to working on the anniversary, I already have a few ideas but I have to finish detailing everything, so maybe for this anniversary it will be actually a short game.
That said.. we move on to the last point at last!
Gonna attach the roadmap again:
So far...
I have already done everything related to the levels of the secondary girls: Sara, Mabel, and Suna. Although I still have to work on Arwen's levels.
The next cap of the secondary girls will be 8. But there's a catch: It's 8 instead of 7 because the level 5 of all the secondary girls has been moved to their level 6 and their level 6 to 7 and... you know. This is because from now on their level 5 they give a special passive (RPG) depending on the girl, as it should have been originally.
Even with all this done, some QoL, bugs, and so on... there is still a lot of work to do:
Two levels for Myra, Alina, and Tali.
One level for Maria.
Three levels for Natsuki.
Two levels for Enya (for different reasons her cap will be 5 instead of 7 in this version).
Add Lisapi's pregnancy.
More inhabitants for the health check-up.
I would like to add an autumn event once and for all...
Main quest which is the continuation of the previous one.
So as you can see, there is still some work to do, so I think that in two months I will be able to have everything ready at a normal pace without overreach. And if it works, it will stay that way.
For the moment, these days I'm going to try to do my best to plan and work on the anniversary game, I have 10 days ahead of me.
Many thanks to those of you who are on Discord asking how I'm doing, and also thanks to all of you who have been here for a long time or forever, and welcome to anyone who is here again, or is new.
I'm going to leave you a few spoilers and I'll say goodbye here!
I forgot! I'll try to make new posts as soon as I have more content to show, and I'll see how I plan again the monthly wallpapers because I should have worked on that already.
See you all!
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