Stawer
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Development Guidelines and What's Coming this Year
🕑 Added 2025-01-07 21:24:59 +0000 UTCHello everyone!
We are already in the first days of this year 2025, and as a ritual, I like to make a list of things to improve and make the necessary changes to make improvements.
And well... This year I really must make changes!
Be prepared for a somewhat lengthy post, as there is a lot to see here, and my reasons behind each decision.
1. Constant Updates
This is something I have always tried to improve but have been impossible as I have taken the wrong methods, rather, I have not been hard enough to split the content correctly.
In terms of content, in 2024 in number of words, images and length, it has been 30% more than in 2023, however, the updates have become more and more titanic, and that leads to long development periods, something that is simply counterproductive.
To these long development periods, I must add that some unforeseen events in my personal life have contributed to these long development periods, as I must do all the writing, art and programming on my side, and synchronize this with translation and marketing (Sirxtias), music (HitCtrl), and of course leave enough time to testing (Wiz), although a simple personal unforeseen event can affect these times quite easily (Things like an illness or the death of my mother, which unintentionally, affected my mental state and as a consequence these development times).
I have seen players prefer more constant content than huge extended content over a long period of time, and because of these long periods, there are also times where they get disengaged from the rhythm of the story.
Also, my goal is not to make updates too small, there must also be a reason for the player to come back and try the new content, not one or two events that don't develop anything.
I want to reach a middle ground.
So, my goal in this aspect, is to manage to make updates in smaller periods of time, intelligently dividing the content, although they will not be as extensive as last year's updates.
What I do want is that, throughout the year, the sum of these parts is greater than the previous year.
Although, to accomplish this I must rethink other aspects to optimize the time, which leads us to...
2. New Updates with Less Size
Getting everything set for an update is another section that consumes a huge amount of time.
Among the list of things I have to do to make the update post, it is necessary to write the changelog, make five builds and test them one by one, upload each build to both Mega (slow upload service) and Drive (crashes easily), and because of all those problems I choose MediaFire (has worked well), which adds up to something like 110 Gb of space (what goes up with each update) to upload between all the builds, plus making the necessary images for the post, banners, mini banners, etc ...
As you can imagine, all this consumes a lot of time that could be invested in development.
But how?
My idea is to only upload the update patches, which would save me from having to upload the 3 full Window/Linux versions each time. Although for Mac and Android, I will have to continue uploading all the content.
Still, this is a significant time saver.
Besides this, the “Mini banner” that is in the “About” of Patreon, due to changes in the platform, I don't see the need to continue doing it, which helps me to free a little more time.
And I will distribute the upload links in a more intelligent way, because Mega has a very slow upload speed, and also has limits for large downloads and Drive collapses easily with the amount of downloads.
Very few players are using the Mac version, but there are many who use the PC and Android, so I will use Drive only to upload the Mac version, which is quite heavy, although it is not a problem because Drive is quite fast to upload, while PC/Android will be uploaded to Mega and MediaFire.
This way Drive should not crash, since it only has the Mac version, while Mega and MediaFire will be available for the rest.
This way I will save more than half of the Gb to upload, and I will be able to make each release in a smooth way.
Although this is not the whole problem, I still must make adjustments to...
3. The Focus of the Updates
With the end of Sasha's story, it sets a precedent for what is to come in the next updates.
So, I want to focus much more on the main girls and the development of their story arcs. For this, I'm going to leave aside a series of features and content that I had planned.
The initial idea was to include a series of systems, such as the “drink” system in the bar or “Change of seasons”, among other things that are quite complex to implement, but I must be honest, not because these things are interesting to me as a developer, they will be interesting for the players.
The players expect to see the development of the girls' story and getting me into the bog of developing a lot of features doesn't go with that goal. Although there are still ideas like the “Pink House” for BDSM content, or extensions of the “Potions” store, there is other content that is not such a priority.
The same is true for several of the secondary girls....
Some are interesting or funny, but others not so much, so focusing on that content might be a mistake. I want to talk about this in another post, as this one will be too long for that.
In 2024 I wanted to give content to a lot of secondary girls that didn't have it yet, but the reception has been lukewarm, so I have to change the focus, I know you expect to know more about the main girls, and although there are some secondary girls like Shizuka, Kaede, Luna, etc... that, if you like them, others don't deserve the same level of attention.
Even so, there are parts that are complementary to the main story or there are ideas for erotic content that I like, I don't want to discard the content, but I want to change the form.
And for that we must talk about...
4. The Secondary Girls
There are still secondary girls that need content, girls like Daisy, Helena, Sarah....
But they will no longer be a focus on the updates to come, although they will be a complement for those who are interested.
I think the best thing to do in this aspect is to mix this content as an extension of the already established girls. For example, Sarah's story develops in parallel with Liz's story, since she is her mother and they maintain a narrative connection, or Helena and Layla at a certain point.
What I mean is that the secondary girls will no longer have a totally focused story, but the player will unlock bits and pieces of their content as they progress through other areas of the main girls.
They will no longer have as much screen time, and I must work twice as hard to give them the same development in less time, but this will be better through character interaction.
It will also allow me to give small story additions to secondary girls who were kept on the sidelines, as is the case with Clara in the hot springs, whose design I like a lot, and I feel I will rock more love.
This also includes new erotic scenes to unlock, and in this I want to make...
5. Improvements to the Content
There are missing elements in the erotic scenes, such as sound effects.
Although as a developer I don't like the idea of adding moans or anything like that, since each of us gives an imaginary voice to each of the girls. There are other types of sounds that could be added.
At the beginning I had set a goal of 1500 stable patreons to add this, since it requires a lot of development time and I was thinking of investing part of the money to get help, there are hundreds of scenes to do, I think it is necessary to improve this standard from now on.
Although there are so many scenes, I have two options...
Make a remake of the game that takes months/years to finish, without any progress in the main story, which quite a few games do in this medium coming to nothing. I have even seen developments that have fallen into the abyss because of this, and despite years of hiatus, to this day many of them have not managed to get out of dev. hell.
Or the option that I like more is to implement these effects in the new scenes that will be added, and in parallel to add them to the old scenes. This will be progressive during the remaining development time, but it prevents the development from getting bogged down without a clear future.
This also translates to improvements in the animations and camera movements, although the latter adds a lot of load to the development, I feel it is necessary to make a standard improvement in this aspect.
Like the sounds, it will be implemented to the new content, while to the old content that is outdated, I will have to prioritize the worst scenes to improve them.
For the latter I had also set a goal of 2000 patreons, but currently it seems to me a very unrealistic goal to achieve. The reasons were the same, but as a developer I want to give 150% of myself, and bring you the best within my possibilities.
I think that, with the time freed in other aspects, I can improve these points, since for me they are very important.
Although for this I must also dedicate my free time to study and learn, evaluate and look for the best results, if everything goes well then I should have...
6. A Time to Improve
I want to study animation, programming and art, obviously without consuming development, but taking these studies more seriously.
My goal is to get the skills to improve everything that comes in the development of Lucky Paradox from now on, plus polish my skills as much as possible for the projects that are to come.
And yes, I have a pretty ambitious project in mind... But don't worry, I won't publish anything about it, until Lucky Paradox is finished.
It's a current cliche for some people to start projects without having finished the first one, which leads to two projects that probably won't be finished. I want to keep the focus on Lucky Paradox until the time comes to move on to the next, and I must evolve and not be Stawer, but SUPER Stawer, no, better... ULTRA STAWER hahaha!
cri-cri-cri!
Jokes aside...
I feel like I owe you guys this, I must improve my skills to give you more and better content, and I feel like this last year I've been a bit lazy in this aspect, due to a period of depression I'm coming out of, but I have a future in mind and I want to bring you guys to the present, so you can enjoy it as much as I do :)
so...
7. What's next?
Lucky Paradox 0.10.0 is coming, and we will continue with Yui's story and everything that the Tournament arc will bring, big twists in the story are coming, we will know more about Masami and Kaede will have an extension to her story, plus the possibility of getting one of Kaede's Endings.
And well, get ready to deal with Yaeko... She might ruin everything with her twisted ideas.
With Yui will come several smaller updates, as it will be the chance to try out this new format I've been telling you about.
Let's hope everything goes well!
Ufff... This has been quite a long post, but I needed to share all this with you.
I want to thank those of you who have made it this far, and of course I would like to know your opinions about it, I'm always happy to receive feedback to help me improve.
We'll be talking :)
A great 2025 is coming!
And I want to share a lot of happiness with you guys!!!!
See you soon <3
Comments
Tim Parsons
It sounds like you're rebalancing things in a positive way. Looking forward to seeing the results! As always, keep time for yourself too 🙂
Glizzy
I beleaf in you, you do awesome work and you have an awesome team and community behind you!
Stawer
Yes! I just have to make this work xD
Glizzy
Thanks for the update Stawer, hope you’re doing well!
