Update 9.5 Roadmap

Hey everybody! 

Thanks for making the last month the best month for the game so far. Big jump in patrons and a lot of support for the new update! You guys are all wonderful. 

So, I want to talk a bit about what I have planned next. As you have probably seen, the game is going to be released on Steam soon. Wishlist it here, if you haven't already: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1724190/Come_Home/

With that coming up, I want to take a little time to just focus on cleaning the game up as much as possible to get it in the best condition I can before releasing to this wide audience. I hope that you all will be okay with me taking a month to fix things instead of advancing the story. I had a list of about 60 items that I wanted to get done, and I've reduced that down to about 40 now. I'd like to spend September focusing on fixing all of those things. Most of this is improving renders, like the one shown above, but there is also some quality-of-life upgrades and some coding changes I want to implement. All of this stuff will just make the game work better and look better in the end. 

So here's the list of stuff I want to get done. 

Update 9.5

Reorganization of Mari's Dates - Mari was the first character that I wrote dates for, and her code is a little weird when it comes to her dates. I need to restructure it some to allow for different dates and different clothes. This requires re-rendering a lot of images, and modifying her first sex scene a bit, where she invites you in. 

Add hints to character profiles - On the new character profile pages, there's an empty spot at the bottom that I want to add the hint text for whichever scene is up next for that character. This is going to require writing a little code to determine which piece of content is next at any given time. 

Moose and Mal - All the images with them in it need to be re-rendered using their new models.

Backgrounds - There are several background images I need to redo, either because they're just stock images (like the schoolyard and the front of the lawoffice building), or because they are at an angle that the characters do not look right in front of. 

Tammy's Park Scenes - The lighting in Tammy's park scenes changes several times, so all of those renders need to be redone. 

Lisa's Bathroom Scene - I'm not happy with the visuals in this whole scene, and will be redoing them. 

Jez's Phone Images - I was having a problem with Jez's model up until the most recent update, and it makes her face look strange in some of these phone images, so want to re-do all of those. 

Kendra First Park Bathroom Sex - I'm not happy with these visuals, so will be re-doing the entire scene, including the animations. 

Connie at Jackson Burger - There's a lot of people that haven't even met Connie I think. There's no visual indication that Mari is not there until you actually go and get a burger. I'm going to change that a bit and make Connie a little more prominent. 

Spend the Night with Mari - After the first time you spend the night with her, you'll be able to go sleep at her house any night, including sexy-time. 

Re-do Early Animations - There's several early animations that I want to redo. I'm not sure how many I'm going to get to before the end of the month, but I'm going to do as much as I can, including a couple of the Dana Fileroom scenes, the bedroom oral from Lisa, Claire's scenes, the after-mowing shower scene, and Tammy's scene after the fight.

Re-do Kendra Go-kart Scene - I'd like to re-do this whole scene, as I know I could make it much more fun now. Back when I did it, I had to render everything in pieces because of my video card and I'm not happy with how it looks now. 

Many Minor Re-Renders - There's a lot of other smaller jobs that I want to get done, but would take forever to list here. Just a bunch of little re-renders that will improve the look of the game. 

Achievements - Lastly, I need to get achievements set up for Steam. I have to do a little research on how to do this, and then figure out the coding involved. 

Release Date

This update, which I'm calling 9.5, is going to be released in October. Right now I have it scheduled to go up on Steam on the 29th. I'll probably release it to you guys a couple of weeks before that. 

Final Thoughts

I've been feeling a little overwhelmed this past week with all the things I want to get done. Yesterday, I sat down and made this list and adjusted everything according to priority and I'm feeling a little better about it now. 

I don't really like the idea of taking a month off from working on new story content. I enjoy writing the story and rendering new scenes MUCH more than going back and fixing older stuff or re-rendering stuff that I've already done. It's really boring work. 

But, I feel like it needs to be done. And once it is done, I'll feel much more confident about the game being in front of a huge audience of people

This also means that when I start working on the new content for Update 10, I won't have to worry as much about cleaning up older images or code - I can just focus on making new content. 

This IS going to mean that Update 10 will likely not be released until December though. If I can get it done before then, I will definitely try, but I'm not confident that I'll be able to. I'll always keep you all updated though on the progress, both on my weekly posts here and on my daily posts over in the dev diary on Discord.

As always, thank you for your support! Love you all.