Since the major update is just a week away that's what I wanted to talk to you all about. Not just the update, but general troubles that I faced when coming up with the update strategy for the game.

Planning updates for non-linear game can be tricky. Unlike the linear story-based games where you can just add "chapters" to the game and continue the storyline, in our game the order of events may vary greatly. So we had to come up with another way. Basically, right from the start, we had two major ways of structuring our updates. Let's call the "intensive" and "extensive". On top of that we have everything in-between these two poles.

Intensive - would be to focus on one or two major storylines, maybe just the main plot and one girl. Complete them (or more or less complete), and then add storylines of other girls one by one. The benefit of this approach would be, of course, that the player could experience the game in some state of completion right off the bat. The downside would be that for any new update, the player would have to play the whole game from the start to experience new content.

Extensive - would be to go wide. More or less the "chapter" approach where the game would have all the characters from the beginning, and we would just add new events in horizontal slices. This approach gives the players a wide picture of what content would be available in the game, but slows down the progress of each individual story.

Each of these approaches had their pros and cons, and each had their own upfront investments that we had to tackle. The more "intensive" we would go - the more pressure it would put on me as writer and designer, since all of the major mechanics and plot points would need to be completed for the initial build. For Shady Two it would mean much less work on the characters (since fewer of them would need to be present in the first build), but more of the interface for the other mechanics would need to be drawn.

The more "extensive" we go - the more work it is for Shady Two, since more girl sprites would need to be completed. That was something that we knew off the bat would not fit us.

So we though on a hybrid approach, and what we got is where we are at now. Having more or less the first 1,5 months of the game playable with about a third of the girls to get a feel of. With each major update both going wider by adding a new girl (or two) and moving the story forward a bit every time too. I also felt that it would be better for the returning players who might want to experience new content but wanted keep their saves (up to a point), and for those who wanted to start from scratch, since they didn't need to replay much of the game if they. So, this is how we landed on this model that we are using right now. We will se how it performs in the future. Maybe we will have to change it at some point, but for now, this is it. And next week it will bring you new events for the girls you are already familiar with, along with two new girl storylines.

See you next week!

Shady Character One, out!