With the new release sequence, I’m not sure how best to handle announcing each new version I put out there. It used to be that I’d give high-level supporters a very bare bones explanation when they got the MMU two weeks ahead of the proper release, and I’d still be adding a lot of finishing touches up until the actual full release today. I felt kinda bad about giving them all this new content with so few specifics, takes some of the fun out of having early access I expect.
Now, I’m making sure it’s a finished, playable product before even doing the advance release on Patreon and SubscribeStar, and I’m ready to explain exactly what’s in it right now. The mid-tier supporters are the only ones that might need to know what to expect right now, but a bunch more supporters will want to know in two weeks, and next month all the rest of you will be wanting to know about this. It feels a little weird to get into a full explanation of what’s going on with this release now, but it’s true that now is when it’s all freshest in my mind both to explain what’s in here and how we got here. I could post it privately first, but I don’t expect any of my explanations here to be spilling huge secrets or anything, and who knows, maybe it’ll entice a few extra people to make the leap and support the project.
So for now, I’m thinking I’ll make my traditional “release post” when I first publish the new version for supporters, give you all a teaser for what’s coming up while informing them, and I’ll make a small announcement again here when the public version comes out, linking back to the original announcement. I think that should be the best of all worlds! We’ll see how it works in the long term.
Now! With all that explained, let’s talk about Project Matchmaker! I wanted my new main project to be something that didn’t feel too different from MVOL, so we could transition a little more comfortably into my crazier ideas. It’s very character-focused, with a strong emphasis on romance and how we struggle to connect with others. The main obvious difference would be the time travel. Where MVOL quietly prevented you from making most massive mistakes that completely destroy the relationship before it can even start, this game embraces them– as a way to learn more about the characters, and do better when you rewind time and try something different. You’ll see each character from many different sides before you complete their chapter and move on to help another unlikely pair get together.
With that said, I wasn’t able to get as far into the story with this release as I’d hoped. I mentioned in the last few journals the difficulties I’d been running into, and Matchmaker both bore the brunt of a lot of that… and created a lot of that. It’s based on an engine I commissioned, and the programmer I hired for that has been mostly out of contact when I’d really been counting on having him to hold my hand through getting things started once I turned my attention to this project fully. But I had to work through all of it on my own in the end, and it was… slow, and at times immensely discouraging. Matchmaker v0.01 hasn’t proven to be the glorious introduction to my post-MVOL career that I had been hoping for.
That’s not to say that it’s bad. There were a lot of bugs, but I’ve fixed or stripped out everything I could to leave a lean, simple tour through the basics of the first scene. I’d hoped to be able to get a sex scene in there, and we get terribly, tantalizingly close to it, but I ran out of time before I could get into that proper. So the upshot is, the first version of Matchmaker takes you on a bracing tour of the game’s initial premise, introducing the characters and several touches of mystery, gives you your first proper taste of the key mechanics, gets rather steamy… and stops there, for now. I think it’s enough for you to at least start to get a feel for the characters, though, and thanks to Leslongxia I even have art for the main duo in the game already!
It’s disappointing to put a new release out there with so little actual written content in it, but to some extent, I think that’s something we may have to get used to in the early stages of the new work schedule. I’m going to be putting a lot more time and energy into building the basics of these games to get them running whatsoever than I’ve had to with MVOL in years and years, so I can’t just devote my schedule to writing like I used to. Of course, that was part of the plan– that I can only write so much in a month anyway, and there’s a fair amount of room for other kinds of work in there without impacting my capacity to write too much. So I’ll still have to figure out that balance as I go on this, and each game may have pretty different demands of me, making this a puzzle that keeps changing before I can solve it.
I’ll be trying not to let my writing slow down too much with this, but between that and shortening the cycle to monthly releases where I can, it’s probably better to adjust our expectations now to not expect the great volumes of writing per release that I’d managed at times before. It’s about more than just writing now, thank the stars! Now it’s about actual gameplay at all, and a variety of setups and infrastructures, and as you all have insisted, a lot of it is going to be about graphics, which can take up a surprising amount of my time getting tweaked just right. I’m trying to diversify one step at a time, and that’s come with some slowdowns here and there, but hopefully that means I’ll be shipping richer, more interesting games in the long term.
Well. I’ve ended up talking about a whole lot of things besides what exactly is in this release, haven’t I? To be fair, it’s pretty straightforward for now, so it’s not like it’ll be too hard to figure out once you get your hands on it, I think. Later on, that’ll probably get much more complicated, but it’s fairly hard to get lost just yet. I do hope that you’ll enjoy it once you get your hands on it!
Thanks for reading!
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