July Progress Update

​It's hot outside.

But I live in the air conditioned part of the world, so I get stay cool and make it hotter for everyone else.

Suffer.

Anyway, moving past the incredibly sobering thought of ecosystem collapse, the release of Part Four went well.  Had a nice bump of paid supporters, which I was very happy to see.  Huge thanks to all of you for supporting the project so far; every dollar lets me stay full-time on TNoM for longer.

The work for the past month has included what I guess is now the usual release window and post-release tasking:

Fixing any additional typos/bugs found by the early access tiers

Keeping spoilers on Discord where they should be

Adding some emojis and stickers to the Discord server now that it's level two (special thanks to everyone who boosted)

Updating software and tools

Playing around with new tools and adding a few to the workflow

Various other smaller tasks for maintaining/updating various parts of the project

I've moved on to writing, completing the general outline for Chapter Three, with a more detailed portion for the next update (Part Five), and starting on the script for said update.  I had originally planned on writing a rough draft of the whole chapter before going into Part Five in-depth, but since Part Four wound up much larger than expected, I've decided to table writing the rest of the chapter until after Part Five is out.  I'd like to have that released before the end of the year, so I'll be trying (again) to make it smaller than previous parts.

I don't anticipate doing another update this month as it'd likely just be a slightly more eloquent version of: "wrote stuff".  If that changes, though, I'll do a second one.  Otherwise, expect the next update in early August.

Extra stuff for Patrons/Subscribers:

Reminder that this portion is just for you folks on Apprentice and up, so if discussing on Discord, make sure to use the appropriate role channels.

TNoM has been relatively successful, so far, but in a rather odd way.  In terms of 'popularity', it is very much lagging behind other AVNs of similar or younger 'age', at least in terms of free Patreon members and Itch downloads, views, and followers.  And yet, the number of financial supporters is probably going to still be fairly high (comparatively) once the post-update cancellations/downgrades settle.  The lack of 'popularity' is definitely mostly due to my disdain of marketing (and probably my refusal to put an outright pornographic image as the Itch cover to elicit horny clicks).  As for the higher ratio of supporters, I'm guessing TNoM has found its niche.  It certainly has more of a focus on romance and 'wholesomeness' than a lot of other games on the market, and I'm guessing that's the driver.  Which is great, since that's a large part of the story I'm telling.  So if that is indeed what you're here for, what you're supporting for, congratulations!  Expect more.

As always, thanks for the support and stay safe!