As a final act of the year, let's check out what's planned for next month. It's an SKA month so the main focus will be on finishing the Roland/Lorraine events.
Week 1: I originally wanted to do a half-vacation-half-work week here, but it turns out the half-work is more like a full week of work. We did the 0.3.0 release for Liora at the start of the week, so the usual bugfixing and marketing work is falling into the middle of the week instead of the weekend. Besides that we have the voice acting recruitment going on where I'm currently investigating the applicant's commission conditions to make sure we don't run into some trap there. We are also very close to the next milestone goal, which is hiring a freelance translator for a chinese translation for Liora. At the end of the month we usually have a drop-off wave so maybe we will the goal in the end, but in case we reach it I will also spend some time starting the recruitment.
And then, it's the start of the new year, so on Friday I will be doing some end of year accounting to hand in my annual revenue tax report. Not much going on, but there will at least be a prerelease for SKA.
Week 2: Then we can finally get on with content production. As I mentioned: Main focus being the Lorraine events. There will be 1 more proper lewd event in the chain and then just a repeat version to hold the line until the ending.
Week 3: It's a 5-week update, so I get a week off; I will be doing the planned new year's vacation in this week. Finish playing Expedition 33 hopefully and otherwise just do integrating work from our freelancers. I hope that the onboarding of our chosen voice actor will have progressed to the point that I can post maybe some sample voiced scenes or something already. But we will have to see.
Week 4: The current event chain with Roland will not lead to a bad end, instead it will further modify his events in the Victory Ending B most likely by adding an extra lewd ending event at the very end. I was considering that it would involve Aura betraying Rose to Roland, but since that kind of already happens in the Roland Bad End, I'm currently wondering if feminized Georgia wouldn't be a better choice. Or perhaps I will keep it simple and it's just Lorraine/Aura/Roland, I will need to see. Whatever is left in time from this week, I will then spend on general polish work.
Week 5: I doubt there is much of a point of opening up anything new this close to the 1.3.0-beta release for SKA, so I will be shifting back to Liora a week early. I noticed during my playtesting that to evaluate the balance on higher day counts of 60+ we really need the next level of the Brightwood area to evaluate how two-stage areas influence the time needed to achieve an area clear.
That's my plan list. Let's take a look at what's up on our freelancer side.
RPGM Dev
Our assistant developer Trihan will continue working on some technical work. For Liora, I want to have an extra way of filtering contract clauses. The plan is that you can use the <- and -> keys (or click on corresponding buttons with the mouse) to filter between certain icon categories. Example: The erotic category has clauses that use the heart icon for lewd actions and the embarrassed smily for behavior during lewd actions. You will be able to filter clauses based on the icons. This should theoretically enable the contract to get big enough all the way into the end game.
The other two goals are more behind-the-scenes work: Analyzing the game for performance bottlenecks, just a general maintenance action, and for translations, Trihan will be investigating further options for reducing redunant texts in the rpgmaker databases.
Artists
No major change of plan for Liora's artist Deniis. I gave him the brief to create the illustrations for the Ariadne Training Handjob/Titjob event. And then we will be focusing on the Blowjob version for the Ariadne Training and the Edgar service events.
Our artist Emubi for SKA is very good in schedule, so I will probably add more minor artworks such as the recent cutin for the selling panties scene. I'm not certain which ones I will pick, as it depends on which ones I can squeeze in and my concrete plans for the ending work in Week 4. The most likely candidate right now is artwork for the Riverflow Artist events.
Voce Acting
Make the decision on who to hire and onboard. I have never done VA directing, so we will need to establish a workflow first and I hope that at least one Liora prerelease from this month can contain some prelimary results so we can a first impression of how the game would feel with VA.
Aaand that's the plan for January.