Five, to be exact.
Updating MC's bedroom provided us with an incredibly valuable experience that can be summarized as "overhauling locations is fucking tough". After releasing our first overhaul update, we decided to take some time and rethink our approach, so we won't have to devote months of effort to ultimately remake one area at a time. The quality might have been decent, but there is no argument that could justify remaking in-game environments at a pace of one location per fiscal year.
This time around we picked multiple locations that were previously underutilized, like pool, and instead of trying to pack them full of events straight away, we're taking a more conservative approach of first making them playable. Then, once we make sure that none of the existing in-game storylines caught on fire, we'll start slowly filling these areas with new things to find, events to encounter, and maybe even new characters to meet. And just to be clear, we are planning to release all five locations we're currently working on in a single update, hence why we're being cautious regarding what content we add straight away and what we should release as a separate update later.
Sticking with pool as an example, there are a few routes that utilize it as a set piece — Andre and Sonya. Right now, once you reach the point in their stories where pool scenes can be triggered, you simply need to enter the location and then things start happening on their own, no additional input needed. With the overhaul, we'd like to give more agency into hands of our players, allowing you to first witness these characters actually appear in a given location, then click on them to progress the story forward. It might sound like a small detail, but there's a ton of examples of this "railroading" in our game. At some point we had to make a choice whether we stick to this approach of holding our player's hand, ultimately turning A34 into a visual novel with rudimentary gameplay that exists for the sole purpose of classifying our product as a game, or use these overhauls as our chance to introduce more interactive elements, give people reasons to look and click around, start rewarding curious players that go out of their way and explore more of the in-game world, and so on. We chose the latter.
Another big benefit that comes with overhauls — the ability to add new content without the ever-present threat of having to redo the same work later on. One of the big stopping factors for adding new girls, apart from the obvious time constrains, was the painful realization that anything we do with our old backgrounds would have to be remade again once we overhaul a given area. Fortunately, this will no longer be a problem! Once these overhauls are out, we'll be able to start filling them up with any kind of content we'd like the finished version of A34 to offer, be that new girls, quests, secrets, events, or literally anything else.
While there is no ETA for this overhaul update, we're aiming to release it this year. Wish us luck and stay tuned for more overhaul news!