Update 19 has now been released after 9 months or so of work on it. It's the biggest update I've ever done, it was the most difficult update I've ever done, and it took the longest of any update I've ever done. I have a lot of thoughts about it and I want to share them.
This is going to be a long post. If you hate the update, I don't expect this to change your mind, but for those who are interested in why I made the decisions that I made and how I feel about those decisions and about the Update in general, I hope that this will answer some of those questions.
If you haven't played Update 19 yet, I HIGHLY suggest you play it before reading this. I'm going to spoil everything, so please play it first.
A Week of Patches
If you played the Update when I first released it and hit a bunch of bugs, it's highly likely that those bugs have been fixed by now.
We knew there was going to be bugs on this one. There's bugs in all of them, honestly. I test as much as I'm able to, I have a small team of alpha testers who work really hard testing the game. But there's still only like five of them and one of me. When it goes to Beta testers, that's like maybe 50-100 more people that play the game. But when it goes out on Premium Edition, very quickly it's being played by thousands of people.
So there are bugs that get through and when an update is as complicated as what this one was, there was no doubt there would be bugs.
I've fixed all the bugs that I could find and that have been reported over the past week. I also added in an end-game gallery since so many were asking for it, but you have to replay the update from the beginning to unlock it, since I didn't have the variables in the original script, sorry about that.
The Origins of Come Home
I want to start talking about this Update from the very beginning. Over five years ago now, Come Home started as kind of a mix of ideas that were all in my head at the same time. I had been playing Persona 5 and loved the social simulation in it. I had been writing erotica and had a bunch of stories I planned to publish as novellas. And I had been dipping my toes into adult games with stuff like Summertime Saga and Harem Hotel. That's where the idea of Come Home was born.
Originally, the idea was something closer to Persona 5. During the day, you had this big dating simulator with a lot of different characters. At night, you venture into the other world and dungeon crawl with alternate versions of those characters, looking for your father. This is what my original gameplan was and my original script reflected that.
As I got started on the game, things quickly changed. I listened to a lot of feedback - people don't like minigames, people don't like RPG combat, people don't want a grindy game system in their porn games. I understand that too - a lot of people just want to come and read a story and jerk off and that's it. They want something that is focused on the characters, not the gameplay. I completely understand that. Adult Visual Novels are not intended to appeal to an audience that is interested in gameplay.
I also learned that my coding and gamemaking capabilities were not quite up to snuff and I had no idea how to actually code a dungeon crawl and a combat system and all of that. It was a lot more work than I was capable of doing, especially when I'm just starting off and learning everything all at once and I have no money to hire people or buy software or assets.
This is from a document that I wrote in 2000.
So I took all of this into account and took a step back on Come Home. Instead, I would just focus on the characters and the dating simulator and have a single chapter of the game where you go through the portal and find your father.
The outline at this point was that there would be two semesters of college and the player would go through the portal and find his father around Update 12, in the middle of the two semesters. Then he'd come back, finish school and finish up all the characters' stories.
The investigation timeline written in 2000.
This is just a little snippet of the planned second semester, with art, math, and computer science class. Some other characters, like Adrian weren't going to be introduced until this second semester as well.
As I continued making the game, I felt like this wouldn't really work well. For one, I already had so many characters in the game. Adding a second semester, (with three more planned teacher characters) just wasn't feasible. Plus, I felt like going through the portal and finding his father is more of a climax of the story and shouldn't happen in the middle.
So the outline was rewritten again and the "through the portal" chapter was moved to Update 19. This was a little over three years ago. This update has been agonizing me almost since I started making the game.
The Agonies of Update 19
I struggled so hard with this update from the very beginning. The plan was always that the MC goes to a fantasy world, meets alternate versions of the characters that he loves, reconciles with his father, and has to fight to get back to his real world. That's pretty much what was written in the outline from the beginning.
As it grew closer and closer, I became more and more scared of actually making it. I talked to several people about this over several years. I knew that some players would be annoyed by this update. Some players would hate the tonal shift. Some players would hate the fantasy world. Some players would hate RPG combat. I'll get more into those subjects later.
About two years ago, I sat down and looked over my outline again and was like, "Do I really want to make this chapter this way?"
I did a couple of rewrites
- Maybe the MC never goes through the portal at all? Maybe he's just happy where he is and lets his father go?
- Maybe the MC goes through the portal and it's just another world like his own. More of a Back to the Future style thing, where he sneaks in, finds his father, talks to him, and then gets back to his world and that's it?
- Maybe the MC doesn't ever go through the portal and instead just pulls his father back?
I spent a while writing a few other ideas and planning them out, just to see how I liked them. Every time though, I came back to the original idea - Fantasy world, alternate versions of characters, father is happy where he is.
Eventually, I had to just commit to doing it. Even though I knew that some fans would not like it. Even though I knew that some people would be genuinely upset about it.
It was hard, because even though I've been doing this for so long and even though most people are supportive, the vocal minority still get to me when they harshly criticize the game. I knew that committing to making the update this way was going to be asking for a lot of that vocal criticism. I talked with people close to me for a long time about this and about how I was going to deal with it. Even though I was prepared for it, it's still been tough to see the reaction be basically exactly as I predicted.
Fantasy World with RPG Combat
So, why a fantasy world with RPG combat? Why not just do anything else?
Because I thought fantasy alternates of all of these characters sounded really fun. I had ideas in my head for a long time of alternate versions of these characters that I wanted to create and I thought this was a fun opportunity to do that.
Once I decided that the MC had to go through the portal, that meant that we had to see an alternate world. I wanted the other world to feel like something completely different. Originally, I had thought about doing a completely different art style for this update. Maybe switching to 2d hand drawn art or making all the characters in Blender or something. I ended up not really being able to do that, because of the time it would take to commission all the 2d art required. It's not something I could do on my own.
The whole point of doing an alternate world though was to see alternate characters. I don't want to see alternate characters in another mundane world - I want to see freaky weird versions of them, you know?
To me, a fantasy world like this was the most fun.
Okay, but why RPG combat?
This was one of those things that I just wanted to do. I thought about cutting it a couple of times and just making it be all visual novel stuff. It would have been much faster to do it that way and people probably would have still liked it / liked it more.
But the combat was something that I wanted. I wanted to try my hand at coding it. I wanted to see these characters in a combat situation and what they would do. I thought it sounded fun.
It went through a few different iterations. At first I was thinking something like Wizardry, where you don't see your characters, or you see the back of their heads. This felt very boring to me and not fun, so I scrapped it. Then I had a sort of Final Fantasy style, where you see both teams on different sides of the screen, they'd run over and attack. This was a mess to code though, and I didn't like how small the characters were on the screen. I want to be able to see them. That's how I ended up on the final results of the combat screen. 
Like all the other elements of the game that I WANTED, but I knew some fans would not, I tried to minimize the annoyance, by making combat fast, easy, and completely skippable. If you don't like it, you literally don't have to do it. Doesn't matter - people are still going to complain about it.
Some people have guessed that maybe I'm using this as a way of designing RPG combat in my next games or something. That's not the case. I have no intention of using this combat system for any future games at the moment. It was just something I wanted to do here.
The point is that I wanted the shift. I wanted going through the portal to feel like a completely different game. Maybe that's not a decision that some players would have preferred, but it's exactly what I wanted it to be.
The Theme
I think it was when I got to about Update 8 or 9 that I realized that Come Home had a bit of a theme that I didn't intend to put in it, but it snuck in anyway. This theme of loss and how people deal with it.
For those who don't know, my father died a couple years before I started writing Come Home. When he died, it completely flipped my life upside down. I got a divorce. I came out as bi. I quit my job. I was a mess.
I didn't intend to write so much of myself into these characters, but as I was looking at it later, I realized that nearly every single one of my characters had lost something and they were dealing with it in different ways. And the entire story is about how the MC's father could not deal with that loss and so he ran away from the entire world.
At this point, I knew that Update 19 was going to have a fantasy world with alternate characters and I knew that the final boss was this Ice Queen that was harassing the land and wouldn't let the MC leave. At that point however, I had penciled in that the Ice Queen was going to be Mrs. Mills.
Once I realized the theme of loss though, I felt that Lisa would be a better fit for the villain. In our world, Lisa has lost a lot. Suzy is everything to her. What if she lost Suzy? How would she handle that? Not very well, I'm guessing.
Alternate Versions of the Characters
This was a ton of fun for me. Once we set up that there are alternate worlds out there, I think most people want to see alternate versions of the characters. That's the entire point of this sort of thing!
I just want to talk about some of my ideas that didn't quite make it or changed over time.
I looked for my original outline, where I marked down what I planned for alternate versions of each character, but I couldn't find it, so some of this is just working off memory.
Originally, as I said, Mrs. Mills was going to be the Ice Queen and I had Lisa in a smaller role somewhere and Suzy as a party member. When it came time to make the update, I knew I had to structure it in a way that limited the number of combinations of party members. The best way to do this, for me, was to group them - have a limited number of choices per group. Then I could layer images based on the group that the character was in. This cut down on the amount of work significantly, but that meant that I only wanted 12 characters to be party members, and picking those was pretty hard.
Since Lisa was the Ice Queen and Suzy was dead, that took those out of the picture. Originally, I had wanted Tammy as a sort of hand-to-hand fighter in the group, but I decided that I had Bai already in that role and it made sense for Tammy to be with Lisa, so I made Tammy the guard.
Reba I originally had as an Engineer - somebody who would create drones to attack the enemies, or maybe hit them with a wrench. I decided to go with a Barbarian though, mostly for the jokes. It was just more fun to write her like that.
I originally had Nora, Mrs. McGee, and Gertrude as a coven of witches that you meet, who help you, and maybe have an orgy. I ended up going in a different direction when I had the idea of Nora being a mermaid. I just really wanted to make an underwater mermaid scene. Once I took Nora out to do that, it didn't make sense to have Gertrude as a witch anymore either, so I switched her to a ghost. I felt like it was a little thematic that the MC gives Gertrude what she needs to let go of this world, like he helped her let go and start a new life in the real world. That left Mrs. McGee, who I still thought would make a great witch, with Pete as her thrall.
Dana was always intended on being a "sexy warrior". I saw her as a sort of valkyrie. Not a whole lot of hidden meaning there - she just looks hot in armor.
Adrian I originally had as an archer (for some reason), but then I thought that she should be a sort of real-life version of her Souls of War character. I pictured this Adrian as the version of herself that our Adrian wants to be.
Juliana didn't really change much. She was always intended to be a wizard, obsessed with books and learning.
Kendra I originally had as an elven princess for some reason, but the idea of her being a short-lived, frustrated fairy popped into my head and I loved it so much, plus it opened the door for so many good moments. Most of my favorite moments in the Update were from Kendra.
Mari was always going to be a druid/shapechanger. There was no other choice for her. Originally I planned on her being in a sort of hybrid form more often, along with maybe a furry sex scene, but I couldn't ever get the model to look the way I wanted it to, so I scrapped the idea.
Mi-Cha was always going to be a dancer. I imagined her sort of like Yuna from Final Fantasy X (who I know was a summoner and not a dancer), but that was a definite inspiration with her dancing on the water.
Jez I originally had imagined as sort of a town guard, but later I decided to flip that and have her be instead more of an outlaw. I toyed with the idea of having her do archery or something instead of guns. Wasn't sure I wanted any guns in the game. But I just picture Jez with guns and it looks right in my head, so I went with it.
Bai was always going to be a monk. No other ideas there.
Jamie was always going to be a cleric of some sort, but she was the last one that I added to the party lineup. For a while, I was planning on having Tammy as a party member and Jamie as somebody you just meet along the way.
Izzy was the one I struggled with for a long time. I wanted Izzy as a gorgon / medusa SO badly. It was one of the scenes that I had in my head from the start and one of the reasons I wanted to do alternate characters and a fantasy world in the first place. I really wanted a sex scene with Izzy as a gorgon and little snake hairs kissing his dick and everything. It's so hot in my brain. There were also a lot of little jokes bumping around in my head about "getting stoned" and stuff. Anyways, the limitations of Daz and my abilities with Daz ended up preventing me from doing this. I did some tests and the posing was SO time consuming and I never really liked how anything looked. Animation would have been a complete nightmare. So "getting stoned" got changed to "blaze it" and I made her a sort of pyromancer instead. I'm still happy with it. Still love Izzy. But I wish I could have done that gorgon scene.
Mrs. Mills, since I wasn't going to make her the Ice Queen, I almost immediately came up with her actually just being the devil. It's fitting and it's fun. I loved her scene as well.
Brandi was originally going to be a Pirate Chef, but I took away the Pirate, since I didn't really have any scenes near the sea or anything. I toyed with the idea of her being a party member, but didn't really get anywhere with that. Then I liked the idea of her just being somebody your group runs into. It also gives her the opportunity to do some threesomes, since she has none with any of the main characters in the real world of the game.
Whitney, I originally had as something else… I can't remember what it was now. But the idea of her being a centaur was just fun for me and a fun challenge to make in Daz and I wanted to try it. Originally her scene was bigger, but I kind of had to cut it down due to the complexity of having all the other characters there as well. It was just a logistical coding nightmare.
This is an early version of Whitney:
There were a few side characters that show up too. Some townsfolk that the MC sees. Some of the enemies are alternate versions of antagonists in the real world. There's Mickey, Reba's brother, which I thought was a fun scene. There's Claire cameoing as a scorpion woman.
And there's another scene with the "Big-Tittied HotTub MILF. That's intended as a bonus Patreon-only scene (so is the sex scene with Joan, which I'll get to in a bit). I didn't want to cut off too much content for Free players, but I wanted at least two scenes for Premium players, so the BTHTMILF scene was a late addition. When I started working on the scene, I toyed with the idea of it being another Connie appearance instead and actually put it up for a vote on Discord, but in the end went with the BTHTMILF.
MC and his Family
Let's talk a bit about MC finally discovering what happened with his father, getting a bit of reconciliation with his mother as well, and meeting Joan.
This meeting with MC's father is something that I've thought about since I first started writing the game. It's one of those things that you know has to happen at some point, but I wasn't sure how it was going to happen until we got closer. Until after I began exploring that theme of how people deal with loss.
MC has all these love interests who have dealt with their own loss. Particularly Mari, who lost her whole family and still goes to work with a smile on her face. Or Reba, who lost her father and still takes care of her mother. Or Kendra, who knows she's going to die, but still gets up and tries her best to enjoy the life she has. There's all these characters who have lost so much, but still fight to enjoy their lives and help the people around them.
Then there's Dad, who instead of dealing with his loss, abandoned his family and ran away from the world to chase after his dead wife.
It's sad. It's pitiful.
So that's how I pictured the MC's dad, when we finally meet him. He is a sad old man with a lot of regrets. He's not the strong, supportive, father that the MC knew.
It's kind of rough to write a scene like that. I don't know that I accomplished it completely. I can understand people seeing it as a bit of an anticlimax. But I also think that's kind of the point. The MC's goal when he started was to get his father back, but those goals have changed over time. He doesn't need his dad anymore. He has other people who love him who didn't abandon him.
Anyways, there's a little bit of my personal demons in all of this stuff. I hope some of it clicked with people. I don't think it's a perfectly written story, by any means, but it's what I felt.
The MC also gets to spend some time with his mother (who is not really his mother, but still kind of is). I felt like I did pretty well on that scene. I think it conveyed the emotion I was trying to convey. I wish I could have a final talk with my dad like that. I wish I could tell him all the things that I feel. I wrote some of them out in that scene and I felt like it worked.
Finally, there's Joan. Joan is a bit of a joke, I guess, but I just thought the idea of an alternate version of our MC was just too fun. And what if she's a girl and she fucks everybody in town, just like our MC does? The concept was funny to me, so I went with it. I put her in that blue top and khaki pants and tried to make her look close to the MC. Then I went through the same thought process as the MC does when he's trying to figure out how weird it is. I'm like "is this okay for Patreon?" In the end, I came to the same conclusion as he did. She's not related to him. She's not him. It's just some woman. Since this scene was just a little bonus thing, I decided to make it a Premium-only scene, but I think it's fun.
Voices
Up until this point, I'd been hiring voice actresses and including voicework in the game as I could. I didn't include any new voicework in Update 19 and there's a few reasons for that.
Firstly, some of the voice actresses that I have used up until this point are either not doing voicework anymore or I did not have a good experience using them and do not want to hire them again. It's unfortunate, but it's not possible for me to add new voicework for some of these characters without recasting them.
Some of the characters though I could have added more voicework for. There are several of the actresses that I really love and would want to work with again and probably will work with in the future. I didn't add more voicework from those actresses though, because I felt like it would be odd to have the update partially voiced, but obviously missing certain characters.
But, the main game is also partially voiced and missing certain characters too, right? Yeah, I there's still some characters I haven't cast, but I'm hoping to. I just didn't have time this update. Sending out casting calls, listening to auditions, directing the actors, editing the audio, and putting all of that into the game is a lot of work and this Update was already taking so long, I decided not to attempt to add the voice acting for the update at all.
I know some people are going to be disappointed by that. Some people don't care about the voice acting and won't care at all.
I think I made a mistake by adding voice acting before the game was finished. It means that now I have to go back to those actresses and get more voicework to finish the game with. There's some of the actors that I'm just not going to be able to do that with, leaving me to either recast and redo the whole thing, or have new actresses come in and take over, causing a voice switch in the middle.
Or just not finishing the voicework, which is obviously the easiest way, but also the most disappointing.
I probably should have stuck to my guns and told everybody asking for voicework to wait until the game was finished, then done it all at the end, before the full-game release. This game is still early access after all. It's not really meant to be played update by update. I should have planned for its final form a little better.
At the moment, I do not know if I'm going to add more voices to the game. I would like to have voices for every character, even if it's only partial voices, but it will depend on if I find the right voice for the role. It would also be nice to have some actresses come back and do more voicework for endgame stuff, but it wouldn't be all of them.
I don't know how I'm going to handle it yet.
Previews and The Trailer
I knew that this was going to be tough, but I wanted the update to be a complete surprise for people. I wanted it to come out of left field and make people go, "What the fuck? Who put this fantasy stuff in my college porn game?" That's absolutely what I wanted to happen. I knew some people wouldn't like it, but I hoped that most people would give it a chance and have fun with it.
In order to keep it a secret for as long as possible, I didn't do many previews throughout the development cycle. This was hard, and I lost a lot of patrons over the last 9 months or so, because I haven't been sharing as much as normal. It's all expected and understandable, but I did what I had to do to get the result that I wanted, which was a genuine surprise for the audience.
Some people don't like being surprised. Sorry, but that's the way it is. It's not like you were surprised by a roof falling on you or surprised by a bear in your toilet. It's just a silly porn game getting a little sillier. You'll be okay.
The trailer was fun for me as well. I wanted to convey the emotion that we are sort of saying goodbye here. Once again, dealing with loss. The MC has gone through the portal, leaving all the other characters behind. That stuff doesn't actually happen in the Update, but we can imagine it and the emotions are real. It's the first time I've ever made renders exclusively for a trailer. I thought it turned out wonderful though. I really loved the trailer and I think that most of the audience did as well.
Update 19's Reception
So, I have established that I knew a long time ago that this was going to be a hard update. I knew that the reception was probably going to be polarizing. I knew that I was going to lose fans and maybe even lose money and maybe piss a lot of people off. Hell maybe everybody would hate this Update and think that the game was trash and this game would forever be known as that one game that was good up until the stupid twist at the end.
Maybe it'll still be known as that. But I wrote what I wrote for a reason and I hope that I've explained that reasoning sufficiently.
I am not a perfect writer. I know that I did not craft the most perfect story. It's not going to be the best story ever told about loss. It's not going to be the best porn game story ever made. I'm not the best writer in the world and I don't think that anything I make is ever going to be perfect. When somebody compares me to other writers like Drifty (Leap of Faith) or Dr. PinkCake (Acting Lessons) or whoever else, saying that they told their stories better, I'm just like "Okay, what do you want me to do about that?"
If I'm not as good a writer as those people, should I just stop? Go home? Never write again, until I can craft the most perfect narrative?
I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to keep writing the best that I can with all the heart that I can give it and hope that it'll connect with some people. What the hell else am I supposed to do?
So, I sent the first version of this to alpha testers several months ago. It didn't have the full update yet, but did have a more rudimentary version of the combat included. I wanted to test the waters with them a bit to see how they felt about the combat. At this point, I was considering removing the combat completely and just having it be normal visual novel stuff.
But, for the most part, the alpha testers actually thought the combat was fun and enjoyed the change of pace. There were a couple who were more iffy and a couple others who had suggestions to make the combat more fun.
One of my alphas at this point flat out told me that they hated it and that they don't play games with combat and if they would have known that the game was going to have combat, they wouldn't have played it in the first place. This is a sentiment that I expected and knew I was going to have to deal with.
I hear this sentiment all the time though, for different things.
"I hate sandboxes and will never play a sandbox!"
"I don't have any interest in femdom!"
"More than five love interests is too many!"
"I don't care about any characters with a penis!"
"I hate furries!"
But for some people those things have changed to…
"I hate sandboxes, but Come Home implements the sandbox system in a really fun, non-grindy way."
"I don't have any interest in femdom, but Mrs. Mills is pretty fun."
"More than five love interests is too many, but here are my top 10 favorite love interests in Come Home."
"I didn't care about any characters with a penis, but I'm completely in love with Adrian."
"I hate furries, but Mari is adorable and I want to marry her!"
My point is that from the very beginning, my whole thing with Come Home has been a sort of sampling of all kinds of different concepts that people can come and take what they want and enjoy what they want and maybe try some things that they wouldn't normally try and maybe find some things that they like that they didn't know they would like. I cannot tell you how many reviews I've gotten from people who hate sandboxes, but really love the way that I've implemented it. I cannot tell you how many people have messaged me saying that they didn't know they were into transwomen until they met Adrian. It makes me feel good every time.
People need to be a little more open to ideas. If you cannot enjoy a game because it's a sandbox or you cannot enjoy a game because it has a little combat minigame, or you cannot enjoy a game because it has a dragon or a sword in it or something, you are just going to be stuck playing the same stuff over and over again forever. Expand your horizons. Take a breath and try something new. It's fun and you might find something that you didn't know you would like.
Later, when he played the final version, that Alpha tester who told me that he hated that I was implementing combat, said that I had done a good job and that he was convinced. He enjoyed the combat. It was fun.
It made me feel amazing, just like it does every time somebody says that I showed them something that they didn't know they would enjoy.
I know that not everybody is going to be like that. Some people are going to hate it no matter what. Some people are going to be upset and feel betrayed and think I'm an idiot for implementing this stuff. I've read all the reviews and the feedback, and it's about what I expected. Most people enjoyed it. A vocal minority hate it and want everybody to know how much they hated it.
To them, I am sorry, but I'm always going to do what I feel is the best for the game and for myself. I am not making the game for a single person and I'm not making the game based on what I think that the majority of my players want. I'm making the game based on what I want, with a little bit of input from the community.
That's what makes it art. It's not made by a community or a robot. You don't just get to type into a prompt and it spits out exactly what you want. It's made by a single person's brain and that brain might not always align with what you think is the best.
But in the end, it's what I think is the best.
Would I Change Anything?
As of now, no I don't think so. If I had an infinite amount of time, I might have made it a little longer. Added some more scenes at the beginning with MC's dad. Stretched the journey out a bit more. But the Update already took around 9 months to make and I just didn't have the time to add more content in there. I also did not want this update to overstay its welcome. It's a big departure from the main game and I wanted it to be quick and enclosed.
I'd make Izzy a gorgon, haha. If I could do that scene justice, I would have done it. Maybe some future game, who knows?
I'd have a little more Tammy in the update. Maybe even a sex scene. I had an idea that the MC would be imprisoned for a bit or something and maybe they'd fuck in his cell. I don't know. One of those things that got cut for time and pacing.
So no, even though people are yelling at me and telling me that I'm a horrible writer and that I ruined the game, I wouldn't change the update. It was always going to be this. It's the story that I wanted to tell.
What's Next? Q&A!
Firstly, I want to do a Q&A. So if you have any questions about anything regarding the game or me, put them in the comments below and I'll get to them. I'll probably post the answers to the Q&A in a couple of weeks.
Along with the Q&A, I'll be doing a sort of "State of the RJ" or whatever, talking about where the development is at and what is going to happen in the future. I'm planning on revealing some things about what is coming after Come Home in that post.
Come Home Update 20 is my highest priority now. Update 20 will be the end of the game. I believe I will have it released before the end of the year, but I'm not 100% on that. It will be close though. It won't be as long of a wait as Update 19 was.
Final Thoughts
Update 19 was a monster that I've been grappling with for years and it's nice to finally have it out there. I've been pleased with the amount of people who seem to get it and love it. I knew that there were going to be people upset about it, but I feel like that's going to happen no matter what version of the story I tell. It's probably going to happen with Update 20 as well - there's always going to be some people who aren't happy with endings. That's just the way it is.
Overall, I'm happy with the update though. I thought it was a lot of fun. It had some emotion in it that I wanted to convey. It had a lot of funny moments. The combat is quick, easy, (and skippable if you hate it). It closes up the father storyline and it sets us up for our ending.
If you were happy with the update, shout it out in the comments. I need to hear it sometimes. The loud negatives always stick in my head more than the positives and the last week has been hard.
It's hard to work on something for nearly a year and then have people tell you that it's trash, or that I took the lazy way, or that I maliciously tricked everybody. I'm not sure what these negative comments are trying to achieve, aside from just making a solo developer who works very hard feel bad. Mission accomplished there. Good job!
I interact with my community a lot and I read most of the comments and reviews that most people make, and maybe that's something that I shouldn't do. I know that a lot of other creators eventually get to the point that they stop interacting, because the negativity is hard to deal with over time. I haven't hit that point yet and I don't want to.
Thank you to the people who have been supportive. Especially on my Discord and over on Patreon. You guys are amazing and make all this bearable. I love you all so much.
And I love this game. It's my baby and I wouldn't ever abandon it or rush through it or do anything that I thought was harmful to it. It's what I wanted from beginning to end and it always will be.
Thanks for reading all this mess (or at least skimming through it). Hope this explains my mindset a bit with this crazy Update. Hope you'll stick around for the finale.
Remember to ask any questions here in the comment and I'll try to get to them in the Q&A!