Hello, all! 

It's been a while since the last update, and I've had a lot on my plate. 2 book formatting and cover design jobs, internet and power outages due to winter storms, and even a Twitch sponsorship. It was the ideal time to let the survey I posted simmer and gather results. And after 120 submissions, I felt I had a pretty good sample size to determine how the community at large would like the next WCA season to go. Allow me to share some of that data with you. 

Design Decision 1: Light Sandbox "Free Time" sections

Decision: YES

Analysis: Nearly 90% of respondents think this type of mechanic would work well in WCA, and the #1 thing people have been asking for is More Game in the game. Yes, even more than "MOAR SEGS!" Players want choices and to be able to customize their playthrough. In this case, I am adamantly avoiding all the things people hate about traditional sandboxes. There will be NO GRIND. NO REPETITIVE CYCLES. NO STATS. All it will be is a glorified menu that allows you to choose to visit one of the love interests or continue the main storyline. The ONLY thing I will be doing is requiring you to be at certain affection levels with specific girls in order to access other girls' or some main story content, and I don't plan on doing that often for characters that don't have a ton of established synergy. 

Here's an example of how the Free Time screen will look:

That's it. Two buttons. Maybe a third button to access the Options menu. Press the right button, and you continue the main story. Press the left, and you'll end up on this screen:

You choose the character you wanna hang out with, and at the end it returns to the Free Time screen. Simple. Elegant. And won't ruin the game for most of you.

Question 2: RPG Mechanics 

Decision: NO

Analysis: According to this data, trying to add this to the game would completely ruin it for approximately 15% of you, and could potentially ruin it for another nearly 28%. Less than 60% of respondents considered this a good idea, and I'm not a fan of alienating nearly half of my community. RPG mechanics will not be featured in WCA. 

That being said, I do have some other ideas on how to inject a little bit of action into WCA. I'm currently looking into MMD for the ability to record fight scenes as video rather than stills, and I'm considering Dragon's Lair style QTE sections in some of the stories (you'll be able to auto-succeed these sections via a setting in the Options menu for a Story Only experience). 

Question 3: Who should be the face of WCA Season 2?

Decision: Pending

Analysis: The numbers are pretty clear here.  A lot of people liked the Wither and Saffryn mockup I did. But the interesting thing here is that Wither by herself got INSANELY high numbers, while Saffryn by herself did not. But you know who did get high numbers by herself, nearly doubling the next most popular character? Nook. So I may end up swapping Saffryn out for Nook and have the new icon feature Nook and Wither. Undecided as of yet.

Question 4: What other mechanics should I be considering?

Decision: None yet

Analysis: By far the most suggested thing has been a visible affection system; players want to see how they're progressing with a girl, and that's fair. I'll be discussing with Rimulex on how best to implement this, and will definitely be taking suggestions.

Question 5: WCA Merch?

Decision: NO

Analysis: Well, this one surprised me. A lot of you thought that others would buy it, but wouldn't do so yourselves. Less than 20% of you would actually purchase something with your favorite character on it. 

Also, one intrepid supporter had this to say regarding the legality:

This is honestly a great point and I hadn't considered it. I know I can't sell WCA on Steam because under Steam's guidelines, my game can't be made with assets belonging to other games. Which is also fair. 

All of this data has been pretty eye-opening, and will give me and Rimulex a good idea of where to start designing Season 2. This will likely be a bit of a pause between content delivery, as we'll be putting out a whole new project due to size limitations. I will, however, include a Season 1 package for PC and Mac users so that you can replay all of Season 1 inside the Season 2 program at your leisure. Past that, we're looking at another image converter that seems to convert the images to about half the size of our normal converter, and I'm having a hard time seeing any reduction in quality.

Regarding the last Season 1 update, we are removing all of the H-scene "locked" slots that don't pertain to actual H-scenes. This has caused a ton of confusion, with most players thinking there were a bunch of lewd scenes they missed. I will be retconning and rewriting one thing, as I decided moving a particular event forward a bit would be a perfect capstone to the end of Season 1. There will be exactly 1 more lewd scene as well, though I might have to do some reconverting of a batch of the images to get everything to fit in a <2gb package.

Anyways, thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy post. Once these two Book Cover/Formatting commissions are finished, I'll be able to get back to work on WCA, polish up Season 1's content, and deliver a final content update as we prepare for the launch of Season 2. In the meantime, this project could REALLY use your support, as meeting my goal in SubscribeStar or Patreon will mean I am able to cut myself down from four days a week at my security job to three. Heck, I'm typing this from one of my work sites as we speak. Being able to work less and still pay rent would be huge, not only for me, but for the development speed of WCA. So if you have some disposable income that you'd like to go to a good cause, I'd love if you could head to:

https://subscribestar.adult/emberwings

or

https://www.patreon.com/emberwings

Your support means the world to me, and puts me one step closer to my goal of decreasing the time between content drops for this game. Thank you all so much, and I hope you're looking forward to what I have in store for you in Season 2!

-Vic