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A Look Back at 2019 and Broad Plans for 2020
🕑 Added 2020-01-02 02:29:16 +0000 UTCHappy new year! I hope everyone had a great holiday season.
2019 was the first full calendar year of development since the game's first release back in April 2018, and it was a productive year looking back. There were 25 full updates in 2019 (not counting the release candidates for public beta testing), averaging 14.6 days between updates, which is already pretty close to my promise of consistently one update per 2 weeks for the $500 Patreon goal, even though this goal hasn't been reached yet. Some of the most important developments in 2019 include:
- The character model overhaul: All the character models were upgraded from the old ManuelLab system to a more current-gen Daz Genesis 8 system, which vastly improved the visual appeal of the game,
- New animations tailor-made for the new Daz models, which are simply superior to the old ones, due to both the Daz models having a better skeleton to base the animations around + me becoming more experienced at animating myself (I'm a coder by trade so I initially started this project with no animating experience)
- 3d bedrooms: The additions of these mean that most adult scenes are now fully 3d (instead of happening in front of a flat 2d background) and look pretty good indeed. It also allows for things like bed and wall animations.
- Quests, Achievements, Perks & Karma: these new gameplay elements help enhance the original life simulation sandbox experience. Quests add longer storylines and radiant activities that were simply impossible with the short random scenes.
Last but not least, the last few months of the year in particular saw an emergence of the modding community for the game, which has continued growing. Anything from character and room presets to huge ambitious mods that focus on a specific fetish or expand the game's gameplay - the modders have been amazing in their contributions, some spending tens or hundreds of hours into modding, and I cannot be more thankful for their efforts. I will continue to post a monthly list of community-made mods so that you won't miss out on these fantastic mods and their updates.
So what developments can you expect to see in 2020:
- For the first three months of the year, I will focus on the rest of major features that I have yet to work in 2019. These include but are not limited to sounds, expressions (even though the animations are now much better, the characters still look very emotionless right now during adult scenes), sex scene UI (super long scrollbar right now, not the most user-friendly) and map graphical overhaul (the gray building blocks are probably the biggest eye-sore still left after all the graphical improvements made in 2019, hopefully I will be able to come up with something resembling a real city more). A more technical major feature to implement will be multi-threading, which will eliminate lags when taking actions, allow scenes to be checked and triggered while waiting and doing nothing (while letting the time simply pass) too, and just generally make scenes trigger more consistently if their conditions are met. After these major features are implemented, LifePlay will be a pretty well-rounded game and the core gameplay should feel quite 'complete', just needing more content. Obviously, these feature updates will be the focus of the first three months, but won't be everything that I do. There will be some content updates too.
- Once the major remaining features are out of the way, the rest of the year will be mainly content updates, rather than feature updates. Namely, these will be new quests, scenes, animations, character customization assets, clothes and most importantly, expanding existing fetishes and adding some new ones. In 2020, the community will have more say in what these content updates will be: I will take suggestions for new content updates coming from the public (Patreon, Discord, F95, LoversLab, Reddit, etc), combine them with my own ideas and then make polls on Patreon for patrons to vote on what comes next. That way, even though patrons get to decide what comes next, anyone can have their suggestions be implemented in an update if the idea is good and popular enough.
These are the broad plans for 2020, I will of course continue to publish specific plans for each update that comes next.
Thank you for your continued support of the project, whether it's financial support via Patreon or via modding, beta testing or promoting the game. Let's look forward to an exciting year for LifePlay.
