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Monthly Update - January/February 2025
🕑 Added 2025-02-02 09:43:39 +0000 UTCHey everyone!
Once again I disappeared into my little hole in an attempt to finish my most recent update.
For this update I had a simple goal: To make a fun little scene with Kat and Allison at the end of the Going Home Ending where they spend the holidays at Kat’s family’s cabin. They all exchange gifts which sets events in motion for some Christmas themed fun.
The original plan was to keep the scene fairly contained where I would get done as much as I could before Christmas to make the most out of the holiday theme. For this I succeeded… kind of. But also failed.
My original plan was to come out with a holiday version of the game with this scene in isolation. But I’ve grown to hate those updates when I play other games. Taking events out from the main storyline and adding a whimsical little subplot is fine for a few minutes, but once you realize there is no tension in the scene and it doesn’t apply to the main game it becomes rather pointless. No stakes, no repercussions, no lasting impact.
The haunted house content for Hypnosis made me realize it all works much better within the main story itself. Using a holiday or other theme to change up the pacing of the story a bit but using it to better explore the lore of the characters is too much fun to pass up.
Adding “what if” content is fun as a creator, but when the story itself has multiple endings and paths, I believe leaving it out of the main game is a mistake. If it doesn’t actually happen within the game, it doesn’t matter, making it essentially pointless. So after that, I decided to make sure I place any other content still within the overall story of the games.
Halloween makes for a great excuse for the characters to dress up in costumes, which was the original point of my first Halloween update. It was a way to use all the random renders of the girls in different outfits and bring them into the main game. But it’s also great for fun and games, including pranks, which led to the haunted house update. Originally I didn’t plan to make it canon, but the characters seemed to insist on it. What settled that choice for me was when Haley talks about not being a “main girl”, and how cute she is when the MC tells her she’s wrong. Sure, the scene with Lydia is fun too, but Haley settled it for me.
And after releasing it I wanted to bring it into the main game, which took three updates to make it fit in the game chronologically.
Just as Halloween makes a fun backdrop for costumes and shenanigans, Christmas, to me, feels like a natural place to end things in these kind of games. It shows the MC finally likes a girl enough to bring her back to his family, like in Leah’s little Christmas scene which will become the last scene of one of her endings. For this ending, it is the MC of Endowed being brought back to his girlfriend’s family, which I can also identify with, as I tend to spend a couple weeks in that position myself. Although I try not to make quite so much of a mess as the MC does.
The other reason I’ve made several of these holiday updates now is probably due to how much my wife enjoys going back to Christmas episodes of her favorite TV shows. The Halloween episodes of Brooklyn 99 always have the heist episodes, The Office Christmas episodes turn up the cringe levels, and for me it’s not Christmas until I watch Charlie and Mac throw rocks at trains.
Right! So that’s my motivation in the fun of making an episode holiday themed. So what’s the problem I ran into this time that makes it over halfway into January and still haven’t finished the episode?
Well, part of it was the usual challenges. Our nanny moved away and it took several weeks to find a new one, meaning I was spending my mornings watching my kid instead of sleeping in until noon after a long night’s work. Our holiday travel was also a challenge with delayed flights, battling off sickness, and all that good stuff. Nothing too big of a deal, just enough where I was not able to give my 100%. Thankfully we have a new nanny watching the little guy and I’ll be able to catch up on my sleep. Maybe.
But the main problem was a bit more elaborate than I expected. Basically I played the Going Home Ending and got angry at it.
Which sounds silly when I consider I’m the one who made it. But that’s the thing about all this… I have no idea what I’m doing sometimes. This time it was with gameplay.
Endowed has been my attempt at challenging myself at times. Adding music and sound effects, using a point system for characters, making every character optional while still maintaining the main narrative, and attempting to offer more gameplay at times.
The problem is, it’s hard to know when things are too difficult for the average player. My goal is to make it entirely possible to find what you want without having to try too hard. It’s more about paying attention and me attempting to leave clues along the way. However, difficulty is subjective.
In this case, it was me trying to get to the threesome between Kat and Allison in the game without cheating by looking into the code. And… I couldn’t get it. Which is some bullshit when you consider I’m the one who made it in the first place. So I checked the walkthrough guide and was let down again. Where was the chart I’d made to show all the different endings in the branch and how to find them? I’d never put it in the walkthrough guide? What the hell.
Had to go through my old documents for Endowed, all five of them, scrolling through them multiple times before finally finding it. In the process of doing all this, I realized this likely didn’t make for a good gameplay experience for most players.
I’d designed the path with the most obvious paths being the least rewarding, hoping to encourage players to keep trying new ones to find the fun stuff. But without indication of there even being other paths and what kind of content they contained, why would you?
Since the original update I’d added names and numbers to endings, so it says “You have reached ending 3 of 9: Party Of Five”
Which at least gives some indication to keep playing. But now I’m realizing why most times I’ve mentioned endings to players they had no idea they existed. Because they’re hard to find and kind of buried.
To get the threesome scene, which is what the new content builds off of, you simply need to not knock up Allison or Kat initially. But… that’s kind of difficult. For me at least.
So I went back and added the same in-game walkthrough game system Hypnosis has and added a “this choice leads to the new content” sign post for each choice to get there. Which is great and all, but I took another look at what I had and why I felt so locked in without much choice for most of the updates. And the reason? The update is so focused on Allison, it ignores Kat’s character in a lot of ways.
The only way to end up with Kat is to date both girls as a throuple. This isn’t the worst thing at face value, but it also takes away a lot of choice. But the real crime the update commits is by locking most of the good kinks into the less obvious endings.
My main goal for this ending in the first place was to skip ahead in time and see what things would be like for the MC and bring in the main fetishes from Hypnosis, that being breast and ass expansion, pregnancy, lactation, and good/evil choices to make with the world reacting accordingly. Endowed takes longer to kick off with all of these, and I wanted to offer a showcase of how it will work in the main game. But what good is that when it’s hard to find?
When I originally finished the Going Home Ending I was really fucking excited for it. I believed it was my best work yet, and that people were going to love it as much as I did. When that reaction never came, and it was met instead with “what is this”, I was actually pretty bummed. But now after going back to play it blind, I think I fully understand that reaction. It all made sense to me at the time, because I made it, but coming back to it later gave a very different experience.
There will now be better guides and walkthroughs for this, but I was too frustrated with my experience to leave things there. So I sat down and played all the different paths and attempted to knock some of the walls down. The MC can now choose Kat and end with her instead of Allie, and the variety in Allie’s endings are now more available based on the player’s choice. Everything is opened up more, with more choices given with more clarity to where they lead.
There are now around twice as many endings, but many of them aren’t entirely different from each other. They are simply accessible in multiple ways. If you knock up Allison initially, you can now see her honeymoon (preggo sex!) and your anniversary at the same place a year later (time for another one! Or lactation. Or make her bigger!) then you can come back and continue seeing Kat on the side without her knowledge. Or you can tell her and see what happens.
I’ve been trying to bring this update to become the way I originally imagined it, with a smaller, more condensed and contained version of the game all in one.
I don’t plan on giving characters this much time or effort in their endings, but a big part of it was learning how to do it. And obviously that learning process is ongoing, but I’d like to think I have a better idea now of how I want side endings to look going forward. They don’t need to have a bunch of different endings, they just need to make sense to the characters. And we don’t need to follow up on each one several times over the next months and years.
But in this case, we got the full version. With the new scenes added, including the big scene at the end with the original planned new content and several more mixed in, it’s now twice as big and as long as the first four episodes of the game combined.
So what’s next?
In a previous post I mentioned the addition of a new path I plan to add to Endowed called the Bad Reputation path. For the most part it will run along with the existing content of Endowed but will offer extra scenes and context for the Main Character’s motivations. I figured now would be a good of time as any to go into more detail.
The main goal is to bring out the MC’s internal conflict earlier in the game. There are several hints to the MC struggling with his identity throughout the game, but we don’t quite see it yet. A big part of his motivation to find out more about his uncle is on the surface, his desire to understand how he died in order to avoid the same fate. But the other motivation is something he might not be fully aware of himself: His desire to understand who his uncle was in an attempt to maybe learn more about himself. Growing up, the MC was constantly compared to his uncle, and as the MC is now fresh out of college and striking out on the world, he is struggling to discover who he is going to be, like Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. So part of understanding his uncle and trying to learn whether he was kind, whether he was fair, whether he was a good manager or someone who took advantage of his position of power is all personal to him, as he realizes he has the potential to act the same way.
Now as he hears more about who his uncle became secondhand through the different employees and people who knew him, he will hear descriptions that contradict each other. His uncle was generally well regarded by his employees, but he was also obviously dating some of the girls, as he’s introduced to several of them at the lawyer’s office in the beginning. Even when well intentioned, a boss/employee relationship is dubious in the best of circumstances, but in the context of a gentlemen’s club it becomes a minefield. If the uncle had done it once that would be one thing, but apparently he did it often, or else there wouldn’t have been so many women who apparently were either carrying or having already given birth to his offspring.
There must be a reason the uncle gave the rule “don’t fuck the strippers”, even if the MC recently learned from the lawyer it wasn’t exactly a rule and more of a piece of advice. Perhaps this was a rule the uncle should have made for himself, or perhaps he did but failed to follow it.
So the new scenes with dig more into the MC’s mindset of whether he should attempt to play into the rules of society despite already being bitter about the fact he has for all his life and feels like it let him down when he finds himself with a huge student loan that will take decades to pay off and no job prospects in sight despite having accumulated debt for that very purpose. “Study hard, work hard, and you will be rewarded” became an empty promise, and now he finds himself in a position where he can get highly rewarded for little effort, but it likely also comes with high risk. Going forward he can attempt to mitigate that risk by trying to follow the rules, or he can say fuck it and be a rebel. It seemed to work out for his uncle, at least right up until the end.
Part of this new content will be shown in conversation, but it will also be put into action. When the MC interviews Hannah at the beginning of Episode 2, if he lets her continue without stopping her, she mentions how her friend Stacy said she occasionally makes extra money by giving BJs. This is obviously against the rules of the club (and illegal), so the MC will be able to investigate this and find out who Stacy is. She will be one of the girls the MC hasn’t really had a conversation with yet but has appeared several times in the background. This is Sapphire.
If the MC confronts her about this, she will offer to “pay him” to keep quiet about it. If he accepts, some of the other girls will hear about this, which hurts the MC’s reputation with the girls. However, having a bad reputation doesn’t necessarily hurt his chances with the others, it simply changes their dynamics. If the MC is willing to give out favors for favors, he’s going to have more offers, leading to more transactional relationships with his employees.
This leads to Episode 5 when the MC is introduced to Jazz. Currently the scene remains unfinished, as I ended up writing several different versions of the scene and wasn’t quite sure which direction to take it. In a similar circumstance to the one mentioned above, he overhears Diamond talking to Sapphire about offering “extra services” to customers. When he confronts her about it, Diamond refuses to answer, but tells him he is free to ask the others. This leads to his first introduction to Topaz, and gives a scene that currently ends with a “to be continued”.
One of the reasons I originally struggled with the scene was I wrote a version where the MC is aggressive with her, but it felt out of place, as there was little leading up to it to suggest he would do this. As he learns what “extra services” are (spoiler: It has to do with tiddy milk), he has the option to let her buy his silence. For her to bribe him and him accept the bribe would be in character for him, as he already did this with Hannah. But for him to be the one to initiate the transaction felt out of character for him.
So now with the added scene of something similar happening in the past with Sapphire, we’ll have the opportunity for the MC to earn and maintain a bad reputation among the girls and will lead to a different flavor of interactions with them. Like with Hypnosis, I still want the “good guy” playthroughs to be rewarding in their own right. Most of the girls will be available on both paths, whether you decide to play the MC as a kind, generous guy, or one who is looking out for himself first and attempts to make the most out of situations. There will likely be a girl or two who will only be available on one path vs. the other, but they will have smaller roles and be more of NPCs than love interests.
You may be asking whether the bad reputation path will affect the other love interests like Gabi, Crystal, Raya, and Charlotte, and the answer is… yes. However, it will be optionally. His bad reputation is mostly made through the club, and although this will overlap into his personal life (especially as he lives with Kassie), he can generally choose to still treat the girls outside of the club differently from the ones who work there, but can still choose whether to be nice or an asshole.
You may be thinking, “ah, so this is similar to Hypnosis in that you can play a nice guy or asshole path, but with a different sounding title?” and the answer is… kind of? It’s still about the MC deciding to take advantage of his power, this time being their boss instead of being able to grant wishes. But the wish granting thing will also be a factor once the girls realize he is able to give them free boob jobs without any surgery needed, which will automatically make him more popular with the dancers.
One of the common complaints of Hypnosis is how long it takes for the asshole path to kick into gear, which is fair. I kept meaning to introduce it sooner, but continuously made it all subtle. Here I want to start it sooner, and I want to make it less subtle. Currently the early chapters of Endowed don’t have much in the way of replay value, and I hope this addresses that by giving a different flavor to scenes with most of the girls, of which will increase substantially going forward.
Apologies for the long post here. This was originally meant to be two posts, and to be edited a bit more, but Patreon errored out and somehow this unedited mess got posted instead. I might as well leave it here now, but sorry for the unnecessary length and long rambling.
Cheers!
Comments
Mudiay
I really like that none of your characters is so much expanded that they're not sexy anymore, for example, Laura in Hypnosis upon return from the cruise became really biiiig, but she looked better than ever. I hope you continue like that, or at least give us a choice to refuse further expansion. I'll probably stop reading White Russian because almost all the girls are half-tits now, I'm still on the ride because I hope we'll get an option to make them smaller. Anyway, you're great. Hypnosis and Endowed are one and two for me when it comes to expansion stories. Your growth from the beginning of Hypnosis to later chapters is amazing, it looks so much better. Dialogues are a lot better than this kind of stories usually are. I'm definitely buying both games when you complete them. Sorry for taking up so much space, but I just wanted to give praise where it's due.
DarkSerpin
Ok, hold on, you're telling me there is a going home ending?
V
Except unlike Elon he's actually putting in the work and not paying someone else to do it for him.
Deepdowner
I like what I am hearing here. I think it is important for you to remember that you are still really early days with Endowed as compared to Hypnosis. I would expect rearchitecting things a bit in the first 7 to 10 chapters as the scope of the build becomes more defined. Additionally, you have a habit of building a whole ass game as a branch of the main game. I like this depth to your content, but just like Going Home, Broken Watch could have been a whole game too. I am excited to see this new content when it is done!
Jukke
Sounds like you have the same kind of brain as Elon when it comes to estimate time. 😂 Anyway I am really looking forward to the next Endowed update, I have missed seeing the girls. The lesbian assistant especially.
Kaywye
Speaking of...maybe I missed it... any rough estimates as to when the endowed update is arriving?
Expanding Universe Games
Funny thing is, I've started taking initial estimates for plans and acknowledging they'll likely take 4x as long because nothing is as easy as it first appears. The frustrating thing is when the original plan introduces 3 new things I didn't anticipate but need to be completed before getting started on the easy thing.
Kaywye
Dude. I have noticed your tendency to do something that you say will br relatively simple, then turn and make it one of the most complicated and convoluted tasks I have ever heard of. Lol. It's become something of a pattern. That being said, I have no talent or skill in doing what you do, so I will simply wait as patiently as possible...and thank you for your efforts when the result finally arrives. So take the time you need, I will be here, waiting.
