April Update Plan Change

I've had a big change of plans for the April update. Originally I intended to release the new dating system that really enriches your experience with your favored slaves. This is part of a larger shift in the project to allow a "two-track" system where some slaves you intend to sell and others you keep for yourself, with the occasional "great deal" that tempts you to sell one of the slaves you've been building a personal relationship with.

That was the plan originally. I'm now planning to keep the dating system Patreon-exclusive and release a major rework of the fundamental game system in April for everyone. I've been contemplating shifting the game from a turn-based system to a real-time system for a while now. I feel like real-time will be more relaxing and require less mental effort than pushing the "end year" button. It also opens up the possibility for more interesting animations.  As I was designing a new system for world political interactions, I realized that this was probably the time to make the jump to real-time. It will allow for more dynamic, unpredictable interactions between different countries in the world. 

It's a little bitter-sweet of a decision for me. I think this new system will be much better, but originally I was thinking about keeping the option to play the game either real-time or turn-based. Although there's no reason that option can't be done in theory, I quickly realized that maintaining two different sets of code scripts for both systems will be overwhelming for me. Not only does it expand the amount of work, but it also means that either features will start diverging between the two systems as I implement things that work especially well for real-time systems, or features will be artificially restricted to things that can be applied to both systems.

The real-time shift, along with the world political system will now be released in April with the dating system moving from Patreon-exclusive to Itch in May.