Message Received

So, over the weekend, there were some very illuminating comments in my last post. I basically took away four things from the multitude of comments.

1) Requests for new content are unlikely when I have a large backlog of content waiting to get into the game.
2) The requests are actually detracting from the game development (to say that this surprised me is true, but it's also true that I should've fucking known this)
3) While the additional content is great and all, what you people actually want is more development of the core concepts, i.e. jobs and plot.
4) I need to work harder.

The fourth one in particular is kind of maddening to me, because it's very accurate. I've been getting so distracted by...well, things, that the thing is falling on the wayside. I will admit that my real life schedule is messing with my priorities right now, but honestly, that's kind of a poor excuse. Last year, I was working about fifteen hours a week on the game. These days, I'm putting in nine to ten hours a week*.

I'm thinking of a new donation structure for the next couple of weeks, where instead of donating to request a new addition to the game, you donate to request that I work on something specific, like jobs, plot or requests. There would be a default for a given week (like, say, I would plan to work on jobs unless donations said otherwise), and I would cut off donations after $100 or whatever the goal is was reached. It would be a case of supporting the game while at the same time influencing my development time. But that's something I just came up with in the last two hours or so, and I don't know if I want to do that. What I am going to do is turn off requests for a while: I need to clear out that backlog, and piling more stuff on to it isn't going to help.

Anyway, what I'm going to work on (and what I started working on this morning) is plot and jobs. And not the eroticism jobs that I've been working on forever, but the business career and the publishing career. I spent this morning working on the second mission that Maria gives you (the blonde girl part of it anyway), and now I'm going to be planning out the next few stages of the business career. I might get some coding done tonight, but I do (perhaps unfortunately) have other obligations. Apparently, I have to be a human being and not a programming robot, some times.

tl;dr: I get that people are getting frustrated with the pace of development, and I'm going to be working as much as possible on correcting that.

*To be fair, the nine hours a week is time I spend coding. I spend significantly more time planning (if you've ever heard me say I need my notebook, it's because that's where I do all my planning), but that's not exactly something people can see.