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Sneak peeks, state of the game and the future...
🕑 Added 2025-02-26 08:33:53 +0000 UTCHey guys, it has been a while. I hope you've been doing okay~
Today I bring you a lengthy wall of text what has been happening in the kitchen, to me as the developer, and what's to come. First, let's start with the kitchen.
Okay, so... I went public with Harem Residence on January 15, 2022. That was three years ago. Yikes~! Honestly speaking, I didn't expect for me to take so long to tell this silly story, but I guess that everything that has been happening IRL has slowed things down considerably.
That said, I've learned a bit in these past 3 years. And, if you compare the very early renders to the more modern ones, you can tell there's quite a difference. And since first impressions are very important, I went ahead and reworked some of the old stuff.
In the previous patch, 0.12, I reworked all the sprites of the girls. That alone was 1,644 renders. Yes, a lot. But the good thing is that now the sprites are prettier, with better poses and the addition of new outfits that will debut in future patches.
With that out of the way, for the current patch, I went and looked at some of the early events. I grabbed the renders that looked... not okay... and remade them. Here's a little preview and comparison of old/new stuff:
In the prologue, when you take a peek at Kasumi when taking a bath. Before it was just two renders, now it's five:
When hanging out with Ayase and Kasumi. A few of these were remade:
Working for Yuri. Now there's an extra render/variation:
Learning a bit from Miya and petting her head:
And several other events had their renders remade, if you want to see them, I invite you to give the game a full replay.
Something else that was tweaked a bit was the UI. The main menu was replaced entirely:
The HUD (where you see your money, the map buttons and so) now has a "Hide" button that hides all elements on screen, so you can look at what's happening without the textbox and stuff on the way. While PC players could simply press "H" or click the Middle Mouse Button to do this, Android players had no clear way of doing so. This change will benefit mostly Android players.
And finally, the change that's more obvious in the screenshots from above, the textbox is smaller. Before I release each patch, I tend to give the game a full replay to make sure everything works (and nothing explodes). And I have noticed that the textbox is unnecessarily big...
So, after thinking about it for a bit, I went ahead and made it considerably smaller. With it taking less space, it fixed an issue of the thing blocking some bits that were made intentionally so you'd pay attention to them.
I've also increased the total amount of pages to save from 15 to 99. That should give players who love to save at every corner, enough slots to do so... hopefully... unless you need more than 2,700...
Now, about revisions of the story and similar. Some things have been slightly tweaked, so latter events make more sense. Varying from nothing big to serious changes.
For example, a slight change was learning from Miya about their life. Originally, she speaks about strict parents, when the reality is just a strict mother... as the father is absent. This was fixed a bit.
An example of a bigger change was the remake of the whole "Retained by Fumiko" questline. Even though I personally think that, given how the game mechanics works, players would easily find their way out of this scenario. But turns out, there are players that are stuck in Fumiko's house literally for in-game months, while the minimum is a week. I constantly see them asking how to get free and stuff.
While I am not a huge fan of hand-holding players, brushing it off as skill issues and having them go online to figure out what to do is not the way to go either... so I remade the whole thing.
What happens in the house, the conversations and the events were sightly tweaked. But now, the game makes very obvious what you should do next instead of simply telling you to "try something else".
Another major revision were the lewd events...
Let's be honest here, I'm not precisely the best one when it comes to the writing of the lewd events. All I do is show you some angles here and there while the girls moans incessantly, then the money shot. This can be perceived as lazy, and I do agree to that. So I went ahead and rewrote all the lewd scenes. ALL of them.
Now, while yes, the moaning is present, now there's a lot of more stuff added to it. Description of sensations, dialogues, and the so. While by no means this change will make them peak, in the very least they're better now, in my opinion.
Okay, let's talk a bit about what changed under the hood.
Since the new textbox is smaller, some dialogues would pop out from it. So I had to check, line by line, that the dialogues are displayed correctly. And split the paragraphs that were too long. As a side bonus of doing this, I could fix some issues the game had so far. For example...
I finally managed to track what was bugging Ayase's hints. I was focusing on her code, or Sanae's, but the issue was actually in an early event with Kasumi. There was a missing condition check that screwed everything up (as in, you could see a certain event before you were supposed to). Now, hopefully her hints won't bug again.
And while I was at it, I found and fixed some issues in Sanae's route, Sakura's route, and the Aurora extra-quest. Plus the bugged hint for a Sunday event. A crash in the tutorial, and more issues related to the Skip Time Button.
I also increased the speed of transitions. You know, when the image dissolves or fades. Making the general experience of reading through the game a bit smoother.
The Memories function was rewritten entirely. Before, I was relying on duplicating the lewd events so you could play them again, but now I took a different approach and the game's scripts are less bloated now.
A lot of the internal logic of the game, like the code that rules over some RNG events (like, which girl comes to sleep with you) were entirely rewritten. It's no secret that I'm no programmer, I just learn as I go. I relied on some copy&paste spaghetti code to make some stuff "work", but I've learned new tricks. Now, the RNG won't loop hundreds of times until a proper condition is checked, making it less stressful on older/lower end devices. And, possibly even, reduce crashes/slow-downs.
Okay, now about some of the new additions that you'll see on the next patch:
Other Perspective Events are, as you know already, events that happened from the perspective of a heroine, while you were busy doing something else. They're directly tied to stuff you did, or witnessed. For example, Ayase and Kasumi joining Miya as she was sighing in the hallway. You can only watch this after you meet her, and spend time with her and Maya at least once at night.
Ideally, you'd watch this event as soon as it's available, but unless you're constantly checking for new OP events in the menu, you won't. As result, most players will, most likely, watch those events at the end, when they run out of content. Or worse, they don't watch them at all.
So, to fix this issue, I added a notification that will show up every time a new OP event is available. Now, if you want, you can watch these when they are relevant (as they were triggered by a recent event you went through).
Aurora has a new client:
She's the second of the three planned unique clients that you can take care of. Like Sayo, if you take care of her long enough, you get to have a special "date" with her. All of this is already implemented in the game.
You can spend more time with both Marika and our boy Rick:
Finally, Nagisa is getting content:
A little tease of the burden that your in-game persona carries:
With version 0.11b, I added collectibles in the form of Achievements. Fulfilling certain conditions in the game, like completely clearing the pool event, will grant you a unique render, plus a bonus to your weekly income. The idea of this was having a little extra for players to have, but I've noticed a high amount of players being completionists. Grinding out all the obtainable achievements. I found this curious, but not rare.
So, to those players that are fan of collectibles, I added another one. Waifu Collector. An album of cards.
Either Kaori or Yuri can sell you up to five packs a day, with each pack containing five random cards. The cards come in three different categories: Common, Rare and Legendary. With increasing rarity between the categories, lowering the chances of getting them, of course.
So, a gacha, pretty much~
The starting batch contains a total of 54 cards for you to collect, with each of them having a unique illustration of each one of the girls in the game (so far). With the possibility of adding more cards in future patches if you guys like the system enough.
The rates for the cards are 5% for Legendaries, 15% for Rares and 80% for Common. Filling up the album will take several in-game days, and of course, each pack has a cost of $100. So, while the rates aren't stupid low, it'll still give completionists and fan of collectibles, something else to have fun with.
Waifu Collector adds the possibility of expanding it in the future. For example, when I decide how many cards are enough, having an achievement granted when you collect them all. Or maybe, a new series of events with a new girl, or two, that are fans of the cards as well. Who knows~
So, yes. While the upcoming patch will add new content for you, it'll also tweak or rework old stuff. Making it a perfect opportunity to give the game a full replay, if you haven't done so already.
Okay, let's wrap the kitchen talk for the time being and move onto the current state of the game and what's to come...
Why did the previous patch (0.12) took so long to come out, and why it looks like the following one will be slow as well? It all comes to me, as the developer of the game, and my personal circumstances.
To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of leaving details of my life get out there, but to get proper context, it's only fair to share a little.
The reality of the situation is that I am an immigrant. I fled my home country with my sick mother, who had cancer, looking for an opportunity to make our lives slightly better, and give her proper treatment. Sadly, almost immediately after of me getting off the plane on a certain island in Europe, the pandemic happened, which complicated things... quite a bit, in the very least...
In addition to that, my own mental and physical health were heavily deteriorated due to the poor life I had the past decade or so. Effectively handicapping me in several aspects of what you could say is a normal life. But even so, I still pushed forward and did whatever it was within my capabilities.
I wanted a distraction to those sleepless nights, and got me thinking. I always liked eroge, and Japanese pop culture in general. Had a fancy to write small stories and share them with friends, and always wanted to make something a bit bigger. So I grabbed an old script and characters I created decades ago, and started developing Harem Residence based on what I learned about Ren'Py and Koikatsu. Some friends played it and convinced me to make it public. I gave it some thought, and after remaking most of it, figuring out that maybe I could get a little support though donation sites like this one, and being a good way of expanding my skills, I released it to the public. To you guys.
It was received with some critiques, but many more compliments. Even got some support as well. I was surprised, but saw it as an opportunity to grow as a writer. So I slept less and spent that time making content for it.
Sadly, life decided to make it harsher for me. My mother passed away, leaving me completely alone in a foreign land. With no friends and relatives nearby. And to make it worse, in less than a year since her passing, more close relatives passed away back in my homeland. Depressing me even more.
The funny thing is that's not even rock bottom. Things became rougher for me with each passing month. Having terrible luck with landlords, I had to move 3 times in a year, losing a significant amount of money in the process, even some belongings. But I kept pushing myself past my limits, trying to make a living and still put some decent amount of effort in the game. Ignoring the damage I was piling up on myself.
But even in the middle of getting beaten by life, I still had some fun moments working on the game, and chatting with fans and players in the Discord server.
Sadly, there's one more thing. A rotten cherry on top of the crappy cake. I recently lost an important income that allowed me to continue to barely sustain myself.
Yep. It's as bad as it sounds. The only income I have, at the time I'm writing this, is the generous support of you guys through this site.
With all that said, we can go back to the question. Why did 0.12 took that long, and why no updates have been released since then? Well, my complicated immigration status, anxiety, depression, the thing with my heart, struggling to reach months' end, and... yeah... all that...
As sad as it sounds, this game is all I have. Working on it, expanding it, having you guys play it and see your reactions. Is my own little joy. But if things don't improve for me. And fast. Even that is jeopardized. Rent, bills and food are a reality we all have, sadly.
I want to put more daily hours to it. Finish it. And then, tell you other stories I think you'd like. That's the only motivation I have... again, as sad as it sounds.
So, what happens now? Well, to be honest, I'm unsure. For the time being, I'll continue to work on the game while I figure out how to attract more support through these sites. If by some miracle, we can somehow raise the membership funds to roughly $500 a month, I can make it work.
My stance with this was pretty much "I'll just have this over here, and those who like the game and want to offer some support, can do so" and that's it. I guess it was a wrong stance, just randomly receiving support without anything in exchange, I mean.
I got some ideas on what to offer as rewards for those that go out of the way and support me through these sites. Stuff like early access, bonus in-game content, and other goodies like that. Hopefully it'll enable more support.
If it works, it means that I can just focus on the game and improving my own health. That translated to faster releases.
If not... well, I guess that'll be game over.
...
Honestly, I'd like to end this post with a positive light, but it's kinda hard. And given how supportive you guys have been, opening up a bit brings no harm, I guess.
You will hear about me, and the game, soon.
As always, thank you very much for your support. I really appreciate it.
Cheers, and stay safe.
Comments
Felix Velazquez
In times like these we've got to stick together, membership added as best I can for now. This game has always been one of my favorites and you have my continued support.
Sylvio Poddey
Thank you for your great work and hopfully you get better :)
