(tl;dr: I'm taking a break from burnout, restructuring the stressful development, and trying to set a deadline to Beta. Expect a bit slower updates for the rest of this year.)

Hello again everyone: players, readers, followers.

This devlog is going to be a bit different - it's been a year since the game started having active players, and I thought it would be a good time to talk about the state of the game and what is going to happen next. Because, you see, after a crazy year of huge changes for me, both offline and online, half a year of constant production has finally caught up with me and resulted in a creative and productive burnout for the past two weeks.

I'm not quitting, but I am taking a slightly extended break to collect myself. I also realized something important - if I want this game to succeed, this sort of schedule and production is unsustainable in the long run and frankly a bit dangerous to one's health. So I'm taking a step back to check on everything related to this game, to see what I can do, what I can change; with schedules, work, plans, and everything. And I'd like to tell you what my plans are for next year to let this game flourish.

Reflecting on the past year

This past year has seen a steady growth of both active and occasional players, and resulted in just about 8 different alpha releases, each bringing substantial content that has led Kemoverse Online to be a pretty good online socializing game. We've had a variety of interesting events, the discord has grown to a nice amount of people, and I've taken a health check of the game by talking and doing surveys with active players. The game has gained a lot of content: many new npcs, many social online features, and the development of new areas. Many new systems were added such as room ownership, tokens, in-game video streaming, foodraise, and many other smaller functions.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied by the active player count and how the game impacts players enough that it spreads through word of mouth.

Lessons learned

Now, what has not gone well?... It's an uncomfortable question, but of course, there's always things that could be better.

• Production pace: producing this much content in this short time by myself was a crazy, crazy amount of effort that is probably not healthy in the long run. I was mostly motivated because I thought it would help to have new items all the time, but to lean the entire playerbase on my schedule and production is not going to work out. This led to players dropping out because not much new stuff was being announced.
• Live systems: I made the mistake of relying a lot of content on live/new things rather than fundamental, independent gameplay. For example, while the lore/community events were an interesting fresh take on live online play, it also set up for a lot of expectations and were quite stressful. So were the various events with specific event-scripted sequences, although incredibly fun, they took a lot of time and attention away from basic game development. Same thing with E-shop.
• Amount of content: There were too many features planned and the amount of content exploded, leading to random parts of the game breaking when I fixed basic system. This also made it very difficult for me to test everything, as I'd have to go through every single feature and make it work whenever I did a big change, and many times it led to stressful patches to fix game-breaking errors.
• Insufficient planning: A lot of things I created was by trial and error and experimentation. For example, creating the kitchen incurred me with a lot of technical debt, and something I probably should've thought twice about before adding. This led to a lot of "half-baked"/unexplained things in the world that players just didn't know how to use. Whoops.
• Work-life separation/balance: Completely non-existent. This needs to be fixed.

Basically, too many social online things were done by just me, and it took my focus, time, and attention away from actually working on game content that people can play without my guidance. As it stands now, the game is just an extremely fancy chatroom reliant on social events that I lead, and that's not where I want the game to end up at.

Kemoverse Online, part 2.

Well, what is Kemoverse Online supposed to be when it's finished? The "Online" part is obviously the online gameplay, but what is "Kemoverse" about? Well, it's supposed to be the game's story set in the worldbuilding of Kemoverse where you figure out your place in the world as a Kemonae, and go through the long journey of starting out at this school, then moving to town, and then beyond the town walls. Each of those chapters have their own arcs with its own conclusions and stories of characters, areas, conflicts and resolutions. And this game, Kemoverse Online, is supposed to be the start of this larger story, where you are tasked to learn how to be a Kemonae to get accepted back to the town, Khara. 

I planned the story and world with the intention of lasting a long time, with multiple games and hopefully under a bigger team. So in a way, Kemoverse Online is the first "prototype". The problem is just... that I kind of suck at adding story stuff because I'm hesitant at my own writing skills. I just don't want to make an injustice to the story - there is a story that I've worked on for a few years, but I just haven't gotten myself to the point of adding it as playable content. Which is also a problem, because the story helps the game mechanics link together the online part and the story part. I didn't realize its practical significance until now.

It is clear that having a story is essential for the game to work out, and so, I need to change my strategy if I want to keep my sanity and for the game to survive.

So... what now?

The entire process to finish this game is divided in to phases: Alpha, Beta, Pre-Release and Release.

• Alpha: Adding systems, functions, and building up the foundation for adding stuff. Lots of changes, bugs, and things breaking. Focus on online gameplay and mechanics.
• Beta: Foundation finished and now adding game content like items, areas, characters and stories. Less bugs and things occasionally breaking. Focus on making the story.
• Pre-Release: Content added and mostly fixing bugs and glitches. Polishing and refinement.
• Release: The game is done.

I have to put the breaks on adding online functionality and systems now, or else, the game will never go out of Alpha. I had a ton of cool ideas and things I would like to add, such as your character appearing even if you're offline and other stuff that isn't related to the story, but I have to push the ideas away for now.

I also have to re-check existing stuff in the game, like the kitchen, and consider cutting them out to lower the amount of dev time spend on maintaining them. In general, I need to condense the available features in the game so that there's less things to worry about, and make the gameplay simpler and more straight forward.

I also have to work on and determine the story in detail so I know what else to add in the game. I feel like the reluctance in writing the story made me just add features until I had a story to work with - but this had an opposite effect, where a bunch of maintenance was piled up on me, delaying everything else. I need to write, determine, and just roll along with my writing and not be so afraid.

I just have to put more effort in to getting the game in to Beta. Ideally, I'd like to do it immediately, but there's still work to do until I can get there. It will take some time to sort this development situation out in to a plain roadmap with deadlines for the next half year, so expect me to be a bit quiet with the releases for the rest of this year... and maybe some patch releases to fix pressing issues, of course.

Closing thoughts...

This project has grown to such a size that it has evolved beyond my full control, which is honestly a bit intimidating, but also humbling to see the foundations of a game that I hope will strike a chord to a certain kind of player. The tricky part is just to figure out what steps to take and how to take them... and the courage to do so.

For example, I have begun to start ask for help, not only from friends online but even offline contacts. I've also considered getting a working location outside of my home for better work-life separation. I've slowly accepted the fact that if I really want this game to succeed, I'll have to let go of my old ways and try to do it better.

Given that the game has survived long enough to get to this point, I think it will go fine. I just need a small  break. Then I'll get back to work. And try to craft Kemoverse Online the way it deserves to be, and to completion.