Hey everyone, I'm back with the poll results and a course of action. First off, thank you to everyone who participated in the poll, we got a lot of good feedback and it was really helpful to see what people wanted. We're going to take a departure from the original plan, which I think most of you will approve, but more on that later. First, let's look at the results!

As you can see, the expansion poll was the strong favorite. Before we did the poll, I had a feeling that this would be the winner judging by the results of previous polls and comments in discord over the last few months. I was a bit surprised by how much it won by because I expected Transformation and Relationships to be a closer race, but it's good to see that the choice has pretty clear support.

I'm guessing that Relationships will be the next expansion, so if you voted for that I think there's a good chance it'll be the next choice. Of course, we'll continue working on the base game as I mentioned in the poll post, so even if you're not into transformations there's still going to be things for you to enjoy.

Next Steps

One thing that I had been seriously considering was taking an "expansion break" to work on the core aspects of the game. I almost put it in as an option in the poll, but I didn't want to split the vote too much, especially when it seems like something that a lot of people want. Reading the written results of the survey, however, was enough to convince me that this is something we should do.

Rather than doing a "planning period" for a couple months while we prepare for the expansion and work on the main game, we're instead going to do a longer period of "core game focus". I'm thinking this will be for the rest of 2026, judging by all the things we want to work on and fix.

The truth is, while most of you reading this are able to enjoy the game in its current state, it can be pretty inaccessible for new players. In the long run, more support means more people we can have working on the game and making it better. Beyond that though, there are just a lot of quality of life and basic improvements that we can do to make the game better for everyone.

In addition to improving existing content, we'll also be expanding content all over the place and working on continuing some of the existing characters and storylines, so this won't be just a bunch of mechanics and gameplay stuff. It seems like plenty of you would like to see more of Lily, Sacred Knowledge, Maeve, and others, so you'll have that to look forward to as well.

After we get through this period of core game focus, we'll be starting in on the transformation expansion. The good news here is that several of the improvements we plan to make will help us do a better job with the expansion. We'll also have the Transformation and Relationship expansions in mind as we go, so we can make sure to set things up to enhance them when we get there.

At the end of the post is more information about what all this will entail, but before that let's get into the rest of the results.

Other Results

The other poll items are pretty informative as well, so here's a quick look at the results and what we learned.

While most people said they like the current approach, there's definitely a need to look at pre-release testing. Particularly from a certain cat... Fixing the base game up should also help make quality control easier/better.

It seems most people are happy with how we mix up the "base game" work we do each month. For those in the "fixing" and "simulation" camps, I think the core game focus period will definitely help with this.

I'm happy to see that the majority of people like the general balance of expansion vs main game work that we do. I'm also happy that plenty of people fell into the "more balanced" 50/50 group, because it has been a common worry for me that we deviate too much from the expansion. I think it'll be good to see how this looks again after we've started up the expansions again.

It seems that you guys in general like a mix of expanding on existing content/characters, and adding totally new stuff, but that there is a pretty notable bias towards expanding on existing content. We'll be sure to keep that in mind, and hopefully you'll enjoy some of the stuff we'll add during this core game period.

AI is such a controversial topic, but it's good to see that the majority of you are okay with how we're doing things. I'm hoping in the future we'll be able to pay for more real art. We'll continue to try and be responsible with how we use it too. Someone suggested that we train up a LORA on art from our artists to use it in a more artist-appreciative way, but that'll take some thought and of course talk with any artists we might try it with. I'm not particularly confident in training a LORA though.

I am actually really happy with this result! Of course, we all love hearing that you like one of our characters or scenarios. It's hard to shake the feeling that you don't like it when we spend a lot of time working on ongoing characters and stories. Maeve is a great example because there's so much to do with her, but even though my brain is full of ideas I tend to hold off on them because I worry people will get tired of it. Of course we'll need to mix things up month to month, but I'm going to definitely put more focus on growing our existing characters and creating new ones that we can expand on in the future.

This is actually a pretty useful result, even though it looks like mostly a bunch of similar support for various items. It shows that as a group, you like a lot of the general kinds of content that we do. If there were a whole bunch of low results, that would mean that we've been spending time on unpopular stuff, which is no good. Unfortunately, there were a few items I forgot to put on there that also would've been good to see.

The high support for unlocks and character creation I'm happy to say will be something in the core game focus, along with two others with greater than 50% support.

Other Results

The text response items were also great, and we got a lot of good feedback there too. I'm not going to call out any individual responses, but it's great for getting a general feeling of how you feel. It also helped push us towards doing the core game focus.

Core Game Objectives

There are quite a lot of things we need to fix, improve, revise, and expand in the core game. I'm going to share an early list of the things we want to work on. This isn't a "final" list, and not comprehensive, but it should give you an idea of the kinds of things we're looking to do. We have to be mindful of scope and time, so things will evolve a bit over the next month or so as we get started.

In no particular order...

• Clarification
• We gotten several requests for features that are already in the game, or are at least partially available.
• A good example is asking about what changes the players status, when there is a status record for most of the mental stats that show the size and general reason for the last 10 changes to each stat.
• We want to make sure these things are more intuitive and accessible to players.
• Expand on some of the QoL things that are limited or often requested too.

• Main UI Redo
  • Specifically looking at the layout and accessibility of the main location screens with the map, location, sidebar, etc.
  • Turn this into a more useful, less cluttered interface for players that is also hopefully a bit more intuitive.
  • We also want this to be more functional on different screen sizes and aspect ratios.
    • Yes, more mobile friendly, but this won't be turning every menu etc. into one optimized for cell phones.
  • More style unification and UX/QoL improvements across many other UIs such as menus, dialogs, etc.
  • Spruce up some ancient menus/pages like statistics, prolog skip, encyclopedia, cheats, etc.
• Overhaul of mental status mechanics
  • Reworking these to better do what they're supposed to do, and improve this aspect of the game.
• Improve character creation and implement things like Arcanist points and unlocks.
• Fix up or add some QoL items to new games, like character templates and NPC generator settings, along with fixing up data initialization and the "restart" function.
• Improve maps and navigation some to make locations and content more accessible.
• Expand and improve on the main quest.
  • More Lily content.
  • More direction and objectives.
  • Alternative routes and results.
• Streamline and improve the male prolog.
• Continue some existing storylines like Sacred Knowledge.
• Add an "Appletree Virtual Assistant" AI for the early game.
  • Give objectives and tasks with some content to make new games smoother and more accessible.
  • Demonstrate some aspects of play without depending on tons of text and mini-tutorials that many players never look at anyway.
• Character appearance improvement.
  • Improve or rework items to work better and be more relevant.
    • Grooming, piercings, tattoos, clothing, weight & muscle loss/gain
• Skills rework and balancing.
  • better and more reliable skill checks.
  • Less random, more deterministic, more situation awareness.
• Overhaul the sleep system
  • Separate "sleep" from overnight simulation processing so that sleep is no longer mandatory.
  • Sleep can be a better experience with dreams, events, waking up, transformations, etc. in a single streamlined process.
  • Processing will happen automatically in the early morning. Usually this will coincide with sleep, but it won't be a requirement.
• Improvements to multiple "routine" activities like jogging, visiting a gym, reading on your phone, watching TV, etc.
  • Add gloryholes and other sex-related things all over the place where they belong.
• Improvements to a lot of ancillary systems like home items, homes themselves, shopping, weekly planning, texting, and car ownership/travel.
• Location sweep, improve the content and "realness" of various places on the map. Add hints to areas that have associated content.
• Improve existing body change/transformation status effects to be more descriptive and revealing of changes. From Transformation Expansion
• Remove the "interact" system as it exists. Add location-based potential interactions with NPCs for a more natural and useful experience. From Relationship Expansion
• Tingler Rework
  • Tingler was originally a way to test sex scenes, so it doesn't quite fit and isn't great.
  • Replace with Tingler "Cock/Hole Finder" where you register as a willing hole (female) or see a list of nearby willing holes (futa).
  • Less of a dating style hookup app, more of a way for men to find a nearby convenient partner when they need/want one.
  • Note: We also want to make more of a "dating" app separate from this, but this is something for the Relationship expansion.
• Jobbing Improvements
  • Rework some content for certain jobs like Stripper, Maid, and Masseuse to be more like "full" jobs and better represent the game lore.
  • Rework farmhand job to match hucow content and shift the nature of the job to more of a "behind the scenes" take on that experience.
  • Add "opening" storylines to jobs when you're new to the job.
    • Give a better look at what you're doing, meeting your boss, getting some lore, etc.
    • Currently for most jobs you're just sort of dumped in without much content beyond unique events that happen.
    • Spread out over several events.
  • Some changes to how job applications work, starting more consistently at a lower/safer level, rejections for unsuited candidates.
• Improved "Side Gigs"
  • Better representation of doing things to actually make money, rather than things you happen into or have to find.
  • Content for side gigs that are currently mostly mechanical, such as professional breeding.
  • Some standardization, content revision, and general improvements.
  • Side gigs are: breastmilk production, professional breeding, surrogacy, escorts & prostitution, stud work (futa characters), gig/task work, streaming, test subject (transformation expansion).
• Pregnancy
  • content and experience of being pregnant
  • birth scenes