It took a while but now that I have the latest release out of the way, it's time to pin down this year's goals for Hom Factory.

I'll tackle each point on the summary one by one:

The game has an estimated 9 (10) chapters until the "end" based on the overall story I have in mind. We are currently in the prologue phase of the game. The main reason we haven't made it a bit further is due to a lack of poses for some of the major events in the prologue's resolution.

 My goal is to procure those this month and by Feb. bring the game into Chapter 1 by February's release (ideally earlier). This will require some outsourcing for putting together some of the "battles" I have in mind.

I'd like to spend 0% time revamping the game between each release. The lion's share of time was spent on this last update -- to the point that I feel the content is lacking. Ideally, I want to get to a place where I no longer have to do this. The only real way for me to tackle this problem is to devote insane amounts of time to development at current. I didn't want to do this anymore, because the Patreon page hasn't grown to a point where it's financially feasible but -- I do realize it's what needs to happen for the game to grow. It's a sacrifice I will have to make. Which leads into the next points--

I realized with this past update that there's a certain order things need to be tackled. I amended this order based on the last week. New Story / Event Content > Systems and Feature Development > Finish Up.  By adding some of the events and encounters first, the idea is that finishing up will then be easier and more productive. Basically, I just plan to do about 50% of the new content first, then deal with the time consuming stuff (play testing / bug finding / stability ) and if time permits, finish up the other 50% of new content.

For context, the last 4 weeks of my life have seen me devote about 200 hours into development. That's currently less than 1$ per hour (closer to 75 cents!). I don't know many people who would be okay working for 75 cents an hour, so I've been trying to remedy this in several ways. 

The biggest thing is to get a new PC, which will decrease the amount of time needed to do mundane tasks. (woo hoo, then I will be making 2$ an hour, which is a vast improvement ^_^). The second will be to limit new features and play time to focus on advancing the overall content. Since this is much less time consuming, if I can do these two things, I will shave a ton of dev time off of each update and increase the content as well.

I'd like to also do better with the rewards I've offered. I have failed in some aspects (such as consistently making new Fanservice and NSFW content in this regard. The main reason for this is also related to the current amount of time and energy I have to devote to pushing the game out. There's also the aspect of needing to get fanservice poses done (outsourced) which costs about 5$ per pose at current. Naturally those tend to add up over time. Despite this, I will endeavor to release at least 2 fanservice posts per month and 2 Lewd Content drops per month.

In terms of the game's polish, I'm slowly getting there. Stability also will come from spending more time really exploring the project (as I did this past release).

In short, these are my commitments to making HF better this year. I'm also open to any suggestions as frankly -- you all are pretty quiet. It's kind of difficult to judge exactly what you may want without feedback. In that regard, don't hesitate to drop me a message here or via discord.

I look forward to doing some awesome things this year.

- Ren