Tia’s Path Home will be shorter and less ambitious than originally planned, and here is why

Hello there! It’s been over 6 months since the release of the demo and the last update already, but rest assured that plenty of progress has been made meanwhile, even if it was not all smooth sailings.

The update today comes with a bit of bad news because I have decided to shrink down the game in ambition. It will be shorter than originally anticipated, albeit fear not, it will still have a lot more content than the demo did, and I will thrive to deliver an experience that does not feel too incomplete!

The goal of this post is to explain a bit why I am scaling the game down, how much, and what the players can expect upon release late 2021 or early 2022. But first, I want to share a bit about why I started working on this game in the first place.

Why I started working on this game

Tia’s Path Home (TPH) is the first game I started developing with the intent of delivering a complete and finished product. It was, and still is, aimed at being the first of many games I would release over the years, all staring my OCs and the world I build around them.

For my first game, I decided to make things as simple as possible for myself. A very basic game, with a simple plot, few assets, relatively basic Mechanisms. That meant nothing fancy like shooting, complex puzzles, clothing damage, and the sort. I, however, still wanted the game to contribute to the overall story, which is currently told mainly through comics.

Trying to fit all of these requirements is how I ended up deciding on what would become TPH: a game of a girl stranded in a shady residential building late at night, trying to make it home while entirely naked. It fit perfectly between one of my oldest comics and the one currently being published weekly (To Hell and Back: RAID), the plot was simple enough, and the concept of a naked girl trying to dodge bad guys without any weapon was as basic as it got.

Outside of making a hentai game for the sake of training myself and seeing a project to completion, this game also had two objectives:

• Give some breadcrumbs about the larger story at play (that of To Hell and Back)
• Show off Tia’s personality, strengths, and flaws

On paper, it all works out, but in practice, sadly, there were a few issues with the plan, which are leading to the decision of being less ambitious than originally desired.

Why the game fails in regards to most of its objectives, and why it’s better to shrink it down

I absolutely succeeded in keeping the game mechanically basic enough that there has been no technical hurdle in developing the game, and that I can absolutely achieve all of what I had planned. However, I had not anticipated how time-consuming even a very basic game it to develop, and it became clear that, while I can absolutely achieve my intended vision, I could not do so with a release window of later 2021 to early 2022 as originally planned.

Of course, a solution could be to just delay the game until the full vision is completed, but there are two problems with that:

• The game is basic enough mechanically that I am not really learning much anymore while I continue working on it, nor challenging myself
• Because I work on this game on my spare time, alongside a full-time job, I don’t have time to experiment or to start working on the next project while I work on TPH

In short, it is important to wrap up this game in the originally planned time frame so that I can resume training myself, experiment with game design, and start on the next project.

But that’s not all. Another reason to prioritize wrapping this project up on time rather than sticking to the full vision is because of the two objectives it was intended to serve outside of training.

The game is intended to contribute to the larger story, and it only does so tangentially, through optional and secret content. This was deliberate on my part: I wanted this game, on the surface, to be nothing more than “naked girl goes home”, and to keep the larger picture for people very curious or interested in it. But it also means that the game itself is like a side dish, the extra work going into it doesn’t really contribute to the main course.

The second goal of this game was to show off Tia’s personality, as she is one of the characters most of the content I create and fund is centered around. The problem is that the nature of the game makes this goal difficult to achieve. Tia’s willpower and stamina drop fast, her libido builds up quickly, and she is always a few decisions away from utter failure, because, otherwise, it wouldn’t be much of a game, and there wouldn’t be much hentai content to be seen.

Thus, instead of showing off Tia’s personality, strengths, and weaknesses, I ended up making a game which largely parodies her, and exacerbates her weaknesses. In a “perfect run”, in which no mistakes are made, Tia is portrayed more or less faithfully, but the goals of most players will be to chase the hentai scenes, meaning that they will see more of Tia at her weakest. This game thus makes for a rather bad showcase of Tia as a character, all in the names of sensible game design and plentiful hentai.

To be honest, what I just described wouldn’t be such a problem if it weren’t the first game to introduce Tia. Working on this game made me realize that the very first appearance of Tia to be in a game about running naked in corridors was a mistake. This is a very bad first introduction to a very important character. I made a right decision on my first game’s concept in regards to the goal of keeping it basic and easy for myself, but a disastrous decision when it comes to introducing Tia properly to people I hope to keep engaged with her ordeals and fate for years to come.

To conclude this very long section, my motivation in developing this game has taken a nosedive both because I am eager to move on to bigger challenges, and because it’s a game mostly focused on showing Tia in a bad light. At her core, Tia is supposed to be a badass vigilante. A badass vigilante with her share of failure, yes. It is interesting to show her in a situation where she cannot showcase her usual badassery, absolutely. But not in a game which aims to introduce the character.

So, I am shrinking the game down in size and ambition compared to the original plans, but what does that mean, concretely?

The very least that players can expect to get at game release

First off, let me clarify that, even shrunk down, the game will have a lot more content than the demo! The demo had a total of 6 hentai scenes, each fully illustrated with several pictures and some sound bites as well.

If I were to release the game with the addition of just what has been implemented and is already ready to be implemented after the demo, this number would already have doubled, from 6 to 12. However, we still have more scenes that we plan to start working on in the future, including 3 endings. The game is being shrunk down, but not abandoned!

The original plan was for the residential building to represent half of the game, with the other half happening in the streets. As for the demo, it represented around 1/3 of what the residential building had to offer, and thus 1/6th of the total game. What is going to be gutted is the large majority of the streets section, meaning that TPH will now become mostly about leaving the residential building, with a bit of streets for the final climax.

So, in the new plan, one can expect the final game to be roughly 3 to 4 times larger than the demo (in terms of hentai content), when including the endings in the equation, instead of 6 times larger as originally ambitioned.

However, albeit truncated, the final game won’t just have more content than the demo, but also be of a higher quality. This includes extended voice acting, with a bit more variety in the sound bites, and even fully dubbed looping sequences for each scene of sexual intercourse (Tia only, men remain silent), recorded specifically for that scene! This will help each hentai scene feel more distinct and unique than the others!

Expected release window

As I stated earlier, one of the goals of shrinking the game down is to keep to the originally intended release window. Thus, you can still expect the game to be released somewhere around Christmas 2021, or Easter 2022 at the latest. As a reminder, the game will be free.

And what after?

Once the game is released, no new content will be added to it, however, I will of course continue to support the game by fixing bugs. I won’t immediately start working on the next game, as I will take some time to experiment with different engines, concepts, ideas, and such. I will also solicit you, the players of Tia’s Path Home, to know about which direction you would like us to head for the next game.

What I can say now is that the next game will almost certainly feature combat, exploration, clothing damage, sex (of course!), and, again, Tia. It will probably involve shooting, but a beat ‘em up is also in the cards. As for the engine, the experimentation period and future survey will help me choose between making another 2D game in RPG Maker (with the same visual style as TPH, but with updated and more detailed character sprites), or leaping forward to a 3D game in Unreal Engine 5.

But all that is for a far-off future, for now, I am still fully committed to seeing Tia’s Path Home to completion. See you guys next update!