Update and Character View Poll

Greetings!

I wanted to give you guys an update on where 0.9's development is before the end of the month -  and we're almost there! The biggest development on my end is that writing is back on track after a period of not being so. You may have noticed that I've spent a lot of time on non-writing stuff lately - transmog and character view plugins, art for the new features, hair models, early-game art revamp, etc. There was a reason for that, which mostly came down to lack of inspiration on the writing front. I'm now through this and back to writing. The stuff I worked on previously was needed and important, but the writing is probably the most important part of this project, and I'm glad to be back to it.

I think a lot of the problem came down to process. I'd tried different ways of mapping out ideas for the plot, and I ended up using tools for things they weren't really well-suited for (Articy:Draft is good for many things, but I don't find it to be a good all-around writing tool.) I also didn't have a very good system to capture my ideas and refer to them later. They were scattered in a bunch of different places, so they'd get recorded and then forgotten. I started out using Scrivener to handle all the writing and story-related stuff, and I think it worked quite well. I ended up moving away from it partially because the Windows version kinda sucked at the time, but I tried out the recent beta and it's actually pretty good now. In the process of moving everything back to Scrivener, I came across all these interesting ideas I had, read a lot of the stuff I'd written before, and got excited about the story all over again. I then started coming up with cool ideas for new quests and story events, figuring out how to rework old ones, and - well, we're back in business!

Something else newsworthy is that I'll likely include a second H-scene in 0.9. The one I've finished artwork for isn't super long (15 images), and given how long 0.9 has been in development, I figure it ought to have more sexy. As I've mentioned before, 0.9 will introduce a new H-scene 'hub' of sorts, but it won't feel much like a 'hub' with only one scene, will it? The second scene will probably involve Sami (the succubus) - don't think I didn't remember that poll I did a while back! :D

So, let's do a wrap-up on 0.9's status:

• Character View feature: Done
• Transmogrification feature: Done
• Additional character art: Done
• H-scenes: 1/2 complete
• Quests: 3/8 complete

You may notice there are now more quests than I'd previously advertised for 0.9. I had some vague ideas floating around before, but while working through my writing issues I fleshed them out and got them to a point where I think they'd be pretty fun. 0.9 will see our heroes finally meet Ned Danger and get some clue as to what this whole quest line is all about! There are several other fun adventures in store for them, too :)

My plan is to finish up the writing before starting work on the second H-scene. This will let me have a bit of time between writing stuff and editing it for the final release - and it's always good to edit when the stuff you've written is no longer fresh in your mind.

The Poll

And now on to the poll question: it's about the 'game view' character view feature. 'Game View' is the one that places an image of the PC on your screen as you're walking about - hopefully you've played the test build and have seen it for yourself. As I've stated before, I don't really like it. I know there are some folks who do, though, and what I'm trying to get a handle on is how many folks feel that way. My inclination is not to include the feature in 0.9, but if it's popular enough I may have some way to enable it. So, here's my question:

Should I include the 'Game View' character view feature in 0.9?

Please let me know what you think, and thank you for your support! And Happy New Year everyone!