Young & Naughty - Updated areas, new user interface, and so much more!

While our art team was busy conjuring the smuttiest and mind-bogglingly lewd images for Zahera's upcoming story update, the rest of our creative heads were hard at work taking the game apart, pinpointing as many underperforming or outdated elements as they could, and remaking it in a more user-friendly or visually pleasing fashion. Or, to put it simply, we tried to unshittify our game.

But before we get into specifics regarding the upcoming changes, let's talk a little about our vision first. As it stands right now, Academy34 is a full-on sandbox. There is no real goal to achieve, no endings to get, and no challenge to speak of, unless we count reading multiple books worth of text a challenge. And it's not a bad thing in of itself! Sandboxes are a popular genre and, given the amount of people that actively follows our project, it clearly worked out for our game well enough. That being said, we believe that getting comfortable with the idea that Academy34 is and should always remain a sandbox will only result in a stagnation - both in terms of overall quality, and people's enjoyment from interacting with the game.

But what are we actually planning to do? There's no simple way to answer this question, so instead I'll highlight our short- and long-term plans. That should give you a decent idea about what we want Academy34 to become.

Our current short-term plans are as follows:

Remake in-game User Interface.

Expand and improve functionality of in-game menus.

Update visuals of all existing locations.

Overhaul Prologue and early-game progression.

As for our long-term plans, they are a bit more ambitious:

Add the Main Storyline with multiple endings. Some journeys are indeed about the friends we made along the way rather than the destination, but why not both?

Rework study subjects and implement class-specific storylines. The game is called Academy, so it's only fair that we give classes the love they deserve.

Introduce exploration rewards, update core gameplay systems, and add point-and-click adventure elements. After all, is our project really a game if there's no gameplay?

Implement schedule and event system in all applicable locations. We want the world of our game to feel alive, rather than be stuck in some sort of stasis.

Expand the selection of areas available to visit. Not much else to say about that, we just want to give you more locations to explore.

And quite a few other things, but we'll talk about them later.

Now, we understand that our ambitions might've raised a lot of eyebrows, which is entirely fair, but we wouldn't have brought this topic up unless we had something to show. In fact, most of our short-term plans are either close to completion or being actively worked on behind the scenes! So, let's finally talk details.

USER INTERFACE

We're not going to pretend as if our current interface doesn't suck balls. It does, and we hate it as much as most of our players do. That's exactly why Lexickon — the wonderful person who brought you animated scenes, release gifs, and helped us a bunch with community management — spent a very, very, very long time making something way cooler, prettier, and more functional than anything our game was able to offer before. Keep in mind that the images below are a mockup and the final version might look somewhat different due to the engine limitations we have to work around of.

And that's just a taste of what's to come! Our developer has already started slowly replacing old UI with a shiny new one, but it will be a gradual process. The first changes will arrive alongside Zahera's upcoming story chapter, introducing a new bug report window with heavily expanded functionality. Yes, we see the irony in prioritizing bug report UI as opposed to literally anything else.

UPDATED AREAS

As the name suggests, we're updating visuals for ALL in-game locations! Last year we released our first overhaul targeting MC's bedroom which, among other things, allowed us to figure out the best way to go about reworking locations in a time-efficient manner. Since then, we quietly worked on preparing a dozen more areas for the upcoming overhaul patches, and soon we'll release the first of the bunch! Albeit, without the random events at first. They will come in a separate patch later on; we simply didn't want to turn it into another case of trying to bite more than we could chew in one go.

Okay, that's enough words. Time to look at fancy pictures!

All of these locations, as well as a few others are coming soon! We're still deciding whether we want to add them alongside story chapters, or turn it into a separate series of updates. Either way, expect to personally explore these areas in a few short months! Or even sooner if luck will be on our side.

COOL, BUT WHAT ABOUT LONG-TERM PLANS?

The reason we prioritized updating UI and overhauling locations is to ensure we'll be able to start adding new content without the ever-present fear of having to remake it later on. If we want to make quests, add interactive elements, or introduce new characters - we need to have everything else figured out first. Which is exactly what we did!

As soon as we roll more overhaul updates out and free ourselves from shackles of outdated codebase, our next priority would be improving and expanding on the core elements, such as study subjects and class-specific stories, gameplay systems and exploration, and, most importantly, main storyline.

In the upcoming weeks we'll be posting more behind-the-scenes progress and in-depth look at changes we mentioned above, so stay tuned to find out what else our overly caffeinated team has in store! Also, Zahera's update is coming really soon too. Stock up on napkins while you still got time.

See you all very soon!