Devlog Update - Version 1.1.0 Released

Hi all, version 1.1.0 is now released!

The biggest change is that, by default, the game will show mistress animations instead of the previous static images. Try it out! There are 174 mistress animations in total. Here are the details:

• In the menu page, there's a new toggle option to decide whether to see mistress animations or static images. It's set on the animations by default.
• During a game, you'll now see animated mistresses (if the menu option says so).
• You can switch between mistress animations and static images also during a game, from the game options.

That's it! Easy to explain, but a lot of work done in creating those video animations and improving. As explained in the last devlog, I'm using Runpod and ComfyUI to create those animations, using video models, tuned Loras, and specific prompts. There's a lot of work in optimizing prompts, validating the results, changing workflows, trying different models and Loras, etc.

Views on Itchio have been pretty stable, but slowly declining over the last weeks. That's normal as I haven't done anything for spreading the project in this time.

We got to a total of 37k+ of games played since the game launch. The game has been launched 3 months ago, so I think it's pretty good! There are also currently 11 people with an active subscription.

Moreover, there are 476 people that registered to the game in total. Users can sign up with either email or Patreon account. Of all these 476 people, 11 are the ones that are also subscribed.

Most people still find the game/website either thanks to the Reddit posts that I made, or because of Itchio. There isn't anything else for marketing yet.

For the rest, it seems that there's still a bug in Safari from mobile that, sometimes, won't play sounds. I tried fixing it a few times already but I', still getting bug reports about it. It rarely happens, I'm still unsure of what are the causes and I'm still not able to replicate it. I'll investigate more on this.

I've been looking at similar games in the "JOI space" to see what people like the most. There are a lot of different games and there's also potential for many new types of games to be created. In particular, I noticed these two game categories:

• There are games that are more "story-driven", with dialogues, clear personality of the game characters, etc. Typical teases on Milovana are like this. I think they are for those occasions where the users want to enjoy their time to read and being immersed in the story. First you read the rules, you understand the story, the setting, and then you "get to jerk off". It also takes time to get to the more lewd parts.
• Then, there are games that go more straight to the jerk off parts. They may not have any dialogues or characters. They are just about images and JOI instructions, with some level of randomness in it. I think they are for those occasions where the users want to have quick JOI instructions, without the need for more "storybuilding". It takes less time here to get to the more lewd parts.

I think that both types of games are great and there are occasions in which I prefer one type over the other and viceversa. It also depends on how much time I want to spend gooning on that specific day.

The game in JOI Training is of the first type. I like it, but I want the project to also provide an alternative of the second type. It's also an experiment in seeing the differences on developing each type of game, on seeing how users play both, etc. In any case, JOI Training will have both types of games in the future!

Therefore, I wanted now to focus on providing one or two games of the second type. They will still be in joitraining.com. I imagine that the homepage of the website will be different, letting the users choose between the available games, and then each game has its own options. I'm expecting that it will take a significantly shorter time to create them with respect to a game of the first type (like JOI Training currently is). Ideally, I'm aiming at keeping it simple so that it can be released by the end of March.

For now I think I'll keep the marketing efforts low. There are already many users using JOI Training that are providing amazing feedback for improving the game. I don't feel that I need more users right now as I have already a nice user base that can help me improving the project. However, I'm mostly a technical person (a software developer), therefore it may be that I'm postponing marketing simply because I enjoy more developing the project. It could be. My current feeling is that it would be better to have a couple of more games of the second type before pushing on marketing.

One marketing task that I think it should be started now though is related to SEO, as it takes several months to show its effects and therefore it makes sense to start as soon as possible. In particular, I wanted to write glossary blog posts explaining the main terminology of the JOI Space: "JOI", "JOE", "Orgasm Control", "Femdom/Maledom", etc. Each one with advice, trends, explanations, guides, etc. They are topics with good search volumes and whose results are not always of high quality. Hopefully, over time, people searching those topics will end up in the JOI Training blog posts, and they'll try the games that we developed. I think I'll start with these blog posts in parallel with the developments of the new games.

So, here are the current plans on what to do next:

• Decide exactly what game to create of the second type. Game mechanics, images/animations to use, etc.
• Develop such game.
• Add a "full screen" mode to the game. This is because users told me that they are zooming to see the mistress images/animations bigger and covering the full screen.
• Add these backlogs to the changelog section of the website. They are currently only on Patreon and Itchio, but people will reach the website also from search engines, I think it makes sense to have them on the website as well.
• Write first glossary blog posts for SEO.
• ... and others, but I won't probably get to them before the next devlog.

In the meanwhile, thank you very much to all the supporters of this project! I'll keep using this support to make the project better.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day!