Hope everyone had a good festive season. As has become an annual tradition, I want to discuss the project's progress last year, what my broad plans are for this year, including what the annual 2-month overhaul will focus on. Furthermore, as you know, Unreal Engine 5 is now in early access, so I want to talk about migrating the project to Unreal Engine 5, which will involve a UE5 LifePlay Test Showcase side project.

1. A LOOK BACK AT 2021:

- 2021 was a good year for LifePlay, with 32 updates in total (6 v3.x updates, 5 beta updates during the v4.0 overhaul & 21 v4.x updates). The $1000 milestone was reached in May, which increased the number of updates to 3 updates each month. This, along with the new weighted polls for higher tier patrons & 3-month exclusion for each winning kink, allows for more kinks to be catered for.

- Last year's v4.0 Variety and Polish Overhaul was an important one. There are now more impactful and user-friendly character customizations, the NPC generation now creates much more varied characters, with distinguishable age and ethnicity, and is capable for creating some pretty hot characters that match high attractiveness. The clothes now look and fit on characters better and there are now over 900 items in total, a massive increase on previous! 

2. LOOKING FORWARD TO 2022:

- 2022 will have 36 updates, 3 each month. The focus of at least two-third of those updates will be decided by patrons in the weighted Kinks of the Month monthly polls. I will continue to give some love to less popular kinks, which never do well enough in polls, in about half of the updates that fall outside of this.

- The biggest challenge I've found so far about 3 updates a month is that with only 10 days between updates it's much harder to stay on top of the bug fixes. This has made necessary some bug fixes only updates last year. It's not so much the actual fixing that's hard, it's reproducing a bug that can sometimes take away hours in vain. Next month (I will make an announcement when it's done), I will put together a team of "Bug Detectives" volunteers on Discord who will take turns and try to reproduce each bug reported on Discord or F95 in their game first, and put together exact instructions for me on how to reproduce it. That way, the bugs can be fixed quickly enough that I stay on top of them each update, providing a more pleasant gaming experience for players while freeing up a few more updates each year to dedicate to new content.

3. v5.0 EXTERIORS & DYNAMIC ANIMATIONS OVERHAUL:

- Each year, I do an overhaul that makes a big improvement on certain weaknesses of the game. This year, the v5.0 overhaul will take place over the 6 updates in April & May.

- The focus of the overhaul will be on exteriors and dynamic animations. The full plans for the overhaul will be posted in March, below are just the key points:

- As you know, 3d interiors for most building types were already added during the v3.0 overhaul two years ago, so 3d exteriors (for example, high street, dark alley, park, beach, etc) are long overdue really. Adding exteriors obviously first involve adding the 3d models for it, but a lot of work will also go into exterior lighting, which works very differently from interiors. Furthermore, since exteriors haven't been a thing so far, there are hardly any existing content taking place outdoors. Adding exteriors will open up a huge number of new scenes and interactions. Finally, although exteriors are in the name of the overhaul, I will also use the opportunity to add some interiors still missing from the game too.

- Dynamic animations mean that the animations have some AI logic added to them to make them aware of their context and automatically adjust themselves accordingly. Take a MF adult animation for example, this means that the male animation detects where the hole to penetrate is and if necessary, the guy moves his whole body a bit down or arch his back a bit to make sure the dick actually goes in. If said animation also involves the guy squeezing the girl's boobs for example, the fingers squeeze more for a flat chested girl and less for a busty girl and maybe he'll have to move the entire arm to fit better as well. You get the idea ... Simple things we take for granted IRL, but to replicate in a game takes a lot of development hours that only an overhaul can provide.

4. UNREAL ENGINE 5 MIGRATION & TEST SHOWCASE

- As you know, Unreal Engine 5 is currently in early access, with Epic's official promise of full release in "early 2022". Note that 'full' doesn't mean 'final', for example, Unreal Engine 4 eventually went up to v4.27, which was worlds away from its first "full release". If you just search "Unreal Engine 5" on YouTube, you'll find all the impressive 'next-gen' showcases for it done by Epic and others. For LifePlay, Unreal Engine 5 have the potential to completely transform its graphics, the most important new features being much better shadows from dynamic lights and photorealistic strand-based hairs (two major weaknesses of the game's graphics currently that I have my hands tied on while using this v4.20 version of UE4 from 2019)

- I was initially quite obssessed about the idea of "Unreal Engine 5 for v5.0 Overhaul". However, after spending a lot of time testing in the past week, I concluded that this early access version of UE5 isn't ready to migrate LifePlay to yet, and it probably would be wise to wait for a further year for it to reach about v5.2 or v5.3 to be on the safe side. Let's just do the exteriors and dynamic animations first for the v5.0 overhaul, which the game sorely needs currently, and then all the fancy new tech from Unreal Engine 5 will be the cherry on top next year.

- This extra wait would therefore make the Unreal Engine 5 migration ideally earmarked for the v6.0 overhaul around June-July 2023 instead. However, that doesn't mean I can't do anything in the meantime - UE5 is already available in early access after all. In fact, if I'm going to migrate to this so-called 'next-gen' game engine, I want to plan and prepare long in advance and actually make use of all the new UE5 features available to me to make the final outcome look and play the best possible.

- Therefore, as soon as v5.0 overhaul is done in May, I will start working on a LifePlay UE5 Test Showcase as a side project in the background, IN ADDITION TO the usual 3 updates a month for the main LifePlay project on UE4. This showcase will just be a relatively short and vanilla adult story game where you play a guy romancing 2 hot chicks, with 3 endings depending on your choices - no sandbox gameplay or character customizations - basically an equivalent of a short visual novel game or a LifePlay quest. This showcase is likely to have only 4 updates ever (again, the usual 3 updates a month for the main LifePlay project will take place as normal meanwhile, the showcase is just a bonus). These 4 updates for the test showcase will probably be in Aug 22, Nov 22, Feb 23 & May 23, allowing the actual migration of the main project to UE5 to start in June 2023. 

- The purpose of such a test showcase side project is to allow me to experiment with all the new UE5 features, focusing solely on delivering the best possible graphical quality without any constraints. That way, when it comes to the full migration of LifePlay in 2023, I will already have become experienced with UE5 and have confidence that whatever version of UE5 I opt to migrate the whole main project to is a stable one, limiting the risk of bugs post migration. Furthermore, I could then simply copy the lighting setup, material rendering and strand-based hair from the showcase project back to the main project once it's  migrated to UE5, preserving as much of the 'next-gen' graphics as possible while adjusting for any constraints the main project has.

Thank you for all your support so far, without which the LifePlay project wouldn't be where it is today, let alone be in a position to look forward to Unreal Engine 5 and 'next-gen graphics'. Obviously, it's impossible to predict Patreon trends and I'm never one to take anything for granted, but it would a absolute dream to reach the $1,500 milestone by the end of 2022 and finally be able to focus on this project as my full-time job, which would give me more development hours to make the three updates per month much bigger and less buggy. It would also allow me to dedicate more time to the UE5 Test Showcase side project, making sure the eventual migration of the whole project to UE5 next year yields the best results possible. However, we're still a long way away from $1,500 and even if this milestone isn't to be achieved in any foreseeable future, I'm still very thankful for all your current support, not only financially as patrons, but also those who contributed to the game via mods, brainstorm ideas, bug reports and more. Thank you all and let us look forward to another year full of progress for the project!