Greetings Surveyors!
The Anniversary Update is finally here! I'm so excited to share it with you all! This post will be a little long, so if you don't wanna read a bunch feel free to skip down to the patch notes!
If you encounter any issues, feel free to drop them in this thread and I'll get them fixed as soon as I can!
To explain a little bit about where I've been the past couple years, after I released For Mother Matron I immediately began work on new chapters that would have added on to the base game. There was some cool stuff there, but I ended up scrapping most of it because I didn't feel like It was turning out good. I learned a lot of valuable things, but it was pretty demoralizing. A lot of stuff in my personal life happened also that made it hard to work. I ended up taking a break for awhile.
I'm doing much better now though and I'm super excited to share some of what I've been working on!
What is this update?
I was always really proud of FMM, but it had some issues. Particularly a lack of polish. This update aims to clean the game up as much as possible and make it a better experience to play. In addition, I wanted to use the things I've learned over the past couple years to help make it look better and feel scarier. This isn't a complete remaster or anything, but I tried to improve anything that turned out ugly or just didn't reflect the vision in my head well enough.
I also read through the whole script and did a lot of cleanup and editing. The overall plot is still the same, but I tried to fix or cut any bits that I felt were badly written or didn't fit in the story. There's a few new scenes here and there to flesh things out as well. If you were hoping for new story, I'm sorry to say this isn't that.... but I have more to say on that near the bottom of this post.
PLEASE START A NEW GAME FOR THIS UPDATE!
This update makes a lot of changes and adds some new features. Old saves may experience problems and some of the new features like the journal will definitely not work correctly. I apologize for the inconvenience.
For anyone this may affect, the previous version has been preserved as a beta branch that you can opt into from the game's properties. Feel free to opt into this if you want to finish your in-progress games or just prefer the old edition for whatever reason. Here's an image to help you find it:
Patch Notes
Big Features
Lizzy's Journal - A journal screen has been added that fills up with new information as the game progresses. Learn more about The Boarding, its people, and what Lizzy thinks about it all. Some illustrations include drawings, featuring artwork from Razorkade and myself! For people that wanted extra lore, this is for you.
Difficulty Options - The difficulty of decision timers can now be adjusted. Starting a new game will prompt you to choose between 'RELAXED', 'THREATENING', and 'LIFE IS MISERABLE'. You can change this setting again at any time from the preferences menu
New Music - New compositions from my friend Angel B. and I. We hope you love them!
New Scenes - some small new scenes have been added throughout the game to help flesh things out and improve the pacing.
Visual improvements
Script Improvements
Bug fixes
Quality Of Life
Quick Menu - Something that should have been included from the start. You can now enable or disable a quick menu that hangs on the edge of the screen to access game functions faster. It is on by default
Auto Advance - I'm not sure why this was disabled to be honest, but now you can toggle auto advancing text with the A key or through the quick menu button
Achievements Screen - you can now track the achievements from within the game, and you can choose to sync them with steam in case you happen to play on a fresh install or lose your save data
Certain monster encounters have been adjusted to be less difficult
Some choices now have glyphs to make it easier to understand what they do at a glance
The amount of clicking needed to unlock the "Hate When That Happens" achievement has been reduced by about half
Reduced the use of "bark" voice clips
Fixes
The clicking zone of the cursor is now properly aligned to the center.
You should no longer have to restart the game to unlock certain achievements
Lizzy's animation should no longer bug out when you use the skip function
Fixed various crashes and mislabeled jumps
Accessibility
Font options were buggy and not implemented correctly, so they have been removed. Instead, players can use Shift + A or a button in the preferences menu to open up Ren'py's built in accessibility menu. This allows you to directly control font size, spacing, and the use of OpenDyslexic.
Added a toggle to disable screenshake
Added a toggle to reduce flashing images for certain visuals
Other Things
Added title cards between chapters
The Main Menu now changes depending on what ending you saw last
Added a toggle to display information about what music is currently playing
Added sounds to the UI
What's Next?
I will be monitoring the game for a week or two to make sure there's no critical errors I missed. There were a few smaller additions that I wasn't able to finish in time for the update, so I'll work on completing those and getting them in the next patch.
Many people have also requested to be able to download the soundtrack or listen to it on YouTube, so I will be getting that out there soon as well.
After that, further development on For Mother Matron will hit the back burner because...
I am working on For Mother Matron 2!
(and one other secret game).
I'll talk about that more in 2026, but for now I hope everyone enjoys the new update! We'll talk again soon!
Before I head out, I just wanna say:
THANK YOU!! THANKS TO EVERYONE THAT TOOK PART IN HELPING ME MAKE THIS GAME A REALITY!! AND A SUPER BIG THANKS TO EVERYONE THAT'S PLAYED, STREAMED, AND/OR LEFT FEEDBACK!
Whether good or bad, I really love that people are still checking the game out. Knowing that there's people that get something out of the stuff I make really motivates me to keep creating, and I hope I get to do this for a very long time!
And don't forget to follow Neoclassic Games here -> on Steam for news, updates and more!
- Vevetique + Neoclassic Games
