10/26 Status Update

As you probably noticed, this update is on Sunday instead of Friday. That's probably going to be the standard going forward because Rad Lad has changed their art delivery date to the weekends from mid-week. Since I want to give the best art previews I can during these updates having them at the end of the weekend after I get all the art makes more sense. There also was always a weird conflict between me releasing updates on Friday, so sometimes the status update would be delayed, or me having a bunch of work on a Friday and just forgetting to make the post. So from now on it will be on Sunday and hopefully more consistent.

As for what I worked on this week, it was more Netoria 2 testing and adjustments. Level 9 continues to cause lots of issues. It's by far the most complex level in the game and has a lot more variation per POV than the others. The variation wouldn't be a big deal if I wasn't trying to test for all four of them at the same time, it's just very time consuming. I was already planning to only work on one POV at a time for Act 2, so the kind of headache this level is causing shouldn't be an issue in the future. Having to check all four of the POVs for stuff is making this final testing process pretty annoying. The game has been in frustrating state of being aaaaaalmost finished for months. Remember when Netoria Tactics 2 was supposed to come out in March/April? The crazy thing is I totally could have finished it by then. So how am I still crunching 6 months later to get it finished?

Game development has an amazing ability to expand to fill all available time. Have one week? You could get it done in a week. Have a year? It will take that entire year. Of course, the quality and polish of the week long development versus thew year long will be very different, but the base experience of the game could get done. The version of Act 1 that is coming out now has a lot of improvements that wouldn't have existed in the May version I had planned. Hell, if I took another two years for Act 1 imagine how good it could be! But at the end of the day my goal isn't to make the absolute best game I possibly can. It's to make a game, finish it, and then make more games. Even though I've been making more money from the games lately, they are still fundamentally a hobby I do for fun. So intense polish is probably never going to happen for these games, because intense polish isn't very fun.

Now to move on to the Rad Lad art this post was delayed for. Today's preview art is a first for my game, armpit sex.

Can't say I have any personal experience with this one. They say it's best to write what you know, but I've never experienced magically transforming into a woman either and those scenes turn out alright. I wanted to do some more out there stuff for this route, to show them really exploring each others bodies and such. It also seemed like a good opportunity to throw in some of Vashti's body transformation magic and give her some giant tiddies. There's really not a lot of context to this one, it's just two characters who like each other having sexy fun.

I've also started getting some of the Act 2 class sprites delivered. These were delayed a bit to do Naked Ambition stuff, but they should be done in time to keep the timeline in sync.

This is for Shah's harem dancer class, which is one of the null route classes. Basically, if Zaman and Shah break up in Act 1 but Vashti and Azar don't seduce them, then this is the sprite Shah will have for Act 2. That means different skills she can learn, different stats, and different art. From the start of Netoria 2 development, I knew this was an area I wanted to invest a lot more resources in than I did for the first game. People really like Gwen's slut class she could unlock on a specific route, and now that system has been expanded to the whole game pretty much. Every route has different sprites for it. Shah has five different ones for Act 2 and by the time we get to Act 3, well there's going to be a lot.

That's a big part of the reason Act 3 is going to be short. I want the branching to be very dramatic by the end of the game. The levels, story, and classes will be completely different from POV to POV and route to route. And to reasonably make that happen, I can only make Act 3 a few levels long. But they should be some good ones.

That's all for this week. As always, thank you for your continued support.