11/8 Status Update

This week was probably one of the most productive I've ever had working on these games. I managed to mostly finish the new levels and make a serious dent into the writing for demo 3 as well. At this point I think that it's almost certain that the new demo will be out this month. So that means levels 1-9 out of the 12 levels in act 1 of Netoria Tactics 2 will be done. So if these three levels took about two months and there's three levels left, that means we're on target for the January release, right?

Unfortunately not. If it was just based on how fast I can design levels and write scenes, then probably yes. But art output is limited and I estimate the needed art for act 1 won't all be done until late February at the earliest. That just means I have more time to polish things up though. I plan for demo 3 to go out to a larger audience, and that likely means a good amount of editing and tweaking needed to existing content. So the extra time the art needs will be spent trying to spiff up the first act as much as I can.

Either way, Netoria Tactics 2's first public release is going closer. There's been no significant setbacks, no big design failures that need to be reworked, it's been smooth sailing for the most part. And while the art is taking some time to all get made, what's being finished is pretty good I think.

Like this art for Zaman and Vashti. One thing I changed recently is the pace of unlocking scenes. It's a little less nebulous now. You can't just unlock pretty much the end of the character relationships by level 6 anymore. It's now a little more spread out. It still happens fairly fast though, act 1 needs to setup a lot of stuff. By the end of act you should know who's banging who, what the POV character's story is about, and who the villain is. All that is needed for act 2 to do it's thing. Speaking of the villains, art for them is getting close. The line art is all finished, what's being worked on now is the coloring.

Like Safa here. Safa is Zaman's sister and the POV villain for Azar. She's here to cause all sorts of problems for Azar's plans of building a harem. Like all the POV villains, she only joins the party and is a major character on one of the four POVs.

I'm unsure of how to decide what order to do the act 2 POVs in. I plan to do the whole act for one character before moving onto the next. It will be easier for production and I think it will be much more satisfying to get a big chunk of just Azar POV levels instead of one or two levels for all four characters. But who gets made first and who gets made last? Maybe I'll make a poll after the public release. Hopefully all four characters will be more or less equally popular, but if one stands out more or less than the others it'd be good to plan around that.

In terms of other games, I did a little bit of work on Futa Oasis. I would really like to fix it up and get a Steam version of it made, but exactly what that looks like is a still pretty up in the air. I'm playing around with a "less is more" kind of approach. Striping out a lot of not great systems to focus on what works about the game, essentially making it more of a standard visual novel. I also want to fins ways to make relationship growth feel more natural, which at this point looks like adding relationship tiers to the random dialogs system. So if you have more love with a character you get different dialogs. This already exists to an extent, but this version woulds add a lot more tiers. So instead of normal, getting naked, fucking, it'd be something like strangers, acquaintance, friend, getting naked, sucking, fucking, in love. Just someway to make it feel like you're actually building up a relationship with the characters.

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