9/13 Status Update

A lot of progress was made this week. The game is playable up through level 6, with the level design and story mostly done. The camp scenes are still a work in progress though. Overall I'm happy with the pace of how things are going. Right now the game is a lot of fun to work on.

There's been some big changes to the overall story recently. The villains idea I talked about last week has progressed beyond an idea and is now an important part of the game. I think it will improve the pacing and stakes of act 2 quite a bit. This moves the game even more of a direction of each POV being it's own story, but I think that's fine. It's more work but the further apart each POV is, the more distinct feel and content they can have.

Because of this Netoria 2 releases after the initial one are going to be based on POV. Instead of releasing a few levels for all of them at once, each update will focus on a specific character. I haven't decided on an order yet, but if Azar was first, then all of the Azar content for act 2 would come out before moving onto the next character. This will let me focus on each one more, as well as minimize how much people replay the same content if playing every update.

With demo 2 on the horizon, what happens after that? I think the game needs to release act 1 all at once for people to feel for where the story is going and what will be in future updates. So after the demos are done, the next release will probably be all of act 1. A lot of the first act is setting up character motivations and positions for the Big Drama that comes up. Even the initial push and pull of if Zaman and Shah stay together isn't really what the game is about. That stuff is important but until the POV villain joins the party in level 10 and act 2 starts after level 12, it's all still build up.

Each character has a fundamental aspect of their character their POV is really about. For example, Shah's POV isn't about if she hooks up with Zaman or Azar, it's about her personal struggles with self-confidence and her heritage. Yes, "what boy do I fuck?" is important in the series of events, but who she ends up with is a consequence of her personal journey, not the cause of it.

That's where the villains add a lot to the story. They act as fail cases for if the POV character doesn't succeed in their character journey. If Shah builds up her confidence, that's how she avoids the fate of becoming her villain's fuck-pet. There are three major outcomes for every POV for the most part. A: Zaman and Shah stuck together after act 1 and the POV character achieves their mechanic. B: Azar and Vashti win over Shah and Zaman respectively and the POV character achieves their mechanic. C: The POV character fails and ends up at the mercy of their villain.

This structure might sound a bit limited, but I had to reign things in to support how different every POV is now. 3 outcomes x 4 POVs is already 12 main routes. And each of those routes has minor variations within them as well. Having any more branching than this would probably be unachievable at the scale of output I currently have.

While we're talking about POVs, I have the first piece of art to show of them. This is from Azar's POV, his route is about fucking pretty much everybody, and this piece is from the start of him seducing Vashti.

 The exclusive POV scenes start towards the end of act 1, where this image is from. Next week we should be able to get a look at some of Zaman's, which is all about his female transformation.

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