9/6 Status Update

This week I'm writing to you from my computer again. The whole debacle ended up being less then a week delay of work in the end. Even with work on things like dialogs and levels getting less work than I planned, a lot ended up happening this week.

The biggest change is I decided the game needed more villains. The core relationship drama between the main four characters is a good basis for act 1, bu act 2 needs more punch. After Zaman and Shah are already cheating on each other, having a whole act where the consequences are just that they cheat on each other harder is a bit flimsy. There needs to be more of a bad ending route. Something that isn't just the characters happy in different places, but a version of events where Bad Stuff (TM) happens. And either you like that kind of thing and let it happen, or you have the satisfaction of knowing you avoided it.

So now there's a unique villain for every POV tailored to that character. In most POVs they act as a fail case for if you don't follow through on the POV's unique mechanic. For example, Shahrazad has a confidence stat that you need to build up by getting the last hit on enemies with her. If you don't, she'll fall prey to that routes villain.

To support this happening, I'm splitting up the POV content even more. Instead of POV content being optional to start and having a default neutral content, POV stuff is now mandatory. Neutral content is probably a waste overall I think because if you're playing a POV you most likely want to see the exclusive content that's on that POV anyway. If you played all the POV content, neutral content would support more of a fifth play through, but designing the game to be played five plus times seems like a waste of resources. That's time and money that could be spend on making the POV content better.

As for art, the big delivery this week was a bunch of voyeur shadow scenes. These are for the events that happen in camp that your POV character isn't involved in. So if You're playing as Shahrazad, and a Vashti+Zaman scene triggers, you'll see something like this:

 And then if you want to see the whole scene, you can go to the recollection room from the camp and watch it. There's no more toggle for seeing all scenes or not like in Netoria 1. It's up to you if you want to go see them in the recollection room or not.

Also coming along are the first gropes including something so lewd, I haven't been able to bring myself to have it in other games.

That's right, there's handholding! As opposed to the first game, characters already in relationships can trigger combat gropes too. So if Zaman and Shah stand next to each other they might do such wanton things as have a quick kiss between disemboweling bandits. Of course, later in the game there will be more sexual gropes as well. By the end of the game I plan to have characters giving each other oral sex, regular sex, all kinds of stuff during combat gropes.

Because of the computer issues, my release schedule has changed slightly. I'm not going to do a upgraded three level demo anymore. The computer problems pretty much ruined that time slot as part of the point was to get a build to $5 patrons before the end of August. Now I'm focusing on a six level chunk instead. This will include the first POV specific levels, the beginning of the TF element, and the introduction of the villains. My plan is to get that done before the end of this month.

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