[Dev-vlog] What are our next milestones?

Hello everyone, Corintio here!

This is the first video I did for youtube and I'm very unfamiliar with the way things work, so I tried to write a script for the video and realised that I was following it very poorly!

So I'll post here what I was trying to explain in the video hoping that writing will make things easier to understand =) 

What are our milestones?

If you are unfamiliar with our game, it's an RPG with erotic elements where you play as Kalyskah Karnstein. She's the first vampire of her world, and she used to lead a legion of her Children of the Night before something happened and she lost everything. She wakes up thousands of years later to find herself in a world that has utterly changed over time. Now her first goal is to discover what and why it happened.

So to better tell this story, we've been working on the Prologue, and Keana went a bit into more details on the storytelling side in this video here:

Now not just the story is essential when it comes to establishing the first hours of gameplay. Before, we had a dungeon crawler where the player would explore the ruins of Kalyskah's temple until she could reach the open world.

Now we are changing the order of things; you'll play as Kalyskah at the height of her influence, where she has several fortresses scattered all around Earth with people ready to do her bidding, despite living secluded from the rest of humanity. You'll follow what happens that makes her go into the slumber that currently you see her waking up from, fight your way out of the dungeon and then get back to exploring again in the changed world.

So as you can see, our gameplay after we are done working on the Prologue will be a funnel, coming from an open-world experience, having a dungeon for you to explore, and then exploration again. This is intentional so we can showcase all the essential mechanics you'll need to see at the start.

The first is the one that gives us the need to have an open world: Influence.

While developing an open-world game, creators might struggle to ensure they are not telling a linear story in a non-linear place. The Influence system will let the players choose which actions to partake in until they reach a particular milestone. Be it to impress the marauder of Millhaven, to solve some issue the legion is facing or anything that can be achieved by doing smaller non-linear tasks that aim for the same goal.

The second mechanic is magic.

In the Prologue, Kalyskah has all the shards of her Bloodgem. In fact, the bloodgem was never created in the first place. This means she'll have access to many of the powers that will be unlocked later in the game. Now we don't want players to feel like they had everything the game had to offer, and now they will be in an endless grind to get it back.

One of the things we'll establish early on is that first: Kalysakh was never a good fighter because she never really had to be. She could solve all her problems with magic, and now that she was stripped from her magic, she'll need to find other ways to handle situations, one of which is by learning how to become a better fighter. So during the game, the player will be able to find trainers that will teach her combos and other tricks she never knew how to do before.

Another thing we'll establish is that magic itself is now more powerful than ever for reasons you will find out as the game progresses. So even though Kalyskah thought she was at the peak of her power, she'll learn she can be even more!

We also want to use the Prologue to showcase the new tools we are coming up with to optimise the game. You can check some of them on Henri's videos about character customisation and development tools.

Lastly, we want to improve the quality we can achieve with cutscenes and animations in general. Gurpreet will show in this video here both our current issues and how we plan to solve them:

After the new rig is done, Gurpreet will help me inside Unreal Engine to create cutscenes. He has experience with animation series, and I believe that once he joins the effort on that side, we'll be able to achieve more incredible things both in the storytelling and the new erotic cutscenes!

When can you expect the Prologue to be released?

We'll do it in many parts. We don't intend to release a public demo until the skeleton of the start, middle and end of the Prologue is done since we feel like releasing it to the big public before then would mean that people would miss a lot of the current content.

But we will be keeping the current version as a public demo and release test versions of this Prologue to our subscribers and patrons. Suppose it takes us more than two or three months to finish this skeleton. In that case, we might make a public release more to have the public see something that will better portray our goal in terms of storytelling and optimisations. Because, let's face it, our current demo requires an amount of CPU power that is driving away many possible players simply because they cannot run the game.

If you have been with us so far, following our work, supporting us on Patreon or Subscribestar, I thank you all! We wouldn't be able to come this far without your help. There's a lot more to come.

We created a playlist on YouTube called Development Vlog, where you can find the complete and uncut videos you've seen during this presentation.

Have a great day, and thank you very much!