Dev Diary #14: Progress Update October

Hello you, It's that time of the month again! Or actually it may even be a little bit after that time. ;D

The biggest news from last month certainly was the start of a Beta phase for our X-Mode Demo. All of our patrons have the opportunity to play the two XXX stages starring Anaela that make up the gameplay part of the soon upcoming public X-Mode Demo Release. That will also feature a few story sequences and dialogue and will later basically be the epilogue and also act as a tutorial to our game as a whole. Feedback has been really great so far :) Read more about it here and find the patron link here!

So that took quite a lot of our attention and still continues to do so, but nonetheless, Cucu managed to paint some more awesome stuff in between of UI graphics and polishing tasks:

Content Updates:

• Nikki's Artwork has been completed. There was another XXX scene artwork as well as her last sticker for which we also postet a painting process video. Artwork Packages were sent out to the corresponding patron tiers.
• A final piece of Artwork for the upcoming first public release was also finished: The Boss of Paradise. Spoiler: He catches you fooling around with Anaela, his favorite angel in the Prologue to our game and the main story (which is the upcoming public X-Mode Demo) - and he's not very happy about it.
• Baby, our freshly introduced unicorn-girl finally got her colors chosen and a beautiful portrait painted.
• We had a poll to determine which of our 4 already introduced girls our patrons would like to see in a little halloween special – Baby won. The special was of course posted on 31st.

Coding Updates:

• As stated above, The month was very busy with including and finishing various gameplay parts of the soon coming public X-Mode Demo in order to start the Beta among our patrons.
• One of the biggest additions certainly is new Combo System that rewards the continous collecting of hearts with increasing points (score system is new, too) and helps keeping the pressure down which makes for a more rewarding and interactive gameplay. The player token got corresponding graphics and effects to visually represent the currently active combo level as you play.
• Implemented a short tutorial which explains the basic gameplay mechanics
• Added a new animated stage startscreen that acts as a transition between the XXX stages and their individual XXX animations while showing the character as well as the number of the upcoming stage. Think of it a little bit like a fighting game loading screen.
• After the release I did some more bugfixing, optimization and polishing and started to make some architectural adjustments to prepare the addition of the mentioned story/dialogue sequences as well as to further increase my workflow, code efficiency and such. Converting things like the pause screen and audio manager system to work in every mode was tedious but worth it :)
• The also mentioned story sequence state with included dialogue system is also nearing completion. I will post more about that soon.

What's next:

• Story sequences and dialogues - intro and outro to be precise – will be finished and implemented now that the mechanics are in place.
• A success-screen at the end of the second stage will be put in place and show how the xp and reward system will work later.
• I still plan on adding a proper highscore list in time for the public release, even though it will be a bit tricky
• More polishing, a few more effects and overall lot's of tiny little things ;)

I still aim for the end of this month as a release date but don't be mad if it becomes december. We really want it to be as good as possible at this point, since the effect of our first public release is quite important in order to keep development speed at this pace – we basically have been working double shifts for quite a while now to get to that point. However, we are very encouraged and confident and eager to present our hard work very soon!

All the best and stay tuned!

Zanzo + Cucu
Peachaboo