Agents of Heels: Untold Tales

Hola, cola! It’s getting hot out there, isn’t it? A blazing few days beating down around here lately, but that’s no excuse for not getting some heat on the page to see and read, huh? So, lets get something spinning.

Heels is still taking the fight to Unshi in what has been described as a “soul eating” process, oof. Ticking through that aside, we’ve got to keep the fun going and we wanted to make sure all the beWildernauts get something to tide them over, so how about we have a little chatter with the words guy around here and a show of some unused concept arts from the back of the vault while the art department keep forging on? And so, I Spooky, give you Agents of Heels: Untold Tales!

Well, it may be more accurate to call it Partially Cut Tales, as we’re discussing parts of AoH that went underdeveloped and why. We expect that once we finally hit our v1.0 on Natasha and start to move into a Pre-Production phase for what comes next, we’ll take a little time out first to do some Postmortem Analysis on our first game, it’s only natural. However, we’ve already had time to think on a lot of it, and some things had their decisions made long ago but never really got to be fully talked about, so today we’re doing a little bit of early dissecting while we’ve got the time/space to. The 2 tales first up at bat for today: Subject 32 and the NYC Subway Stints.

Subject 32

For those not so closely following the content, Subject 32 is our dear gruesome gooner in AoH, the warped male Ivyspawn that’s been tripping through NYC and across Nat/Cat’s paths. For your own info, we (wrongly) named him Subject 32 as a reference to the rule of the internet that goes by the number 34, misremembering it as 32, plus is also hints there’s 31 more like this guy around somewhere, doesn’t it?

As it stands, Subject 32’s content in AoH is pretty much over. Some thoughts still exist about his part in the remaining Mission #3 and there’s openness in plans for potential consequences to be shown before the final curtain drops, but the real meat of his role is already on the page/screen. Sorry to folks that really wanted more from this line of the game, but we have our reasons.

(I’ll preface this part of the post with a disclaimer: This anecdote is from circa Autumn 2018, clearly everything’s fine and hunky-dory in the present) 

Subject 32’s part of the game was original a thread of stuff for more of the extreme situation enthusiasts as well as a supernatural foil to test and push our main characters skills in a way mere humans couldn’t really do for us. Even Natasha could use a challenge to conquer (or be conquered by). It was devised up by Unshi before AoH was published and was being built up tp slowly by the time I (Spooky) came to be part of the project. It wasn’t really part of the game when I was getting to know the project and coming closer to collaboration with Unshi, so it’s something I inherited after the fact of joining without expecting it. I’ll tell y’all the truth, it’s not much of my kind of content. Non-Con and the hard R word, plus stuff that’d rearrange a woman’s anatomy permanently just turns me stone cold. I’m too much of an empathy and vivid feelings type to enjoy it. That being said, I’d like to think I’m professional enough to do my best even when it’s not all the way I like (I direct NTRs content and there’s stuff I’ve put in there not wholly my thing either but I do my best to give the fans a wide base of stuff to enjoy). However, it seemed like it wasn’t going to work with Subject 32.

Fans will know that we’ve gotten a few scenes with the beast, but there’s 1 that’s got the biggest oomph, the Bad Nat scene involving a trapped Cat. That scene made me sick. Literally sick. Seriously sick… Well, maybe not “literally” in that it was the root cause, but it was, I believe a trigger. For those that don’t know, I’ve got a non-photosensitive type of epilepsy, and I had the first major incident of my life after writing that scene. Going back over it to edit and correct texts, I was unwell and had my first blackout seizure, fell on my head, and got a concussion from hitting the floor headfirst when I stood up to get some air. Thankfully, it was the day before Shadow of the Tomb Raider released and Unshi was hyped for that, so he managed to get a nice Fan Art post out while I was getting sorted out that long weekend. It was a scary time, honestly. Since then, it’s been a private thing I’ve dealt with, but it’s also never really risen to the same concern either. Though I still frequently have seizures/illness events, it’s a rare thing indeed that I miss a night of writing work because of them, so all’s well there.

It's unlikely the Subject 32 was the full fault of that day, but the unease and stress of dealing with that scene feel to me like a contributing factor at least. It certainly wasn’t the content I wanted left open on my screen in an open room while conked out on the floor, you know? We took a bit of a break from him after that, but we still had to make his part of the game have some kind of resolution, so we tried, but we also agreed it’s not with the risk of pushing it beyond what was needed and into the original larger plans for the mon-star. Maybe we could get a secondary writer in who’d love to do that part for us? We thought about it, but given it’s already toeing the lines of iffy content to begin with, we decided it best to peel back and not risk our health or the whole game(s) by bringing down the content regulators ire either.

So that’s the story of why Subject 32 is more of an Untold Tale, or at least a potential that hasn’t been tapped to its fullest. So you know, we did consider doing up to a certain point we even made concept art renders for a certain scene…

(There’s a final scene in AoH we were going to do longer, you can tell the one, but it just wasn’t to be. At least Nat enjoys it, but I for one can’t help but feel bad for Cat more than anything. Shudder)

… But we cut it to be on the safe side in a few different ways. I’ll stand up and take the blame. I’m the one who killed Subject 32. My apologies to all those wishing for more, but I’m the reason we won’t see too much more, in AoH or likely in the future*.

(*Odds are very long but not 0, some future game concepts may fit crazier content if not exactly this).

NYC Subway 

On the flip side, here’s a tread of the game I’m more of a champion for. Do y’all remember this?

Once again, this was an early thread of scenes included in the concepts for AoH, a way of adding some kinky slice of life fun to the game between the more action-packed missions to be. Much like the Park content in that sense, but also trying to be a different kind of lewds to the more personal content we’d get from Nat’s bonding with Tim/Kate and getting between Malik and Sam.

To be honest, I’m not 100% what happened with this part of the game even now. It’s simply the epitome of an Untold Tale, really. A part of the cause is likely that the subway was mostly tied into the sandbox elements of the game and that quickly waned and became an underserved part of Heels, it’s true. We focused more on advancing the story and evolving the B.R.A.S.S. part of things. We put in the thought to what we’d like to achieve with Kate, as her story lines up and crosses over with content in NTR. Meanwhile the Subway part of the game simply fell out of the wider plan rather than get built back into the more VN style game flow as we shifted that way semi-consciously. Eventually we just decided that it wasn’t the best use of our time/release content to pull up to the same screen time as the pool party storylines when we had the Park stuff already, and so we did a few CG long scene of Nat getting her replacement car and that was that, no more riding the rails for her.

Wrong decision? Hard to say. In hindsight, we’d like to have gotten more out of this string, especially for the likes of Corrupt Nat (flashy dressing) and Bad Nat (dominating strangers). The anonymous nature of the content and being able to do scenes with next to no dialogue, just bodily seduction (much like 1 of the Park scenes) is an appealing thought… But also, as troubled as production has been at times, can you imagine if we had gone after every idea we had in just AoH?

Well, that’s what the future is for, right? What was once “appealing thoughts” can now be “inspiring thoughts”, why not? Something to take and do better as we’ve become better. Maybe we’ll live up to or pass out the conceptual level of content originally envisioned, like so:

(For a time we thought Nat might go out dressed up to flirt with and amaze the public peons, or be challenged by Maeda to do so. Even be so in need of something after being at the club she went for the first lucky guy. We never got this far into things, but maybe someday, with some girl, we will?)

It’s too early to say for certain what our next game will be. AoH must complete first before we break ground on even the documenting of what comes after. That being said, like pretty much all creatives we’ve got ideas floating through all the time, many of them set in the same NYC as we both drill down and widen the world of the beWilderverse we’ve come to love with returning and new content/places/faces. This could well be something we pick up like a relay baton for the future. Maybe it’s even a way we could see cameos of a certain redheaded stranger, witnessed by our next MC before being coxed into the act as well, depending on what canon ends we see when the Heels dust settles?

The question is really… Is that something you as fans would particularly like to see resurge? Perhaps Discord is the place to have that conversation, but by all means voice your opinion in the comments below too if you have any.

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Agents of Heels has been a real learning experience for us, and a uniquely challenging game to make over the years. Originally 1 man’s idea, turned to the initial concept of a trio of interlapping games, to a 2-person project under a new team identity and all the growing pains and shaking up of roles between us as time and life moves around us. The game’s not over yet, still a lot of hot to have and hold, but our next game will be for sure planned and developed a lot more thoroughly than AoH could ever have been given it’s the first game we’ll be able to start full as a team. We’ve learned more from the hows and whys these parts of AoH became Untold Tales: Learned about ourselves, our content delivery and how we can do things better next time we take it from the top… 

… Now, all the more reason to hop to it and enjoy all that’s left to come. There’s still plenty of Untold Tales out there we can put to screen and a lot of love out of! Until then…

Be enjoying the glory of the story and beWilder!