Roadmapping 2022: Agents of Heels’ Path Ahead

Howdy beWilder fans and fanettes, how’s it hanging out there in the wider world beyond the screens? Things are spinning in various directions here as we handle a whole lot of wildness like we do, as we recently had ourselves a big birthday milestone to be proud of! The celebratory buzz is still alive within us, and today we’d like to use that feeling of passion and motivation to lay out a path forward to more of the same. So here we are, ready to suit up for another year with our Agents and our Heels, if you’ve got the stomach and/or the craving for girls, action and leather, come on with us and see what our goals for AoH and 2022 are! Here we go!

2021 – Getting Here

Last year we took several steps forward with Natasha’s misadventures, but not as many as we would have wanted, and a little less than we might have reached if we could have hit all months on a high. That said, we had a lot of enjoyment along the way and good things did get done. We’ve wrapped up the last of the side content lines by finishing Kate’s party in all paths, enjoying a nice big character crossover as we did so with NTR’s Kelsey coming to play, we kicked off the final Mission #3’s preamble and begun our march to action, drama and a big bang of an end game for 2 of 3 paths on top. We’re well on the way to the end of our first game, as bittersweet as that may be, and so this year ahead is going to be all about reaching deep and getting as close to there as we can together, while enjoying every bit of Nat and the rest of the cast as we do.

So then, what’s the plan? Where are we going in our Heels this year?

Top Line Road Map

We’re in the endgame phase for Agent of Heels now, quite so, with Mission #3 being our focus for the rest of the game. It’s a big undertaking, with so much going on and some very distinct paths, not to mention the potential endings and all the choice consequences yet to fall on Nat’s shoulders to bare, or in her lap to enjoy. That all said, there’s more to the game than just the content, and that’s also on our minds as we home in on our very first v1.0. There are aspects of the project that need retooling, that need improving, and in some cases need removing before we can call it the best experience we can reasonably make of it.

The top line takeaway for Agents of Heels in 2022 is thus: We’ll be pressing the content as much as we can, past the last of the Mission #3 preamble, through the main body of the Mission itself, then as far into the finale and potential post-game endings as possible. When that’s done, and only when it’s done, we’ll turn our attention to some substantial clean-up on the technical side before we call the game finished. We expect this may well take all year, maybe longer, but it’s about making quality, quantity and doing our first game justice until the very end, before we look to new beginnings.

Let’s take a looksee what we’ll be up to on both sides of the To-Do then, starting with the biggest chunk, and the most fun too.

Scenes and Content

The content ahead for Natasha is pretty straightforward on the macro level. Hell, we’ve pretty much said it twice already in this post alone. It’s all about the final Mission and the big finale, and that’s what’s going to be most, if not all of our Heels time in the year ahead.

The path forward is a straight one: Currently we’re still wrapping up the pre-amble for Bad Nat and a little for Corrupt still, and we expect that to not go on much longer. After that it’s the body of the mission, including the action, misadventure and a few flourishes that come from the players’ decisions up until now. Beyond that, it’s the big finale we’ve been building up to as all of Nat’s troubles come to bare and consequences are settled and / or set in motion for the future. All of this will be done in near triplicate, as Good, Corrupt and Bad Nat each have their own distinct paths through the same historic day in the beWilderverse, with additional things like where her loyalties lie, how she dealt (or didn’t) with Cat, Subject 32, Scout and so on, all to be accounted for too. You can plainly see why it may well take us as many as all of the potential 6 versions of 2022 ahead to wrangle all that in a way that’s true to the potential and does right by what the game can be. It’s going to be a year of packing in the content as much as we can, and why it’s the biggest tick on our To-Do.

So yes, we’re keeping the focus for AoH on the straight and narrow, with the #1 thing on our minds being getting us to the end line, or as close as we can, by the end of the year. But what if we do get there? What else is there to do before Heels is ready to pass the baton?

Post-Content Completion and Gameplay

As we said above, and is clear from the game itself, there are areas of AoH that are still in need of sanding down, plumping up, or just plain yanking out if we want this to be the best we can make it before we celebrate our first game completion. Now, we know we can’t spend forever making it incrementally better at the expense of other opportunities to make the best beWilderversepossible, but there are a few key things that need to be done post-content to get us up to a standard we can be proud of. They are:

- A revamped and improved daily section of the game. The game has up to 25 total playable days now, something that has been slowly built up over time but without the backing it needed to make the most of this early design that stuck around even after the game went through growing pains and changes. As it is now the game feels a little bit empty on the sandbox side of things and we want to fix that, at least in the broadest strokes we can, then learn from the experience. We’re still deciding, and likely will be until we’re Mission #3 complete, as to what exactly to do here. Do we peel it back and remove the wasted sandbox days for a smoother, closer to a VN style game? Do we take a page from NTR’s gameplays and spend a version whipping up 20-30 short 2-3CG events of Nat being active, exploratory and sexy to find and enjoy across the city to make those day satisfy instead? Honestly, it’s something that will likely need more discussion with you fans closer to the time we can focus on it, but why not think about it now too? In any case, this is the very thing that needs some post-game attention to make AoH the best experience it can be before we can all anything a v1.0, we feel.

- Minor feature and technical improvements, polishing off our known issues, potential features like a simple Auto-Read, potentially adding game audio and music throughout, and of course properly completing the Gallery features (locking unviewed scenes on start, better highlighting scene paths, etc.). There are a handful of things we could do if we only had the time, and if we weren’t pressed for big leaps and bounds in new content every version, and so there will be at least 1 post-content complete version we’ll need to really wax on the polish. We’re keeping a list and checking it twice, so fans should speak up with anything along these lines they feel AoH could benefit from, because we have a small window set out for these kinds of improvements ahead.

- Remove the legacy stats system. You know the one we mean. In the early game Nat can up her strength and agility, while also letting the infection set itself in deeper. This was an idea Unshi had planned to run with back before beWilder was even a thing and he was alone in Heels, but as time has gone on, as AoH grew to be bigger and have branching personality paths, plus side lines like Kate’s party, Tim’s drama, and Cat’s chase, we simply didn’t keep up with this system as more locks meant more complexity, player blocking and confusion as well. As fun and interesting as those stats may have been, it’s simply too late to make good use of them and so it’s for the best that we disable them entirely, right? Perhaps we can make use of a similar idea in future games, learn from what we did and didn’t do to make a game that really pops from such a set-up, but for AoH we’ll be taking them away and fixing up the early game to run without them, something that’s obviously best done when the content is all complete, installed and we can be sure not to introduce system breaking bugs by putting some real focus into doing the job right.

As you can see, we’ve an awareness of where we’ve let AoH fall through the cracks in places, and more importantly we’ve got plans to spackle’er up and raise the experience rather than shrug things off and let it be less than it can be. It’s also clear it’ll take a version or two of invested time to do too, which is why we believe content is king first and foremost before we start that heavy lifting. How much, if any, we can make happen in 2022 is still unclear, but we wanted to use this opportunity to make it known we have more in mind for AoH than just finish the story and call it a day.

Too Long, Didn’t Read

So then, did you get all that? We’re sure many have, but for those who skimmed or skipped, here’s the simple version of today’s talking points:

Our plans for AoH in 2022 are simple. We’re pushing Nat to the end of her story, through Mission #3, the finale, the ending, all the things that still need attending to narrative wise for all 3 Nats, as we home in on our first finished game and the first set in stone beWilderversegame to shape our world. There are other things on the tech side we want to address before we finish and make an AoH v1.0, including improved or removed sandbox portions, UI/Gallery/Minor Feature polishing and stripping away under-used items such as the stats. We may not get to these in 2022 (though we would like to), but we want to at least start the conversations and make it known they are on our radar.

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There we go, that’s what AoH has coming to it. How does that feel? Got our eyes on the right balls, would you say? We believe we do indeed, so all that’s left is to pick up them up one at a time and run them to goal line! The year is early, but every day counts and is a day we can take a step forward. So y’all take a bit of time to absorb the news of right now. We hope y’all will be ready for more soon as we do this again and more with NTR come Friday. Until then we’ll be working on all things wilder, since there’s no other way we’d have it! So let’s all…

Be on the way to an action-packed new year and beWilder!