Dev Diary #07—Identity: Beyond

Hello everybody, this is our seventh dev diary post. If this were to have been a monthly feature we would have made our first one back in September and our last dev diary post happens to have been made in… October.

We are still aiming for a monthly release schedule, making changes behind the scenes in order to accommodate a faster release cycle.

Lone_Wanderer will first present what features we have planned for the future of the game, and also what he worked on writing-wise. And then as usual, every other team member gets to talk about what they did until now.

However… we will be able to present the fruits of our labour soon. In fact, this is the one big post.

The one about the future content of the game. Of monsters, otherworldly creatures, gods and weird spaces to explore.

Text Adventure Segments

We had always been wondering about how to present and explore the otherworld as well, including any hardships you may face.

All of our current writers either came from or are still working on a different project called "Flexible Survival". It is a text adventure game involving monsters and getting transformed by them or other things happening to you.

So, we all have experience working with and also creating a text adventure.

To explain these images: The left-hand side shows the resource bars for every character that is exploring together with you. The green bar stands for Stamina (STM), the blue bar stands for Willpower (WP), and the red for Essence (ES).

Stamina and Willpower can be recovered easily; Essence can not be recovered at all (or with very few exceptions).

The gameplay itself will not become what one typically might expect from a RPG. The focus will still be on writing itself and you will mostly get to interact with creatures or entities via choices. Combat stats (such as strength, etc.) or levels will not exist in this game.

The actions will be turn-based and whatever action you take will interact with the three aforementioned resources. A very simple example is that if you were to push a boulder blocking your way, it is physically straining and thereby drains your stamina.

The goal is more to arrive at a gameplay similar to games such as World of Horror or Arkham Horror where for a good part it is your choices and managing these resources to get yourself moving forward.

This is a particular concept we had been refining on for a while. A challenge for it was to show more info without the screen feeling too cluttered.

The left-hand side shows not only the health bars but also states of characters. Cedrik looks more strained here, as he is low on his health states.

The top left shows status effects that the entire team may suffer from including their duration. The top right shows a small version of the map, which you will be able to click on to expand.

The map feature itself is not implemented yet, but it will most likely be grid-based and also fairly simplistic.

And finally, the top segment is what is reserved for specific "Event UI" elements. It might change depending on the encounter, but in this case it is to show how much time you have to make it towards the exit.

And with these images you also get a preview of the next zone that we will be exploring in the story. The intent for the background was to evoke a liminal space, a cistern that keeps extending seemingly infinitely. Where might this be? And what will you be doing inside it?

These are questions we hope to present and also answer in the next chapter of the game, which will be from days 11 onwards.

Writing of Lone_Wanderer

Over the last couple of months I had presented my redesign work on Corvolin which brought a lot more design work with itself, as we also had to settle down on how spirit creatures work, what they are and what their desires and payoffs are.

For Corvolin you will be able to see some weirder content involving hypnosis and body swapping if you push them to have you give them another "payment".

Spirit creatures are less restricted by the rigid physical rules of the grounded world (the real world). So, they allow for us to play around with the weirder kinks that one may desire to see.

Extrapolating from this, it has made the future development of more spirit creatures easier, as their visual design can also directly reflect what their desires are. And also of course, how their presence and also interactions can tie with the concept of self-exploration.

Adding to the concepts above, I also started design work on a hostile encounter with a spirit. I will leave talking about this creature for a future dev diary post, hopefully next month. But, so far I have already created the introduction of it and also a potential visual design of it myself. But, I am not an artist, so if we don't have "official" artwork of it by then, you may just see my chicken scratches next time.

And, to finish off this segment, I will start working on redesigning the dream segments of the game. It will become a more generic node similar to the dates where you can choose a "disposition" to go to bed with.

These dispositions can be about wanting some harmless dreams, maybe sexually charged ones, or seeing specific spirit characters. Interactions with spirit characters will still be very real, even if reality and dreams may be blended together in this space.

For the new content release I am also currently in the process of designing a Spider God—a Fate Weaver. Talking about them might also be a bit premature, so we will also be leaving that one for a future post. But their content will be self-contained, so their presence won't explode the required effort/time for the creation of dream segments.

Further on that note, whenever we have this framework, we will also be working on adding some more generic dreams, which I may try to stream on either our Discord or a platform outside of it, but if it comes to it, I will make a further announcement on our Discord server about it.

These generic dreams will be standalone and you are free to make some suggestions in the comments here if you would like.

As a taste for what standalone dreams I might write, two ideas I had been intending to write about was you experiencing a dream from the point of view of a woman being together with her husband and having a nice time. Another set of dreams may incorporate the in-game teasers we had for so long (you know, of the prisoner furry guy).

Gherod and the story

Hello everyone, Gherod here!

After the edits of day 5, my next task is to design and write day 9 so that the story can continue, and this is also the first time I'm in charge of writing a full new day for Identity.

I'm afraid I can't reveal much as everything is still being developed and things aren't definitive until we're certain they can be safely implemented, but I can talk about a few things that will be included in the new day.

The most challenging thing about day 9, and I think it's the one particular feature that makes any Visual Novel, is the variations in dialogue, routes and choices, which this day happens to have a lot of. A conversation with Brymror at this point definitely won't be as simple as in the past, now that Yarin may have expressed to him that he wishes to pursue a relationship with Brym, or perhaps he was a little too forward in his approaches on the day before... Or, maybe even, you haven't dated Brym at all! The more we go forward in days, the more prevalent choices become, but it's a quite fun endeavour for a writer, in my opinion.

But Brym issues aside, there's quite a few things planned for this day. Without spoiling much, let's just say... You may want to be careful with what you're doing, especially if you're pursuing many characters at once, as there's a chance someone might find out and use that against you! But I'm sure a good player can easily get out of a situation like that, right?

Regarding characters, Camila and Azorin will be making a return, though perhaps not in the same scene this time. You'll also have some additional time with Cedrik and, later, Lucra, regarding the main plot and your future plans to visit these mysterious ruins! And at the end of it all, a few surprises are on the plans. A new character, perhaps? Hint: You've seen them already.

The day is also meant to include a few dating options as well, though those might come in future patches once Day 9 is finally released. It still might take a while, as it's a long one, but it'll hopefully be worth it!

Rauch and Illustrations

Rauch is here! For the last couple of months I've been working on more illustrations for character dates and main story. Some artworks made it to the previous build, such as a scene with Garreth in a sauna (where you can spot a special character making an appearance).

And the others, featuring Lucra and Nyrok, are being saved for the upcoming build. I know not everyone was happy when we replaced the first nsfw scene with Garreth.

I'm not a full-scale nsfw artist and I certainly lacked skills at that time. But I think that I have improved since then with more practice and hope it shows in the newest works.

I even started to use 3d models as a reference. Like in case with a car or with poses in both CGs with Lucra. (I'm using this opportunity to say obligatory thank you to clip studio gods for their helpful features) Tbh I want to slightly rework some of the older illustrations to make them more consistent with newer ones, but these are plans for sometime later, since new content should be prioritised over this.

I also did some UI concepts that were presented at the beginning of this dev-diary and it's quite different from what I usually do as an artist. I don't really have much to add about it, other than that I was referencing other game interfaces and simply tried to make something that looks good.

Folksy and Sprites

Folsky brain barf time! Reworking Cedriks Sprite, to try an attempt at some form of uniformity, I oftentimes worry I'm rather lacklustre in my attempts at drawing sprite.

It's been a long time since I started out on this project and as I was comparing the legacy sprites to the ones I've done recently it has consoled me somewhat that I'm making some sort of improvement.

When I first started out I was pretty clueless at what sprites needed (not to mention expressions) but working on them for these few years I've not only grown to do them a lil better but clothes too! haha! As a normally Fully NSFW artist, drawing clothes usually didn't come in often enough for me to try my hand at them (heh) but at least now I'm sorta getting where creases go etc which used to bug me Infinitely. Anyways I hope you guys like my re-attempts so far at the sprites, I'm trying my darndest to learn.

Samples and audio design

Samples tuning in!

With the rework of some segments, new audio has been implemented. A new character's theme and a unique ambient system is in place that will progress audio as you do through choices. This feature might come in later in the game as well, but you can expect to hear it soon....if you make the choices to hear it! You can also expect more of the bandcamp to have more tracks edited and uploaded to it; just keep in mind that their place in the track list might change with time. You will be seeing a post later featuring this new, strange, ambient piece, but for now you can have access to one new character theme (check below) ! 

Closing Words

While all of this progress is such that we had accumulated over the past months, our progress has sped up over the recent weeks themselves.

We know that to ensure longevity of the game project itself it has to run at a consistent pace, ideally with a monthly build and PR post.

Unlike before we did manage to make this post and also finish the content long before the end of the month.

Our next build should be released towards the end of this month, so we hope that you will also enjoy what we have cooked up.

We hope to release the following build afterwards in April, which will probably feature the mentioned dream rework with perhaps a few standalone scenes.

We are excited to see your feedback and we thank you for reading our post.