Public Summary Dev Diary #07

Hello, everybody. This is our third public dev diary post, with our first one having been in September and the following one in October.

So, ultimately we did fall out of the monthly pattern we had intended, but there have been a lot of changes behind the scenes, so that we can hopefully return to a monthly schedule again.

As a result of long work in between we can show off a little more stuff here. In our paid post you can see all the illustrations and sprites that have been made until now.

Adventure Segments

As you can see with the images, we have an alternate format planned for presenting the story in this game. Gherod, Vinickus and Lone_Wanderer came from another game project called "Flexible Survival" and we all have experience with writing and also working on a text adventure game.

The elements in the concepts are:

• Left hand side: Health states of characters
  Green: Stamina (STM)
  Blue: Willpower (WP)
  Red: Essence (ES)
• Top Left: Status effects, including duration
• Top Right: Mini-Map
  It can be clicked on to expand
• Top Center: Event UIIn this example it is time.

All of these elements will allow us to be a bit more freeform with exploring content within Otherworld segments, and each content piece will lead to an increase or decrease in the health states.

This game will not involve levels, combat stats (such as strength, etc.) and will mostly focus on choices. You can think of it in a structure similar to dates really, except the encounters are a bit more hostile.

Lone_Wanderer has already started work on a test encounter that may be encounterable during a night segment. It is currently being developed for internal test purposes, but we may release it in a public build if we are satisfied with it.

Dream Rework and Spirits

Lone_Wanderer has finished the reworked segment on day 2 for Corvolin but also additional content you will be able to find on day 4. Most of the content is optional and you will only be able to find it if you pressure them into letting you give them another payment.

This rework took me quite a bit longer than anticipated, but that also came to personal reasons. However, with it finished we also have a pretty good grasp how spirits will work in our setting.

As such I am going to use the momentum that we have now and start reworking all the dream segments to make them more generic slots like the dating segments.

They will enable the player character to follow stand-alone dreams in full or meet up with spirit characters. I may stream myself writing several of the dreams, and will make an announcement for where and when it will be on our Discord. Feel free to join us and hang out!

Day 9

The next main day is currently being worked on by Gherod. It is proving to be a bit of a design challenge as by this time there is content that has to start diverging, i.e. Brym's disposition of you.

If you already have gotten closer to him, the outcomes on this day will be different than if you managed to get on his bad side, for example.

The focus will also be on numerous other characters including Azorin, Camila, Cedrik and Lucra.

From the next update onwards (0.3.10) more spirits and weird creatures will start showing up.

Illustrations

Rauch has finished illustrations for the sex scenes in Garreth's third date and also the sex scene for Lucra in addition to the concepts for the UI.

Sprites

Folsky has been busy at work with creating sprites for Cedrik, refining his work more and making sprites look more consistent.

Music

Samples has created two new tracks, one will be available for listening to the public, and the second one will be in a separate post later for patrons. This new second piece also involves a new progressive audio system depending on your choices.

Closing Words

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.