Dev Diary #6

Welcome to our sixth dev diary.

It's Lone Wanderer here, once again. We will all present our progress since our last one at the beginning of September here in this post.

We hope to keep up this pace, as with the renewed activity we have seen, we are interpreting this as you preferring this kind of approach.

Which… is ultimately communicating more with you and releasing more content.

General News

Before I talk about what I have worked on until now, I will lay out some general news. We are removing the character Berac from the game, which Gherod will talk about more in-depth further below.

We also may not receive new illustrations for a while, given that Rauch, our background and illustration artist is… in Russia.

While we do know that with a furry visual novel with porn in it, one may not want to hear about the current geopolitical climate in the real world, it does have real world consequences on our lives.

We will still be able to release content, writing-wise, and Rauch did also finish several illustrations for Garreth's sex scenes in his second date. Yes, that includes both variants for sex on the same day.

You can check all of his illustrations in the images of this post.

We cannot tell you when he might be able to contribute more art again, but we will let you know when our situation changes.

In the meantime we will make due with whatever art assets we have at the moment and focus on writing out content.

Corvolin Redesign Process

Speaking of which: I am currently in the midst of adding extra Corvolin content to day 4 and also reworking his existing content.

Their original concept was pitched to me by Blue Bishop and it had enamoured me so much that I had agreed to the concept right away. This spirit character's concept is that they are a cryptid, having lived for a long while in this dark, otherworldly forest.

Contrary to what one might expect, they are nice and really chill. The intent for the story with them was to offer a bridge to this other world.

While as a first idea that sounds nice, the execution for the character ended up having them become a vehicle to dump exposition on the player character. And I personally also felt that they were a bit combative with them cutting off Nyrok when we as writers simply couldn't answer all of Nyrok's questions yet at the time.

Our goals and also evaluations of the game itself changed over time, and I had also observed that Corvolin doesn't really get talked about at all within our audience. Back when I had participated in a recording session with Shin, I also picked up right away that nobody was really interested in his exposition dump.

From what I can gather it is that they are just a boring character in their current state.

Another particular issue the character had was them speaking in two voices to convey that they are intersex, but… on further evaluation, I felt like that still attached the idea of their gender to a binary concept too much.

Corvolin's nature, personality and also rules brought a lot more questions with themselves. So many more questions that it actually made me reevaluate many of the rules of the game world itself.

I will talk about those at another time, but why is this relevant for the cryptid bird? You as a reader will ask yourself these questions:

• Who is Corvolin?
• What is being a spirit like?
• What is their gender and sex?
• Can I fuck and/or date them?

Behind the scenes we couldn't give you an answer on any of these… except for the last one. There was no plan for them to actually have sex scenes with you, originally.

By creating mechanics behind the scenes to give an answer to just one of these questions, more questions opened up. Like, if you can fuck a spirit, what does that really mean? How does that tie into the central theme of exploring self-worth, identity and also one's relationship with people around themselves?

As complicated as all of these questions sound, I did actually come to a lot of answers, and the main solution is really this: Corvolin doesn't adhere to "rules" that one would usually expect from a character or person.

Their gender is undetermined, but they have a more masculine representation, which will be explained, eventually, when we get to the point where we introduce more spirit creatures. We are also going to use they/them and he/him as their pronouns going forward.

What you are seeing with them, the lack of genitals between their legs, is actually that. It's not meant to be convenient censorship but they do not have genitals.

As a person, who is a cis-born male, but is questioning whether or not I am rather non-binary, I am very conscious that exploring gender themes and also combining physical sex with it is very risky.

The intent isn't to reduce Corvolin to their physicality, but more so that they are a character with their own thoughts and motivations. The lack of genitals is an expression of them simply not having bonded much physically with other people.

However… from the angle of the self-worth of a person there is also nothing inherently wrong with one not having anything between their legs. So, this kind of angle offers a far different exploration of sexuality with this character.

We intend to add to their purpose by them somewhat serving as a mirror for Nyrok to peer through. Without giving away too much from our plans in the future, Corvolin might be one of the few characters whom Nyrok can relate to.

Corvolin doesn't have their own identity and needs others to define themselves… whereas Nyrok also doesn't have his own identity and needs others to find his own.

With defining these needs for the characters, we now have a tangible way to present Corvolin's interactions with the player character and also what kinds of content we could write with them.

The physical content and also the relationship content with them will be fairly weird, which of course is a fairly great risk, but this weirder content will be optional.

Corvolin Day 2 and Day 4 Content

Now, with Corvolin being refined and also re-defined, it is far easier to build upon this character and also determine what they might do in more casual scenarios.

One scenario is day 4, where after the events Nyrok is written to just… repress whatever happened. And he carries on his merry way, without being affected by the attempted kidnapping.

A scene I am working on at the moment is an addition to the night segment of day 4, where they visit you again, helping you to to digest the primal fear of having almost been taken away.

This segment will also offer an option to build a not-so-healthy relationship with Corvolin, but you have to actively pursue this path, so it's not something where you can accidentally mess things up with them.

Also while writing them, I have had the opportunity to refine their personality a bit more. Like, them being too literal to really understand jokes, or also being a lot more open to talk about otherworldly stuff in hopefully more fun ways.

You will also get opportunities to simply interrupt their expositions if you aren't interested in any of that kind of stuff. They won't mind either.

I haven't done so yet at the moment of writing this post, but I will also go back to day 2 to rework their first visit to reflect these new paradigms.

An ancient and big, furry spirit talking to you should be fun and weird, and not feel like you are sitting in a lecture.

Looking forward, we will probably also introduce "dating" content to them… but that will bring another rework with itself: Dreams.

That is a subject for another time, so I will let Gherod take over for now!

Gherod:

Hello, Gherod here!

So, I haven't had the opportunity to speak about Day 5 up until this post, so I shall do it now...

It was quite interesting, and I want to give my personal insights as a writer and even former player of this game, so anything I'll say here is by my perception, so opinions may differ. It is going to be quite a bit of text, so be prepared!

The game has been under development for quite some time, so some of the scenes and dialogues were done to follow a certain path that would make sense at the time of their creation. Our current development team made exhaustive efforts at editing all of these days, which certainly improved the game in terms of quality, consistency and presentation.

Day 5, however, was still in need of a great deal of attention.

Some of these older texts just plainly did not make any sense with our current plans and made some characters look utterly insufferable, such as the case of Azorin. The way he repeatedly made sarcastic remarks, to the point of being rude, towards Yarin, was a massive problem and failed to properly represent the core concept of the character.

These were past endeavours to create a conflict in the narrative that would eventually evolve into a redemption arc, with the impatient detective who misjudged Yarin at first glance becoming a potential lover. But instead, it simply made the character unlikeable without any real need for such.

Azorin in concept is a character who tends to be very focused on his work, and while he does prefer to work alone, he would never, in any instance, be purposefully rude to Yarin. Surely, he can allow himself to be a little sarcastic at times, but the way he was previously written was, I thought, slightly off-putting.

Therefore, I thought it urgent to edit Day 5 and every instance of Azorin's dialogue to better represent his current version. A detective focused on solving his cases, not fully enjoying the idea of having to work with a younger stranger to do so, but allowing himself to be surprised without being rude or excessively snarky towards Yarin.

Another thing that needed to be changed was the references to Azorin having an alcoholic drink. This was not in the original concept of Azorin and it seemed to have been a lapse. He is supposed to not enjoy the taste of alcohol nor its effects, therefore, he would never grab a liquor while in Mindalu's suite, much less during work, and even less in front of a complete stranger.

Apart from the changes on Azorin's dialogue, we also had to look into removing Berac from the game. We have decided to not fully disclose the significance of this character, as it involves someone who has retired long ago from Identity's development team, and we thought best to simply remove him completely.

So, we figured Camila would be a fine replacement for Berac's role during day 5, and this even means we can start bringing her into a more active role during the following days, perhaps even opening up a dating route with all the peculiarities involving the character. She has a certain mystery to her which allows us to work out a, hopefully, convincing plot.

We hope we've managed to set up a better build-up for both Azorin and Camila with these changes and that they provide an enjoyable experience for you players! Let us know what you think!

About the next build, yes, I admit it's entirely my fault that it's taking a while longer. I vouched to provide the players a proper experience revisiting the content related to Azorin, so all these changes need to be done before that. I apologise for the time it's taking, but hopefully, it'll be worth it.

Stay tuned for future news on upcoming content, however, as they shall soon arrive in full force :)

Folksy:

Crawls out of piles of papers. I had a dig through Azorin's sprite and I feel he's in need of some updating. I felt I didn't use his fluffy stache muzz proper. So, hopefully I can give him a bit more personality with it and play around with it. Working on his expressions was definitely a process of figuring out just how much to exaggerate while keeping close to his personality.

I'm very tempted to make his stache a lil thicker but i have to control myself lest he turns into the Lorax.

Closing Words

While we might slow down on art assets for a while, the creation of writing content, planning and also background documentation work have actually sped up.

We are fairly excited to make it further into the story so that you can see (hopefully soon) where we want things to go, and also introduce more major updates to individual characters.

As always, let us know what you think, and we hope you enjoyed reading about our thought processes and how we work on content.