Dev Diary #4

Welcome to 2022, everybody. Part 3 of this new decade. We have a bit of stuff to present this time.

Story

So, what is happening regarding the story? We will split this two-fold, talking first about what we are currently working on, and then about what happened in the background.

Current Work

For this next release, Gherod is going to finish working on the second Cedrik date, Vinickus is continuing his work on day 8, while Lone Wanderer is reworking some parts of the prior story: More concretely day 4.

Day 4 will get an extra scene during the night after you talk with Brym about the attempted kidnapping. Currently, the player character "just" pushes aside the stress that he experienced, and while that is how some people react to very stressful and violent events, in our case this needed a bit more immediate addressing.

So, we are adding another scene there, where Yarin summons Corvolin with the incense Brym "borrowed" from the camp earlier. This will allow us to set up future "dates" with this spirit character.

We will also go back to edit their first scene a bit, especially to clarify their gender a bit more. They don't have one, Corvolin reveals themselves as a black amorphous cloud at first before they take shape by peering into your eyes. However, with the "double gendered voice" it may not be clear that they do actually operate outside the gender binary.

Their physical expression currently is still fairly masculine which is intentional. Our plan with them is really to paint a character beyond physicalities even though there are some things to them that a gay person may be able to connect with.

Sex is still planned with them, but we felt we needed to do a bit more leg-work for a non-binary character. We have attempted gender neutral speech before, but we listened to your feedback that seeking out gendering for an indeterminate character can come off as the opposite of thoughtful and inclusive.

Corvolin's physiology and the mechanics to having sexual stuff with them will be explored in the future, but they are non-conventional. They will probably be our first dip into non-conventional sex and other weirder kinks, besides the BDSM sex scene with Mindalu. But as with anything in the game, any content you wish to not experience will be avoidable.

Speaking of unavoidable stuff, we have received feedback that Garreth's first date (in comparison to his other ones) is still fairly unsavoury, and we are planning to lightly rework his first date to make him come off as less objectifying you when he asks you to fuck.

Future Work

The lead designer Lone_Wanderer has done a lot more planning and "exploration" of the design space we have in Identity. As we kept saying sometimes, our game is a psychological horror taking place in an urban fantasy setting, surrounded by nature.

So, as a result, most of the otherworldly stuff will be representative of something, similarly to how mythological descriptions and stories tend to be allegories about ourselves and our relationships, both good and bad.

We won't bore you with abstract talk about how humans express their hardships in general within stories, but our goal is the experience. We want the player/reader to feel whatever we present, so there will also be a lot of visual expressions and visual allegories.

One such allegory is another spirit creature we have in the works. He will be a full character, potentially even with a few own "dates" which will work unlike any other dates so far.

We present to you…

Artwork

Gorgeous, isn't he? This ref sheet is what Rauch had worked on for this month. This creature will appear in a later chapter, but we have already been designing and creating him since he will unfold personal events for Nyrok.

That is all we'll say about him so far, but as you can see with his presented dick, we are also planning to allow sex scenes with him.

Meanwhile, Folsky has been making more side-sprites (seen above) and also reworking all of Brym's sprites. This has the more practical reason of reducing his future workload with the chains.

While the chains look good on him, we made the design decision early on to make full-character sprites instead of just swapping out the faces on a body sprite. While some details like the hooks of the character above also require a bit more extra work, they aren't as granular as having to redraw every little chain segment in Brym's jewellery. We are going to remove them just for the simple reason to be able to make more sprites a bit faster for Brym.

Audio

Samples is working through the new Brym date that has been put into the game so far. He is also working on new music pieces, but he faced technical difficulties with one of the tracks, which may have to be reworked as a result (specifically, "Floaty"). His work is attached to this post down below.

Programming

Not much happened on this front lately, however our lead designer did talk out plans with Rriik and Wattson for future programming infrastructure to allow for new functionality. In simpler words, we want you to be able to explore weird and unfamiliar locations that may also be hostile throughout the story, and are planning the means to do so right now.

This is an early mock-up and will most likely get changed, whenever we ask Rauch to re-design it for us.

The bottom of this UI is the regular text box you see within the game. The top right element is a sketch of the amulet, which will serve as a timer of sorts. The top left will display information specific to characters. In this concept it is a menu that is hidden in a tab that you'll have to mouse over or click on to expand or collapse.

We are still playing around with the ideas for laying these elements out on the interface, as we want to make the UI as simplistic, easy to use but also clear as possible.

The way the explorations will go is like this:

• You will explore locations with up to two more characters, each character has resources. Think something along the lines of Stamina and Willpower.
• You will also have a timer that doesn't tick down in real time but based on options you pick. Generally this will tick down at least by "1" with every choice picked.
• You are within a room, you get options.
• You go to a new room and you may get an event to face in this specific room or a random one.
• These events are stand-alone encounters that you have to resolve, they will require specific characters to do something, have done something or you to expend the aforementioned "resources".

This description might seem a bit long, but this is it already. We are still novices when it comes to tying game mechanics to story-telling, but we feel that this might enrich our game through interactive elements.

If one is adept with board or simulation games one may recognize this structure as something similar like Arkham Horror/Asylum or the Oregon Trail. Those are good comparisons for how simplistic but potentially fun this mechanic may be.

While this is fairly in-depth, as with anything, things can change during game development, so we will keep you updated on this, if we end up having to scrap. But currently, we are fairly confident in this concept that it may work out.

There is another piece of tech we have planned which involves visuals.

On this (crude) mock-up you can see a weird, contorted creature with red lines. The red lines are supposed to be an alpha channel; we are considering to create sprites with transparency in their bodies and have particles or other effects show up behind or even in front of them.

This is an attempt to make otherworldly creatures seem more otherworldly. This should be a more straight forward addition as it mostly just requires us to "play around" with shaders. You can also spot these patterns on the ref sheet for the character we posted above.

This wraps up the showcase for this month! As always, any feedback is highly appreciated, so feel free to leave a comment and tell us what you think of the new concept art, music, sprite changes and game mechanic ideas we laid out!