Lucra's Secret History & Design

Lone Wanderer here again and today's topic is hopefully rich with lore that you will find valuable. This golden character isn't one you have seen yet but she will make an appearance soon.

Gender Balance in Identity

We didn't make a post yet about the gender balance in Identity. The plan was to talk about it in a public post... however there were other more urgent topics to talk about and we wanted to avoid flooding our announcements when we needed to take care of finances first.

We will again need to start off with how things were before the rework: One day I was in talks with SiriusLeeLost (the original writer) and asked him what the deal was with female characters. He didn't really provide me with an answer other than just wanting to come up with characters that may be acceptable in this setting. What ended up happening was that to me it felt like these were only defined through their sex, similarly to how he defined for example Brymror only through his uncontrolled rage.

The girl in the bathroom was described to definitely have a female voice and physique without ever describing how she actually looked like. As another example Mindalu was supposed to have a corset and look "slutty" along with matching behaviour—being a horny, old woman, that was her character. We weren't happy with the toned down version even, so we remade her—we also made a new character sheet for her, but she will be getting her own post, so I will spare you the details for now.

Making female characters at all in what was advertised a M/M exclusive game was already a large risk, given that there are certain expectations that are getting built. There are other stories which do work on their own without a single female (or vice versa a single male) character, but it needs to fit with the setting to not make the reader disbelieve your story. Axing women altogether wouldn't have worked with our world given that we do want it to be grounded and be similar to a modern age society. It also would have come off as odd to first introduce female characters and remove them all just because they were women.

On the other hand we also wanted to change the mindset of the story and make it possible to befriend everyone. So, with all of our current options one may wonder "Why can't I become best buddies with a woman?". With this line of thought we are opening up our game from being exclusively M/M-oriented to also contain a bit of straight content.

We understand that this may be disappointing for people who are only into males given that writing on a female character will mean that we aren't writing on another male in that exact moment in time. The sex will stay optional with them as well, but they are being made from a guy who is mostly into dudes and who started out primarily writing gay erotica, so my hope is that even as a gay person you can find at least something about them that you may like.

Lucra

With a previous project I was involved with, I gained an interest to venture out and be more inclusive with the smut I wrote.

One of these early experimental characters I made was a female Dracula; although she was a bat anthro rather than human looking. She was fearsome, monstrous, fed on your blood and pretty domineering; I enjoy this kind of controlling character and I just flipped the genders here to see if I could make it work.

I adapted her base idea, that she was a fearsome creature but I developed it further that she ain't so bad under her mask. So a female Dracula became a punk bat. I also wanted her to be a semi-feral but yet still fit into a traditional female ideal, so… this is what came through that:

I was taken aback by it; she does look fearsome, however she didn't look very appealing. Lucra herself was quite a bit of a learning experience for me; my references for characters consist partly of a wide variety of furry art to see how others have stylized a creature before but also my own take and imagination of them.

But I told Rauch to just orient himself after real vampire bats. I was too hasty and had a different version of her in mind than I had told him. Let's be frank here; vampire bats are freakin' horrifying and even in furry art they are usually stylized to more resemble fennecs and foxes with the shapes of their skull.

Zealot helped us to find a bit more of a shape to make a more attractive looking bat anthro:

So with the punk looks, the mock-up and a few clarifications on her, we soon came to her final design:

The "fearsome" part is now just focused on her punk looks and the fact that she has wings for arms. We are aware that even for straight or bi people her looks may be a bit of an acquired taste, but I wanted to go with something that differentiates her more than "just" being a female bat. My hope is that this could perhaps make her more interesting to people who don't care about her sex at all.

Another oddity of her is that she is our first mammal, our first non-scalie character. We needed one who was involved with the Duskin (old name: Folktails) and it had already been established that they have the such among their ranks.

But don't worry, we will not focus too much on mammals; the other dateable female characters so far are all scalies.

Her affiliation with the Duskin and purposes in the story I will leave open for now, given that it may be more fun to see her in action and you will get to see her in the next version of the game.

We wish you a great day and hopefully the next post will be about the next content update!