0.1.0 Postpartum

Happy 1 year to Unyielding! 

What changed:

Combat rework demo
Added Promotion
Added Beginnings Days
Added Appearance Selector
Added Town UI
Added Save/Load UI
Added Sena’s art
Added Beginnings Days art
Added Fray’s art
Added Fhan’s art*
Added Perjurys art*
Ran a stake into the beating heart of the text names being the wrong color, finally, after 6 attempted fixes.  You can’t be the wrong color if you are a different material created at compile time…
Fixed Lena being a horrible mutant if you had TFs on.

What happened:

5-ish is a wonderful artists, but she is busy.  In order to fill in some holes, I had someone else pitch in, trying to mimic her style.  Fhan, Perjury and all the upcoming TF art is from them, WaRen.  WaRen did a pretty good job mimicking 5-ish, but I plan to have 5-ish redo Fhan at some point in the future.

You might wonder why someone like Fhan got a portrait, and the answer is found at the end of Promotion. People have told me they want more game in this game.  I’m on it.  Promotion is the groundwork for that.

The Sena art was very, very expensive, so please don’t expect that level of quality in the near future.  I went for a big name to do that, as that screen is seen a lot.

The appearance selector screen is going to have to change, considering the amount of TF art I now have stockpiled.  I guess that means I’ll have to write more of it as well, which I’m excited to get to.

Beginnings Days is to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of this project, which you can read more about down below.  

You can also find more information on the combat rework below.  The demo is very rough, but it points to where I want to go.  I desperately need feedback on it.  I don’t need balance or design feedback, as what you are seeing is just the framework.  I need feedback on UI, what is clear, and what isn’t.  What needs a mouse over tooltip.  Did you get trapped in the UI somewhere?  

Some words, from me to you:

I can’t believe it’s been a year.  Where does the time go?  So much about this project has changed since I first dreamed it up.  I’d like to pull the curtain back a bit to talk about it.

I’ve wanted to make a video game of my own design for a long time.  I spent a lot of time implementing other people’s games, so this had to be my own design.  While on Christmas vacation, I read the story Inescapable (https://fictionmania.tv/stories/readhtmlstory.html?storyID=1513899178113717415) and absolutely loved it.  From that starting idea, a magical effect that makes you want something, I dreamed up Unyielding’s story.  The world draws heavily from things like The Witcher and Exalted.  Worlds of magic, filled with people above the normal ken.  Two people really helped influenced my writing of erotica, Sorrow (https://www.patreon.com/ChangingGames) and JoeForest (https://www.patreon.com/JoeForestGames).  If you like my sexy time work at all, please check them out.  

Armed with a plot and world, I got started.  I gave myself exactly 2 weeks to get the first version out the door.  If I idle’d on it, I knew I’d never get it done.  I had to strike while the iron was hot, and than ride the fan’s expectations to keep to a schedule.  I’d never really written before that.  Making the game was the easy part; writing was the hard part.  It doesn’t come naturally to me and I struggle with it.  Somehow, I got it all done and out into the wild.

Next, I tried to build myself a support group.  My partner in crime laughed her head off when I told her the project idea.  She agreed to help after I showed her the demo.  Next was an editor to cover my weak writing.  After that, was someone to help write so I could focus on making cool gameplay.  All of that failed rapidly.  My friends just didn’t have the time to help me with this project.

I thought long and hard about quitting after they all abandoned me, but I found that I really like working on this project.  It’s turned into a passion for me.  I enjoy writing, as much as I struggle with it.  I’ll always enjoy making video games, but that is a given for me.

The combat rework.  I’ve lost faith in my ability to continue the current combat minigame.  I just don’t have the design head for it.  Continuing with it is a bad for the project.  Instead, I need to change it to something I’m good at designing.  In short, something closer to a normal RPG.  This is a huge change, and very complicated.  I know some of you like the combat minigame as it stands.  If this drives you away from the project, I understand.  I need to make the change though.  Combat is something that I should feel excited to design and then implement.  If I can’t get excited for it, I have no chance of making the players happy with it.

The new combat minigame is based off of Dungeon and Dragons 5th edition.  Right now, it’s basically just a stripped down version of the tabletop game, but that won’t remain true for long.  My content is going to be pretty different and the two will diverge besides the base rule set of action/movement/bonus action/reaction and the like. I’ve finished a very rough, 2 minute demo of it.  It will not be integrated into the main game for bit, but will be a stand alone .exe that represents the fight that is going to happen in the next Blackfire story.  I have SO much still to do it’s mind boggling.

https://i.imgur.com/l8RyObK.png (The battle begins! Catelly is going to try to tank 3 wolves.)
https://i.imgur.com/3w3qb4c.png (Catelly’s Spark spell is very effective against the wolves.  I actually didn’t notice that Danica was going to get caught in it as well)
https://i.imgur.com/fY4t4sq.png (Things are going poorly.  The wolves made some very unlikely saves, and Caelly got maimed hard.)
https://i.imgur.com/iElh9EF.png (Not even close)

The main storyline, as of writing this, is about halfway finished.  I never envisioned Unyielding as being super long.  It’s pretty close to the first Harry Potter book in terms of word count.  I’m behind on the side stories, but I’m excited to get back to them.

To wrap this up, let me say a heartfelt thanks for being here.  I hope I can continue to make something worth your support.  I hope you and I will be here again next year to have a similar chat.

Combat Demo:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/c4187cfqtg44dwx/UnyieldingCombatDemoLinux.zip/file

http://www.mediafire.com/file/bt7c3ng6ohpnbde/UnyieldingCombatDemoMac.zip/file

http://www.mediafire.com/file/8b426zfye79y6fu/UnyieldingCombatDemoPC.zip/file