Game Update #1 - Assets and You

Hi all!

So as promised (if late), a game update here for y'all. I've been pretty dang busy these past three weeks on it, with both good and bad results- some of which caused this update to veer off in a drastically different direction in terms of the content I have to show off and progress made. Lets go over it all, aye?

General Questions

What engine

Ren'Py

A choice-based visual novel?

Basically, so far as the structure of the content goes.

No combat?

Much as there is a part of the game that *could* be that, unfortunately not. Not enough hours!

We play as a man or a woman?

Much as I'd want to do both a man and a woman, currently only a man. Not enough hours!

Will there be sexy times?

In the main game? Yes! Though with OC's to begin with.

Romance times?

Also yes! Again though, OC's to begin with- and these're much slower burns, so more like mdi/lategame resolutions.

Mind control flavours?

Tech-based, and mostly in a nudging way, though drones are more overtly controlled (and it's not your department that makes them.)

And how do you make thralls?

Each character will be assigned a designation to become a certain kind of thrall- in Ty Lee's case, a Luxury-model dancer. (Ideally I want more than one path for each character but that's for later on in the project).
Each thrall goes through 4 stages of development, and at the end of the last stage you present them. They're graded, then either auctioned off or otherwise kept around the compound for you to interact with them further.

These points aside, lets see about the demo.

The Demo

The basic facts.

So, in the demo you'll be dealing in two scenes that happen very soon on in the game, Ty Lee's initial prepwork, where she's coated in her thrallsuit and you select what impulses to pursue going ahead, and the first scene where you meet her, a preliminary talk prior to Stage 1 training where you cement her assent into being trained as a luxury thrall.

The first scene will be to show off the customization options you'll have with your thrall in regards to appearance, with the choice to make them bald, not, or a 2nd hairstyle, with 3 variant suit designs and 4 variant suit colour-schemes (one of which is just straight-up transparent).

(Examples)

Here, you also set up your implants, which means choosing the suite of subliminals and triggers that you want to pursue during stage 1 of her enthrallment.

This choice is rather important, as it sets the manner in which you'd like to approach the thrall and what techniques you're going to use to get them to co-operate. In general terms, for Ty Lee the choices are:

• Partnership, kind and collaborative in nature
• Duty-like, based on guilt and repentance
• Commanding, master/slave-like and fear-based.

Each different method has their own strengths and weaknesses- however, these suites also need to be calibrated, which is what the second scene is about with your first meeting.

You see, though your suite may have something like 'The instructor is trustworthy' in it, that alone is not enough information for the gem to go on. Yes it's monitoring her mind, but it doesn't know which neurons denote 'instructor' or which denote 'trust'. So part of your job will be to make those connections.

During your conversation with Ty Lee, you can press a button to have her gem 'snapshot' her mental state toward a certain subliminal or trigger. You do this three times, then it's considered 'locked-in'. If you've chosen your times well, while she was feeling emotions of trust, then you will have succeeded; though the exact strength of the subliminal will vary depending on the snapshots taken, which in turn will affect your successes going into the future.

And when all that's done and you've secured her co-operation, that'll be the demo!

Sweet...but what about if I don't secure her?

Well you'll have two options then, to either release her back into her fold of the universe as unchanged as possible (though the gem is quite permanent), or send her to the Hive to be droned.

In the game, these both count as failing in your job, but have different benefits; to release means you can acquire a new Ty Lee to work with immediately (as you can only have one version of Ty Lee in-universe at the start of the game). With a drone you can recoup some of the costs expended in her acquisition, but it takes longer before you can grab a new one- or, if you'd rather work on new projects or other thralls, you could request the drone for yourself.

A third option, if you went a more genteel route, is to see if the hardball option takes instead.

Cool, so how far along are we?

Well unfortunately, this manner of doing the scene I only just thought of when preparing to do this update because I realized I wasn't happy with the written content I'd stumped up for the demo. So I'm basically redoing that from scratch. It pains me as I was hoping for a May release, but I'm told that your first shot should be your best, and that's what I want to give y'all...besides, nothing beyond a very basic version would have been playable anyway.

Right now most of the timesink is in asset-creation, making expressions for Ty Lee and all of that business. Basic designs for the other characters, backgrounds (as you see above), etc. Luckily the ones made so-far don't need changing, and once they're out of the way and properly organized, we can really speed things up content-wise.

Whatever man, road-map me.

Alright, so assuming a scale of starting, rough, detail, nearly done and complete, overall:

Scene Writing: Was nearly done, now reset back to starting to improve content.

CG Art: Currently at roughs stage. There's quite a few; some 12 or so unique pieces with variants by last count, including backgrounds and the like. Some are complete, some are starting, so I think rough on average is about right. Here's a complete one!

Assets: Ty Lee - Detail stage.

                MC - Starting stage

Outside of the lore updates, actual game releases and the rest, I'm hoping to write an update like this once a month just to keep you all posted. At the very least I'm hoping for a bughunt version with fewer CG's to be done before July hits, and in a perfect world have the demo done by then to...but to be practical, I won't set the bar that high- turns out game-making is not as speedy a process as you'd like when doing it all y'self!

I've also made a discord! Link here: https://discord.gg/Jv5u8Z2

I'll be putting progress reports in there, as well as notifying when I'll be streaming and all of that stuff. You're also welcome just to hang out. I'm sure none of you are wangrods, but it goes without saying wangrodding won't be a thing there.

Anyway, questions and comments are welcome as ever. Enjoy!