Dev Log — November 2023

Hi everyone!

It's been another busy month and I'm ready to share a bunch of new things with you!

Succubus & Incubus

The succubus and incubus will be part of the PvE overhaul, where you'll be able to encounter either or both depending on your sexual preferences as part of a set of demon-themed encounters! All sets are designed to have three encounters that chain to create a progressing storyline within a run, and I expect that this set will start with a hoard of imps and include both a solo and duo encounter with a succubus or incubus. The number of potential partners in an encounter drastically changes the dynamic, which is great for making distinct and flavorful stories. For this particular set, I like the idea of encountering the same demon for the second and third encounter, where they seek to mesmerize you during the second encounter, and if they fail and you find them again, they will be accompanied by another student for the third encounter who took your place as their pet, and now the two of them seek to add you to their collection.

UI Upgrades

Most of this month was spent making improvements to the game client and upgrading it to properly use the new Avatar System MK II, which has support for a dynamic avatar in the future and is much easier to expand on.

Change Height

A new spell that will be introduced with the next update allows players to define explicit heights for their character. For now, this will only be seen as text, but the dynamic avatar is planned to change to reflect the actual height of your character. With this change, I also introduced a new floating input field similar to the one for selling items on the market. This one is used to select the height and will be displayed when you try to cast the spell. It supports inches/feet and cm, depending on your settings. Another floating input field has been implemented for the Change Name spell, which validates input before it is sent to the server and lets the caster know in real time why a name isn't valid. These specialized input fields help players select valid input and understand what is possible with much less trial and error than in the past.

Inspect & Profile

The inspect menu and profiles has also been upgraded to support the new avatar data structure meant for dynamic avatars. In the future, players will be able to change between a character's stats and seeing their visual rendering, but until the dynamic avatar has been fully implemented, images of traits will continue to be displayed next to their associated slot.

All equipment slots now correlate to a part of your character's body, and for this purpose the two generic accessory slots have been replaced by a slot for gloves and a bra. Some items, such as the chastity cage and belt has also had their slot property changed, in this case underpants, which also correlates to your character's genitalia, so they can always be found with the body part that they relate to.

The slot layout has also been changed slight, and on the left you have from the top: bra (breasts), undershirt (chest), underpants (genitalia), and gloves (arms & hands). On the right you have from the top: headwear (head), shirt (general body properties like height, wings), pants (butt & hips), and shoes (legs & feet). This also means shirt and undershirt; pants and underpants are now aligned horizontally, which I find a lot more pleasing!

This layout was also designed while considering absorption and body part transformation, marking the first big step towards supporting this sort of content as well! Some may notice that the focus was removed, and I have plans to reintroduce it when it becomes relevant in the future. Right now, there is no room for it but there will be once I deprecate the turn timer with the PvE overhaul and make changes to the top-left UI cluster.

Action Tokens

Speaking of the top-left UI cluster, the top-right UI cluster will be removed with the next update, and action tokens will instead be displayed next to your health bars. That way, the information is clustered in one place and the UI is cleaner. I also intend to have a larger scrollable text box for describing PvE encounters, which will be located on the right side of the screen and continue up through the top where it would've collided with the top-right UI cluster.

As you can see from the image below, the new action display also supports showing you how many fractions of an action you have. When you are at your maximum whole actions, part of the border will become light to indicate the unavailable fractions beyond your max. In settings, you can also control whether you want to see the maximum number of actions next to your current amount, and you can also opt to not have the borders show as a progress bar for a more simple and static look. Regardless, you can always see the fractions available for both the maximum and your current amount by hovering over the respective action token.

Status Effects

The last UI upgrade I've been working on is status effects, which will be used to display non-visible alterations and other magical effects that might be important to know about in a battle and not otherwise obvious.

These include lactation, breast milk level, ailments like diseases and curses, whether your character is restrained/quadruped, enlarged, shrunk, blinded, and many more effects. The idea is, together with the dynamic avatar, to give players an immediate understanding of their own and other players' character without having to go through their entire inspect page, and alone, to give players all the information they need before choosing what to do in a combat situation.

Above is a preview image of how effects might look and what information it conveys. There are three image frames, inspired by Final Fantasy Online: arrow up, arrow down, and neutral/square. The arrow frames are generally used to indicate if something is a buff or debuff, but is also used by the enlarged and shrunk effects to emphasize the direction of the effect. The square frame is used for things like lactation that doesn't have any inherent advantage or disadvantage. Another inspiration from FF is the use of roman numbers to indicate a rank for an effect. Most effects are compound effects, meaning a single icon is used to describe many similar effects, such as poisons or diseases. In this case, the rank will convey the number of different active poisons to keep the list concise. The lactation effect, on the other hand, uses the rank to convey milk production, and in this and other applicable cases, the roman number will be replaced by MAX when at maximum rank, something that doesn't make sense for effects like poisons.

The image of an effect might also change to convey information, which is also the case for the lactation effect, where the figure in the image will change color to indicate the amount of milk produced. So rank is used to convey how fast milk is produced, and figure color is used to convey the amount of milk produced using a single effect.

I have also taken some inspiration from how World of Warcraft displays buffs and debuffs. For instance, they use a glowing white border for effects that a player is able to cleanse/dispel, and I have decided to do the same. Right now, players aren't able to cleanse or dispel effects, but it's something I plan on introducing in the future and now the system is ready for when the spells are!

WoW also uses a radial shadow to indicate the duration of an effect that has it, which I have also decided to use. Status effect with a timer can also have a numeric number displayed instead of a rank to give an explicit indication of the remaining time, though players can disable the display of the timer if they find the countdown distracting.

Finally, an idea of my own is the concept of inactive or grayed-out effects that are effects irrelevant to the current encounter. This is primarily used for effects that have trigger events that cause changes, such as the Hucow ailment that can cause breast growth, which could work against whatever your opponent is trying to do and act as a sort of automatic healing, which is not the intended purpose. For this reason, any such effects will become inactive during a PvP encounter, unless they were acquired during the encounter. So showing up with a poison that causes a trigger effect will be disabled during a PvP encounter, but getting poisoned during the encounter will still work, and the influence of effects that don't cause triggered changes to your character will still work. The only other case of an effect becoming inactive, is for the disease effect, which will be inactive while you have no active diseases, so you can still see its tooltip to see all your immunities. Since inactive effects don't impact a PvP encounter, they also won't be visible to other players while inactive. 

The amount of status effects on a character, and space available varies, so I've made a system that attempts to resize status effects to make the best use of the space available so effects are easy to read without taking over the entire screen.

Planned content for the next update

I didn't manage to get the update out this month, which mostly has to do with the UI changes taking a lot more time than I had expected. But I have decided to not rush the update and allow it to take the time it needs to for the game to get to where I'd like for it to be before I start working on the PvE overhaul. The issue with rushing updates is that it always leads to content cuts because you cannot release an update with systems that don't work; that would break the game. The only thing you can do is release it with missing or lackluster content, and I refuse to do that for this update. Many of the upgrades have been to pave the way for the PvE update, but some have been to pave the way for sex toys and more complex sex scenes that acknowledge things like chastity.

I am almost done with all the UI changes and system changes required for the update, and soon I'll be moving on to finishing up all the new content for the update. Hopefully, November will be the month. Fingers crossed! 🤞

That's all!

That's all for this dev log, but before I leave you I want to share one more NPC sprite with you; one for a male gorgon variant. In many games and other media, gorgons, lamia, and other races are strictly female, and others male, but I find that unsatisfying, as it would limit content for players who are not into all genders. So, we decided to make a male gorgon variant, but instead of simply making it a spin on the traditional gorgon with snakes for hair, we decided to give the male variant two sentinel snakes that sprout from their back, Darkness-style.

Thank you so much everyone for all your support! Hopefully, the update will be released this month and I will continue to keep people updated on my progress in the backer channels on Discord ❤️

Cheers,

Tinon