For this week we have two final pieces of fanart from Sehad: an animated Yarra study and Qum doing a famous dance. ^-^ This concludes a long string of fanart from Sehad after they discovered the game. Of course, I'm happy whenever TLS inspires people to create content, even little memes, but I especially appreciate just how much love and work went into all this art.
This week's update will be about Slave Rehabilitator, which continues to move along in the background. It was advancing slower because Kali was on break for a month, but now we are seeing some more progress again.
A key question when it comes to these early builds is how much they should include. The process of funding a game via Patreon, releasing it in stages, means that it's fundamentally collaborative. To start with an extreme example: if I finished the entire game first, I wouldn't get feedback that would have an improving effect overall. Game development needs to iterate, especially when it involves anything new.
On the other hand, "too little" is possible as well. From a pure development perspective, there are sandboxes, early alphas, and other very simple tests. However, as a Patreon-funded developer somewhat doing my work in public, I have to think about how I'm presenting that work as well. If I put out something that reflects too poorly on me or the game I hope to create, that will have a negative effect on the end result in a different way.
Which is all to say that I'm not sure when the first build of Slave Rehabilitator is enough. The (finished) intro plot is pretty short and I haven't decided how much I want to extend it. One critical piece is having the first major version of the full gameplay loop intact, which will take some more work and I'll discuss later. For this post, I'm thinking more about characters and story, which brings me to the additional work we're doing...
(I could have cleaned these up or put together something fancier but I'm just showing you the WIP files to save time.)
Here we have our first orc character and the second major patient of the game, who will be introduced in the major plot section after the tutorial-like intro. I like having varied characters, both in personality and body type, so we're going for some contrast here. This sort of work isn't exactly discrete progress like putting words or code on the screen, but ideating on character design is still important work. Will you actually see a lot of these two in the build? Unsure.
The other major thing we're working on is the code and animation for generic patients, who will be an important part of gameplay if not story. More on that later, as it's a big task that moves only slowly.
Okay, that's enough for now, please look forward to it!