The never ending cycle continues. We are back to Liora development! Last month was largely focused on Edgar related content, including lewd events, contracts and new mechanics for him. It should be possible for most people by now to overcome the Demonized Warhound, so we can now open up the next main area in Highwarden Keep.
I plan to invest roughly two weeks into this, since the dungeon will be fairly complex. Think Draknor Fortress with various vertical movement between floors, shortcuts that you can make and even ways into the level 2 areas of the side areas for maximum interconnection.
A word of warning before I go into weekly breakdown of the project plan: As you have probably noticed (it took me a bit to remember), December is that month with the Christmas and New Year's event, so based on my experience of the past years, this will probably be a bit of a slower month due to reduced availability on everyone's side during the last December week. (On the other hand, last year it's also where I did the whole Final Battle for SKA so who knows)
Week 1: There won't be much to see here on the player side, as I will focus largely on concept work and sketching out the areas and interconnections. As I mentioned before, the dungeon won't be just 1 area, but will come with a layered design. There will be roughly a main square, a side building with a ground and upper floor, and an underground dungeon area. The area is expected to last for 2 parts of content, start at level 30 and the main goal will be gaining access into the main building of the castle, for which there will be multiple entrances (planning 3 with different checks to pass: Beating a strong boss to go in through the front, passing a jump check or finding a way in the underground dungeon).
There will also be a Resistance step-mechanic for this dungeon similar to SKA's Draknor Fortress, but instead of triggering a curse, it will trigger a forced retreat for Rean as he won't be able to take the local Miasma anymore - Liora and Edgar will be free to continue alone :)
In a way with the Clinical Trials quest from last month and this adding another trigger for Rean being outside of the party, you can think of this month being a bit "Rean-adjacent". It's not really about focusing on him, but most things are interacting with him and his Decay condition.
Week 2: After refining my ideas and sketching them out ingame, I plan to at least properl map out the main square area of Highwarden Keep. Since it's all quite interconnected, I'm not sure if I will be completing this area with all encounters or instead do a little bit here and a little bit of another connected area, focusing on encounters that are more beatable given enough level reductions. I will see. The main boss I mentioned earlier that can be killed to gain access through the front access of the main bulding I will probably leave [NOT IMPLEMENTED] since I don't expect it's in any way realistic to defeat it in the current game stage.
Besides dungeon work, I expect there will be some assets from our artists to integrate, so I put some time aside for misc work.
Week 3: Then we continue on expanding the number of quests in the game. Town Prosperity 9 is supposed add a new service NPC into Thornefield and also bring a quest with him. I'm not sure what the service exactly will be yet, but probably something expensive that allows trading money for getting stronger faster similar to Edwin's Workshop in SKA and Elixirs in the later game. Anyways, Edgar will have some blackmail material on him (or something like that) and you will be able to do some investigating and sneaking to help the NPC and then have a choice to hand in proof that Edgar was behind to cause prestige damage to him or in the Quest tab offer to give him the evidence in exchange for a clause. Something like that.
Week 4: As mentioned above, I'm not super sure how much time availability there will be for the last week so it's a bit hart to plan. I will definitely be creating an alt version of the masturbation event focusing on anal masturbation so that we have proper coverage of raising the sensitivity of all body parts.
What I also want to take a look at are some performance items. Not sure if you have noticed but when you click Negotiate with Edgar there is a veerry small time delay. The whole logic for searching for fitting clauses has become quite extensive and I have done little work on the performance side yet, so there's a lot of recalculating going on. Adding some caching here and there should do the trick.
Likewise, RPGMaker has a preload mechanic for Show Picture commands, however, I have been rolling my own commands which allow for dynamic picture names so I don't go insane with managing all the variations. I plan to take a look into supporting some sort of preloading here as well.
That's it for my side. Of course there is also the topic of the VA audition going on in the back of all this.
On the freelancer side, I have the following updates:
RPGMaker Dev
Our assistant developer Trihan will be working on a new "Special Effects" control option to configure your playing experience: You will be able to set various flags for turning off flashes, screenshakes, fog effects, etc. so old (mobile) devices will have an easier time and players replaying the game don't go blind when CTRLing through the game at x50 speed (which will also probably be a bit faster due to the reduced amount of effects playing).
If there are special effects you would like to be able to turn off, drop it in a comment!
Besides that, the other work I have scheduled for him is mostly behind-the-scenes technical stuff. Our prefix and suffix system (Things like Blessed or +) isn't very translation friendly and needs an overhaul.
And then the various pixel animations we have added (mostly to SKA but also some for Liora) have been currently naively scripted in RPGMaker, but that's causing a lot of repeated script code and isn't scaling well, so Trihan will be working on a solution so we can better configure pixel animations in a reusable way.
Liroa Artist
For our Liora Artist Deniis I have a bit of a change in the previous art plan.
Basically, I have moved the items that were originally scheduled for this month to Janurary and instead scheduled two different items for this month: The anal masturbation variation H-CG to go along with my development plan and the CG for the handjob variation of the Ariadne training event to along with the addition of her character artwork.
For SKA there is not change in the art plan.