Roland is done (although he may reappear as a guest in some scenes maybe) - the age of Hermann begins now! Well, at least slowly. With the completion of the major milestones over the past month, this one will be a bit more transitionary to take care of some items of my todo list and in the case of the Hermann content to do some setup work.
Let's take a closer look at what those items are.
Week 1: I will be doing an improvement round to the modding system by investigating the possibility to integrate with Steam Workshop for better mod distribution. I'm not super sure if it will work out with our current tech stack, so there is a chance I will just be wasting my time, but now is the time to find out.
Week 2: A big goal for 2.0 is to improve the reactivity of lewd scenes so when you do a low lewd scene with a more corrupted Aura, or at least reduce the dissonance a bit. I have done a litttle bit of work for dick reaction scenes, but otherwise mostly let this box unopened as we had plenty of other items on the checklist. Now that we have worked our way down, it's time to get started on this. Not sure yet which scenes I will pick and I wouldn't expect crazy new dialogue variations. I think the larger goal is to suppress Aura's "super embarrassed" reactions.
Week 3: Stealing some time for Liora, this time to get a demo up and running on Steam. I still need to do quite some work on adult content checks so I can turn it off for the Steam build, so that's what I will be doing that week.
Week 4: Aaaand then it's finally time to get to the Hermann portion! Hermann will be getting a "Standing" variable of his own similar to Edwin. After marrying Hermann, the game will at some point spawn a quest "Hermann for Vice President" which will allow you to raise Hermann's standing through some actions / or maybe it will happen only passively.
I'm not super sure about the details of the quest yet. What I do know is that whenever you sell out a comrade to an influential character (Nadia, Paulina, Charlotte), there will be a lewd scene with Aura+Hermann and Influential NPC+Girl where Hermann will use the opportunity to sell himself as the brains behind Aura's actions to garner some plus points with the influential character and raise his own standing. This will give us an additional chance to see the corrupted companions after their corruption quest for one more time.
Completing the quest will create an ending variation for Victory Ending B similar to Roland's.
This week I will be working on setting up the Standing variable and to integrate into the current gameplay (for example when you do the Hermann Election event, the number of pro-Hermann chocies you pick will have an influence on its increase) and write the first new Hermann lewd scene.
I overall expect that the Hermann Update will take 3 Updates, so it will take about half a year until the 1.4.0 release.
That covers my own plans. Next up, a quick look at our freelancers.
2D Art
Our 2D artist for SKA Emubi will be away for the next 2 weeks, so there won't be going on too much right now. When he's back, we will be conituing the work on extra art for the Artist and by the time he has finished that I expect the new Hermann scene to be written so that will go into the pipeline.
As for the 2D artist for Liora, I have commissioned him to design the Tier 2 costumes. There will be 3 costumes but I commissioned a total of 6 so that we can pick the best ones. After that he will be working on integrating the new costumes into the existing H-CGs.
Finally, thanks to the inflow of money from the last release wave, we managed to reach the milestone for getting started on some first animation work. Please note that while we will be using the existing CGs as a base, we won't be switching to animated scenes, neither for SKA nor Liora. It's too late for those. Instead we will be focusing on building up knowledge (how does the art need to be produced to be animation friendly? Spine2D or Live2D? How much does it cost? How much time does it take to produce? etc.) and skills for the next project. However, I do hope that as a byproduct we can put those animations into either SKA or Liora as unlockable bonus content.
Our 2D artist Emubi will be in charge for now to create a first animation so we can create a first baseline for costs and effort. But I also want to try hiring other people to compare the work and gain more knowledge.
I didn't make a major projection of the art production as with everything that's going on in with our 2D artists I'm not super sure where they will be at by the end of the month.
Voice Acting
Allure will be focusing on voicing some post-intro scenes, the masturbation scene and then we will revist the Edgar Date once more to bring it up to speed on the quality level. I hope all of this can make it into the steam demo.
RPGM Dev
As mentioned in the previous project plan post, our assistant developer Trihan has been preparing a new "trial" type side quest. While he focused on conception and planning last month, he will be implementing it this month.
Furthermore, I put a minor QoL feature on his todo list to improve the backlog and make the individual message boxes navigateable. This will enable us to do voice replay so you can replay any voice clip through the backlog.
Composer
Our composer has finished the last planned soundtrack for SKA last month. He will begin creating on the OST for Liora with this month. Thanks to our funding growth, I was able to raise the budget to 600€/month, which will allow us to commission on average 1 song every month instead of every 2 months compared to before. This should allow us to replace most of the tracks in the game and thus avoid having too much repetition when you are playing Liora after playing SKA (or vice versa).
Alright, I think that covers it! We have got a lot of stuff in our production pipeline, thanks everyone for joining in on this and enabling this.
Next post will hopefully be soonish with the sketches for the Tier 2 costume designs for Liora.