And we are back to Liora for June! Let's take a look at the usual weekly breakdown of my plans:
Week 1: I expect to be mostly busy with freelancer management especially since both Emubi and Deniis should be able to finish their respective CG that they have in their pipeline within this week. The time I have left I plan to spend on technical work on a new subsystem which is basically "sexual passives from Edgar's side":
The plan is that as Edgar will gain passives that represent his knowledge over Liora's sexual weak points which will in return increase his effective sex skill against her, give more effects to harass moves, etc. The main goal is to work for him to get a passive that allows him to edge Liora during sex.
For now, Edgar will use this skill in the event that his proposal during the date was rejected and try again, offering Liora release if she accepts the proposal. In the future I plan to expand on this to also trigger during sex scenes in other cases, but right now we don't exactly have a large collection of scenarios to choose from and probably the week will be over.
If not, maybe I can sneak in a little bit more work on Rean Decay passives so he can gain higher ranks of bed-ridden to go along the recent Garrick addition.
Week 2: Then we will be working on a standard lewd scene extension; the Edgar will be joining in at the end of the Ariadne Training scene for some action with her. As for Liora, there will probably be a clause like "If Liora sees Edgar fucking Ariadne, Liora shall: Begin to masturbate".
For the anal variation, we will have to see how Deniis makes progress. When I receive the CG, will add it. Maybe that will be this week maybe some other, maybe it won't happen this month but next.
The completion of Week 2 also marks roughly us reaching the 50% mark. I plan to also write an update to the Roadmap Plan to give a summary of where we are now in the big picture, where we are on-time, where we are lagging, behind, etc.
Week 3: Back to Highwarden, I plan to finish the last area and also implement the boss enemy guarding the front entrance to the main building. This should give us a new difficulty ceiling and will help me when designing the rewards for the upcoming quests and the last Underwater Area.
Week 4: My last dev week for the month, I plan to spend on a side quest: Duel Tournament. This will be a long-running, optional quest where you can register either Liora or Rean to compete. We will be using the Verdeaux ruleset for duels, so Magic will be allowed but items still forbidden.
Each week, you will be given the information on your next opponent (so no investigation phase) and you can optionally ask Edgar for help to rig the battle in your favor. Should you win, you gain some money, should you lose, you will gain a bunch of debt to Edgar, which will need to be worked off by Rean in Edgar's mine...
There will 3-4 rounds, with the first two rounds introducing two named female characters that will be joining Thornefield. One will catch the eyes of Clovis and in the future there will be a corruption quest to help Edgar in selling her out to Clovis so he can gain some Prestige / favor with him and the second one will be a friend from Liora from her time at the Academy and the last representant of the story factions. I have various ideas on how I want to use her, all kind of going into different directions, both as a corruption target and what she can bring to the story. Maybe she will have a secret crush on Rean (Veronica but on the "good side"), maybe she will be involved in the second trial quest. I'm not super sure yet. Right now the goal of her introduction is to establish the foundations for the late game events.
From our freelancers, there aren't major changes to the ongoing plans, the only noteworthy mention is the following:
RPGM Dev
Our assistant developer Trihan will be making a successor quest to Alchemical Experiments, but this time focusing on Coatings. If completed, you will unlock Anti-Magic Coating which should provide some new avenues for preparing against magic focused bosses.
His other two milestone items are taking another look at save renaming and in SKA, taking a crack at adding flavor events when you interact with random objects. In the far-far-far past, we once had a free contributor named Jane who added some of those events at the beginning of the game. The goal would be to finally pick up on this again. We will need to see how much this task suits Trihan to figure out if this is a kind of work he would we will do more often in the future.