It's been a bit above a year now since development on Liora started and with the last prerelease we have finally (roughly) crossed the 50% threshold. In this post, I want to give an update to the Long-Term Development Roadmap to give an overview of where we stand, what delays we have now and based on the past year what major roadblocks I expect us to face in the future.
Overall, development has been chugging along nicely. We have gone from the end of Part 1 from when I first made the long-term roadmap to the middle of Part 3. In terms of content development, we are pretty much on line and have been hitting the roadmap milestones nicely. This is mostly thanks to the alternating Liora and SKA months and me catching up on anything that we are behind on by yoinking a week of development time from SKA.
In terms of milestones, I don't see any reason to change our goals and they remain the same as planned in the long-term roadmap. We reached the sex milestone at the beginning of the year and are currently focusing on following that up with passive-based game mechanics and events triggered by those mechanics that express Liora's progression on the sexual corruption. The currently next goal we are working towards to is Liora (reluctantly) triggering lewd events with Edgar by herself due to Sexual Frustration instead of through contracts.
Since we began development, we have added voice acting which our voice actress Allure has been progressing on nicely.
On the art side, things are a bit rougher on the time line. It was always clear that especially the costume variations would take a big chunk of time but the Tier 2 Costumes taking overall about 2.5 months was unexpected. Together with some other minor delays, this puts us roughly a month behind our current schedule for the art side.
Because of this, I have currently scheduled an extra development month for the Midgame.
This is how the development schedule will look like for the next months (and then we will return to the usual alternation going forward). The downside of the alternating development plan is that scheduling an extra dev month means also delaying the other project; on the other hand the Hermann Update is filled with tons of complex multi-character CGs, having the extra month might be good here as well.
I plan to use the extra month for Liora to slightly scope creep the number of side quests and non-repeating non-erotic side story events (most importantly nothing that requires new CGs as that would defeat the purpose of this month to allow our artist to catch up x_X, except for the regular content that we are behind on). Not sure what events those will be yet, but the most likely candidates are story events that can trigger during an Edgar or Rean date. I will figure out the details when I get to that month's project plan.
I have also increased the expected development months for Part 5 by 1, since I assume if we had one month of delay for the first half, we will definitely have at least 1 for the second half as well.
Finally, I also added a Beta block. I was hoping that with the alternating development months, effectively always giving us a beta month between updates, we would be able to avoid a dedicated 1.0-beta phase, but it currently seems likely that we will need it for two reasons:
The mechanical complexity of the interaction loop contracts <-> sexual corruption system is higher than I expected. I'm not sure we can get the numbers right on the passives, their advancement conditions, etc. by the time of the 1.0 release rolls around and it might need some extra rounds of polish after all content is complete.
Costumes x________________________X The keen observer may ask the question: Hey aura-dev, so Tier 2 Costumes took 2.5 months to make. About 1 month for the costume themselves, another 1.5 to make the H-CG variations. By the end, we will have roughly twice as many H-CGs, so making another 3-set would take 1 + 1.5 * 2 = 4 months. How does that fit in :)? ...So, yeah, it's very likely we will need some extra buffer time to finish the production of the Tier 3 Costumes, which we could do in an extra dedicated Beta block.
To summarize the state of our current production schedule: It currently seems we are on track to finish a 1.0-beta version roughly within our time plan with a an estimated total of 2 months of delay. But for the steam release and the official 1.0 release we may face some extra delays by needing an extended beta period.