Weekly Update #74 - A better look at a new character and thinking about gameplay mechanics

Hey all,

In this week's update, a sneak peek at an upcoming new character that was teased before (but changed quite a bit since), and a quick talk (mostly me rambling!) about gameplay mechanics.

This week, I mostly progressed on non-poledance related artworks, which ended up being a nice change of pace as illustrating for the dance scene grew a bit sluggish for me. The poledance artworks will most likely be (partly) animated in the future but not in this update.

The whole art/illustration workload is (thankfully) coming towards completion, though a bunch of finishing touches and polish remains to be done.

Now as I was designing part of a new story arc, I reminisced about the very early days of this project and I recalled that in its infancy, I envisioned it as more of a "hacking" game, which would be played the same way through a simulated computer but the gameplay would have involved a lot more of breaching access to other character's devices and accessing content that way (stealing/peeping).

As it turned out, I much more heavily relied on the social aspect w/ social media, direct messaging and relationship progression which I do believe has great potential for storytelling and gameplay but I'm still pondering about including more "hacking/deceiving/stealing data" in the gameplay loop, especially since I think it can neatly coexist along the social relationship side (and exploit it, i.e. with social engineering) and that it can also be made completely optional, leaving the choice to the player as to their moral compass and what they are willing to do to access content.

Now, nothing is set in my mind but I do have a couple of prototype ideas for gameplay elements that will fill this niche and I will most likely post a poll soon to gauge interest towards that matter.

Now that's enough of me rambling, here's an updated progress chart:

And as promised, a better look at an upcoming new character... As you can see, she has been through a bit of a redesign:

I wanted a more "bottom-heavy", thick-muscular character and this seemed like a good opportunity to introduce one!

Now don't worry, this is not the only glimpse you'll get at her in this update...

I hope you guys enjoy it!

Thank you as always for the support, stay tuned for more posts (and polls), bear with me and have a great one.