PROGRESS REPORT for September 8th, 2017
FrougeDev is working on the Electric Boss as well as an update to the Fire Level Public Demo!
Triangulate is continuing on Earth Level content!
I'm directing SilkyMilk with new voicework for the cutscenes, as well as getting a much wider variety of moans/sex noises and finishing off the Electric Level maps!
Rtil is continuing work on the Electric Level CGs!
Fuyarinpa is working on a few things on other projects, but he'll be back on Future Fragments within the next week or so!
Lewd K. is still knocking out SFX for the game!
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VIE'S ABILITIES
Something we haven't really went into much was Vie's abilities; being that she's from the year 3000, and adapted to the technology of that era, she's magnitudes more powerful than say, two magicians from the year 1000.
It's a good thing she's (probably?) on your side then, as one of her core abilities is to
digitize herself, allowing her to send her body/mind through any of the circuitry in any of the first three levels. This lets her effectively teleport to any part of those levels nearly instantly, which is why she seems to be everywhere at once!
It's not just the device she's tapping on that's causing this, either; her entire outfit is the height of technology in this era, and the device is simply tapping into the suit.
(If you want a comparison, and you've watched ReBoot back in the day, her device is essentially "Glitch", if that makes more sense.)
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RESPONDING TO THE SURVEY
I'm happy to say that the overall response to the Cutscenes being introduced was overwhelmingly positive, with around 80% of voters saying the cutscenes were a 4 or 5 out of 5, and only 5% felt they were anything lower than a 3!
I wanted to address some of the direct feedback though, as well as one question on the survey regarding the types of cutscenes you'd all like to see.
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In regards to which cutscenes people would like to see more of, to no one's surprise, #1 was
"custom sex scenes", and I'm happy to report that Triangulate and I are making multiple ones of those; in fact, we plan for every level to have
two Talia and two Faye scenes that are specifically designed for those levels, and any other scenes where sex is involved will involve enemies that have had their sex animations and designs slightly altered.
For example, in the Ice Level, we might have a special "Commander Celodst" that has special adornments and an extra set of arms that only shows up for a particular cutscene, using a slightly modified version of the Tall Celodst's #1 clothed sex animation.
It will of course take time to implement/create these animations, but they are definitely being worked on and will be in the final release, even if they're not all in next month's demo at once!
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Next up, people voted for, in order from most to least;
- Character Development
- Easter Eggs
- Main Plot-Based
- Comedic-themed
- World-building
- Dark-themed
- Other
The votes between these were pretty close, but one thing I wanted to address was one particular response someone left under "other";
"This is perhaps a more stylistic perspective, but I think the dark-themed scenes should be heavily discouraged against in a game like this."
The comment goes on to mention that the vibe of the game is light, and getting too violent/intense might off-put the feel of the game. While I do agree about violence, and there won't ever be any bloodletting or permanent injuries to Talia (or Faye or Vie for that matter), I do want to make it clear that the
actual storyline of this game
is somewhat dark.
Among the three games I'm working on, this is probably the middle-ground (with
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actually being
lighter than this game and
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being
darker).
That said, it probably DOES come off as light-hearted to a lot of you, and that
is intentional also. So, how is the game both dark and light at the same time?
My intent is that if you play through the game at a surface level, it SHOULD come off as light, even comedic at times, and shouldn't really appear to be too dark or gritty.
However, if you actually read into the databanks and pay attention to certain visual/audible subtexts that are already in the game and more of them that we've got planned, you'll notice a lot of the darker tones I've worked into the game.
This is done intentionally so that people who want to just enjoy a fun platformer and not have to read a lot of depressing/negative/darker stuff can do so, they can enjoy the cutscenes (most of which will be a lot lighter than the databanks) and the game should still be fun and enjoyable to play through and engage with at that level. If you want to read about all the shitty stuff the WORM has done though, or just how shitty it is in the future in general, you're free to take that up yourself. This way, nothing negative/dark is forced on the player, but that content IS available there for those who want to go looking for it.
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Now, for a few more quick responses to questions/feedback from the survey;
- "I would like a function to enlarge the map, so I can see where I've been where I haven't. I can't find that last cutscene with Vie."
We have this already planned for the ESC menu; you should see an empty area on it, and that's where the gigantic map for the level will go!
- "The Grunt vs. Spiderbot conundrum isn't very compelling to me due to it being a clearly random choice, I'm given no prior clue either way to encourage me to have Talia decide one way or the other... feels really arbitrary."
This is intentional; not every cutscene will have a very clear cut choice, but if this were the full game, you would have probably had a lot of experience with Grunts who were actually Rebel Soldiers. Combine that with the fact that the Grunt DIDN'T attack you, despite the JumperBot having made it obvious that you'd worked out a deal of some sort with them (and thus if the JumperBot was really something the Grunt was seeking to destroy, he would have tried to kill you too), and you'll be able to have more weight based around your choice.
Speaking of your choices, you'll gain points in a variety of "categories", from "violence" to "naivete" to "loyalty" and so on depending on the choices you make. Whatever you have the most points in out of those categories will be the ending you get at the end of the game.
For this specific cutscene, there is no real "best choice"; it depends on whether you wanted info on Seeber enough to kill an innocent man, or if you wanted to destroy a malicious JumperBot that could have been feeding you false information. There is no "correct answer" for a good deal of the cutscenes in the game, actually, as your "good choice" early on might result in a "bad result" later on.
That said, your choices aren't arbitrary, as noted above with the endings, and you won't just get some ending at random; your choices will add up over the span of the game to get you an ending that is pretty relevant to your overall behavior/choices.
- "I felt that the dialogue from the jumpbot after refusing to help him was too crass, like he broke character."
This is another way you can tell that the JumperBot is up to no good; he DID break character, in this case, the "character" that he had been putting on for you as an act, acting weak and cordial to you in an attempt to get what he wanted from you. This won't be the last time a character does this, so watch out for it.
- "Levels feel pretty flat in terms of lighting and shading, effects don't seem to give off light, or even glow, and there really doesn't feel like a lot of shadows."
This is something we've had plans to fix for a long time with the dynamic lighting engine; we'll be adding that sometime during the Electric Level.
- "Also, I don't know but both the protagonists sound kind of bratty with all the swearing. Like teenagers trying to look adult."
Believe it or not, they only swear around 10 times within the demo out of around 150 lines of dialogue. That said, "teenagers trying to look adult" IS exactly what I'm going for here; Talia and Faye are from the year 1000, brought into the year 3000 and completely unable to process a good deal of what's going on due to it just being so far over their heads.
When we get into situations that we feel are out of our control, we cope with it in different ways; a common way for that is for people to curse as as show of dominance/boasting, to not make it obvious that they're afraid. Since Talia and Faye don't want to show this side of themselves to one another, as well as simply hating one another, they curse like that when talking to each other.
(You'll notice that Talia hardly, if at all, curses when in any of the other cutscenes in the game.)
A few people commented on this though, so I will try to tone down the cursing a bit between them, but it's still going to stay for the above reasons.
- "Please, PLEASE read this! I highly suggest that you don't make the same mistake as Star Wars did and make the game totally based off fan ideas and suggestions."
Not to worry; while we heavily value feedback, and it HAS changed the game in small ways quite a few times, the overall vision of the game/gameplay/storyline isn't something we're going to have get steamrolled by backer requests. Notably though, I'd probably say less than 1 out of every 100 comments we get about suggestions for the game are outright "ridiculous" ones; the majority are either things we already planned to implement or are actually pretty neat ideas that we do end up implementing without negatively affecting the game.
- "Possibility of a check list of rooms from the minimap like the name of the room and its picture in the pause menu"
Speaking of suggestions we already had planned, you'll notice on the ESC menu that there is a section on the far left already setup for this; you'll be able to replay any databanks/cutscenes you've already seen, which will be organized by the map you found them on as well as the level.
Any cutscenes/databanks you've missed will be greyed out, but they will have location information on them so you'll know what map they're on; as far as how to trigger them though or where they're at on the map, that's up to you to find out!
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PATREON PAGE UPDATE
As a small quality of life update, Triangulate's done icons for the right side of the main Patreon page for the Reward Tiers, and I've streamlined the reward info as well for them so it's not as much to read.
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PUBLIC FIRE DEMO UPGRADE
Later this month/early in October, we're planning to release an upgrade to the demo at Newgrounds for the Fire Level!
This upgrade will contain;
- Redone cutscene dialogue
- Intro cinematic
- New GUI (the GUI we have now)
- The first Game Over CG scene for the Fire Boss
- all new audio by SilkyMilk for Talia
- Parallax scrolling backgrounds
If you're wondering why we're not implementing things like the cinematic and parallax in the current demo, it's because Triangulate got the art done for those long ago for the Fire Level, but we haven't had time to implement it due to rushing to get the cutscene editor out, etc.
All of the new content will of course be in the final game too, so this just gets us closer to the finished game!
This will also serve as a public testbed for all of the above concepts, so when the upgraded demo is out, we'll be sure to let you all know!
(Note that Patreon demos take priority over this of course, so we'll be focusing on making sure the core Electric Level demo is ready before focusing on the Fire Level upgrade.)
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The next demo, v023, will be out September 30th, and will have a number of improvements and additions 
(As an extra note too, if you wanted to check out the other two games of mine (especially if you're a yuri or a futa fan, respectively, since we're not doing either of those in this game), they're at
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and
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.)
