Others Completed Future Fragments [v1.0.6] [HentaiWriter]

[Merlin7]

Not with that attitude you won't!

I'm 99% sure you're joking, but just in case you're not or some folks here are unaware - try googling "multitasking neuroscience" and reading some of the studies and articles that pop up. It's pretty fascinating stuff! All about how the myth of multitasking leads people to bounce between tasks and how that really hurts both work productivity (quantity) and work efficiency (quality). It also kills at least a few thousand people a year in the US. Or to put it more accurately, they die due to hurtling through space in metal deathtraps while they do stuff other than drive. ~20% of the time they even take innocent bystanders down with them!

Waiting to see the massive essay he'll send your way instead of working on the game.

He doesn't have much of a choice here, it's a business requirement due to the 24/7 internet news cycle. See:

"[...]critique is fine, always gonna welcome that, it's my job to respond to stuff like the post I responded to and clarify things, because if I don't, it can spiral out of control pretty quickly and affect both the reputation for future games as well as Future Fragments[...]"

Emphasis is mine, added. In a happier world the FF team would have dedicated social media/PR/marketing/advertising member(s) who took all this off HentaiWriter, but we're not in that world rn. Afaik the best/only step he can take to minimize multitasking is separating his workday into segments. Hopefully being the #1 bestselling game on Steam for Fall 2022 will allow for growth and specialization of the team for next time!

 

[HentaiWriter]

Afaik the best/only step he can take to minimize multitasking is separating his workday into segments. Hopefully being the #1 bestselling game on Steam for Fall 2022 will allow for growth and specialization of the team for next time!

To be fair, even if we had a zillion dollars, I wouldn't hire anyone on to do PR or marketing or networking besides me.
That's not because I think I'm the best in the world at it; far from it, as evidenced by my many screwups as I've learned uh, not to screw up as much.

But no one in the world is as good at marketing our games as I am, and I think that's the same for all developers on their own games.

No one knows a game anywhere close to as well as the people who've grinded out all the work on it for years and years, and Frouge and Triangulate aren't too into doing the marketing/PR thing, so it's pretty much entirely my avenue to do things on.

But yeah, uh, what are segments? What's a workday? That'd imply I do anything but work nowadays, hahaha...

 

[FutureHUD]

Happy to see you took it so well HentaiWriter, admittedly i may have come off a little harsh, but i just have had a lot of grievances regarding the games development is all. Your comment tho did give me some peace of mind regarding the games and the teams quality going forward.

 

[HentaiWriter]

Happy to see you took it so well HentaiWriter, admittedly i may have come off a little harsh, but i just have had a lot of grievances regarding the games development is all. Your comment tho did give me some peace of mind regarding the games and the teams quality going forward.

Glad to hear it; hopefully the full game eases some of your worries, and that the quality of it makes up for the delays some also.



Weekly Progress Report #55 for Future Fragments

DISCORD -

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STEAM -

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TWITTER -

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FREE DEMO -

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MORE PLACES -

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All links are for those 18+ of age and older only.

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I've decided to start posting the blurbs I post on Discord when I post updates over there, too; if you want to see past blurbs, you can find them at the Discord link up above, and then go to the #progress-reports channel.

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Whoops, I uh, completely lost track of time and thought the weekly update was today, not yesterday.

Making good progress on the cutscenes though, although admittedly a good amount of them are quicker ones to knock out.

But some of them were massive brain drains to do (like the entire Shadow Vie ones), because those setup the entire "core" of your relationship with her, as well as her backstory and objective of her reason to team up with you, plus a lot of other stuff that ties into many, many other things.

So I had to go back and re-write parts of those ones a few times to fit in with existing cutscenes/events.

 

[sirherpofderpshire]

HentaiWriter
From the sounds of it, you're going to continue making games after this. Do you have any ideas yet? More of the same? Expansions? Top secret?

 

[HentaiWriter]

Also, because I just wrote this in the Discord, if anyone's curious what steps I go through to do a cutscene for an NPC.

Hopefully this will give a better idea of what I meant when I said the prep work is the majority of work behind making a cutscene. Might also just be interesting for anyone interested in reading about it.

---------------------

First, as almost all the cutscene characters in the game (with a few exceptions) were Patreon backers, a long long time ago, they emailed me saying what they wanted in the game for their NPC character.

Generally, this would just be a single line or so, like for the character I'm about to show you, this was what was in the email as the request;

"Something like a retired hero/knight or something. Someone older and grizzled but still willing to lend a hand where it counts. A big beefed up old guy with sprinkles of good advice."

They also got to name the character, which in this case, was Davin Norose.

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Second, I would figure out where to place the character, where those attributes made the most sense; since they were a character that would provide advice, it'd probably make sense for them to be in the first level of the game, where players would most want that advice, instead of later on when things are mostly hands off.

So he ended up in the Fire Level.

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Third, with that taken care of, I'd start writing down a summary of his traits, expanding on what the backer wanted while tying them into the overarching lore/worldbuilding of the game, as well as tying them into other characters and the player themselves.



This picture shows the cutscene summary per what the backer wanted, with a few extra notes of my own.

The main "notes" section covers all the different ways I'd like to have him interact with other characters and the player themselves.

Then, finally, the "DB Connect" and "Scene Connect" list any Databank or Cutscene connections he's got; in this case, he's got interactions with cutscenes #9 and #19 in the same level (Fire), so if you talk to those characters first before talking to Davin, you'll end up getting different results from Davin's cutscene, versus talking to him first and THEN the other two, which will change THEIR cutscenes.

Killing Davin (or not) or the other two characters, and other actions you can do too, would change things as well.

The connection to #78 is for a later level, so that's one-way; talking to Davin first will make Teshy react differently when you talk to him in the third level, the Electric level.

----------------------

Fourth, once that "draft" version up above is done, I'd refine the events listed and give the character a tiny bit more info.



(The red bar here under the "Done?" column means it's a sex scene for my own notes, but it's done.)

You can see the character now has an actual age range, more sectioned off/well defined notes for his traits, and a few things have been removed or shifted around; this is effectively sort of a "second draft" of the character.

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Fifth, I take that above information and I write up instructions to myself for what each "Tab" will have for the cutscene.

A Tab in our game is a "variant" of the cutscene; for example, Tab 0 is always the "base" cutscene, but if you've done something else somewhere in the level or the game as a whole, the character might respond to you differently partway through Tab 0, so you'll shift to Tab 1 partway through Tab 0.

Here's the writeup I did for Davin Norose; it's a good chunk of text.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TAB 0-7:

• Davin is a retired WORM hero, older, grizzled, muscular, and willing to lend a hand where it counts; he introduces himself mentioning all of these at the start of the scene, as well as some of his accomplishments.
• Offers to tell you WORM secrets because he enjoys presenting a challenge to others as to what is and isn't truth.
• Considers himself a hero, despite being with the WORM; has overwhelming confidence in his abilities, takes shit from no one.
• If no other tabs here would activate, then he asks you if you want to hear some WORM secrets; if yes, he'll give you one of 7 secrets based on whatever your highest Ideal is.
• The conversation quickly ends after that, as he says he's got to handle a dispute between two coworkers; if your highest Ideal was hatred or violence ones, Talia will assume he's going to kick some ass, but he looks disappointed and explains he'd always try to deal with conflicts with compromise first, violence second. Any other values, she'll just be like "ok, sure". If optimism or pacifism is the highest, then she tells him she trusts he's a great negotiator, to which he'll laugh and flex, noting that if negotiation doesn't work, force always will.

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TAB 8:

• If you've seen Cviha in advance, cutscene instantly jumps to this tab once Davin introduces himself.
• He will again note that he doesn't mind telling Cviha WORM secrets because no one's gonna challenge the "great Davin", and he thinks it just ups the challenge/game for both of them for Cviha to figure out which of his statements are truth or not, a fun game they play with each other.
• He then segues into asking if you'd like to hear a secret or two yourself; segue back into the choices for tabs 0-7, etc.

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TAB 9:

• Davin introduces himself here still.
• If you've talked to Cain before talking to Davin, you can tell him as such; this will result in Davin just laughing about it and saying he's got no need to chase him down.
• This overrides Tabs 8 and 0-7.
• He then tells you a story about how he singlehandedly compressed Cain the Distained's room/pod/etc. into the size of a ball with his bare hands after he heard all the shit he'd been up to; it's implied this is an exaggeration, though. He asks you if you think he's serious or not: if you say yes, you get points in optimism, if you say no, you get points in pessimism.
• Afterwards, he leaves, saying he's changed his mind while talking to you and that it might be fun to chase him around a little again.

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TAB 10-11:

• If you killed Cain beforehand and AFTER talking to Cain, he'll say he knows because of his connections, introduces himself much quicker.
• Overrides all other tabs below it.
• He will very quickly cut to a question; he'll ask you if you enjoyed it or not.
• If you pick you did, violence goes up a tiny amount, but justice goes down.
• He says he can't blame you, but he doesn't like hanging out around bloodthirsty people.
• If you pick you didn't, violence and hatred goes down, justice goes up some.
• He's impressed at your sense of self, and says he's leaving because he wants to work on himself some back at home; your personal growth has inspired him.
• He then clarifies he's talking about his muscles, not his spirit; he's already mastered that, but muscles are never complete.

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TAB 12:

• If you killed Cviha beforehand WITHOUT talking to him, he'll berate you for just killing people haphazardly.
• Overrides all other tabs below it.
• He then walks off, disappointed that his lunch partner won't be around anymore.

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TAB 13:

• If you killed Cviha AFTER talking to Cviha, but before talking to Davin, Davin will scold you hard for killing an innocent man who'd already been through so much.
• Overrides all other tabs below it.
• Talia tries to claim he'll respawn anyways, so what's the big deal?
• He'll talk coldly and note that he KNOWS what Talia is capable of, and what her weaponry does.
• She HAD to have known he won't respawn.
• He then walks off, disgusted with her.

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TAB 14-15

• If Talia's sexuality value is fairly high and none of the other tabs between 7 and here trigger, then instead of the questions, Davin will point out that Talia's clearly been having a lot of sex.
• At this point, the player will get a choice to come onto Davin, and he's got no complaints.
• If they reject him, they segue into the 0-7 Tab variant questions.
• This is somewhat out of character for Talia, but to trigger this, the player would have had to intentionally have a good amount of sex more than would normally have likely happened on the first level.
• Would be a fairly "equal" scene power-wise, since Talia initiated it and he's a strong willed person himself.
• Afterwards, Talia would be kind of shocked that she took initiative like that.
• He leaves afterwards, saying he's gonna go take a nap at home after that one.

----------------------

Finally, using that info, I'll write the actual full script for the character.
I might still have to do some research for scientific terms/technology or other related things, but that's not too much extra time usually.

There's also a 17th variant here that I didn't show per massive spoilers with it, so I'll leave it up to the players to find that one.

Regarding the number of variants here, that isn't out of the norm; a good chunk of the game's 250+ cutscenes have 10+ variants, and almost all of them have at least 3-5 extra variants.

However, in a given playthrough, a player will only see one or two of these variants; that's intended to increase replayability and to have a different experience each time you play the game, which we've designed to be dense horizontally (lots of different variants of events), but not that dense vertically (so on average, people can play through it in 4-8 hours depending on play style, multiple times, without getting burnt out)

Hopefully though, all the above should give a better idea of how I do the writing for the game and what you can expect with the full game.

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HentaiWriter
From the sounds of it, you're going to continue making games after this. Do you have any ideas yet? More of the same? Expansions? Top secret?

Yep; we've got a lot of game ideas and game design documents in various states of completion, but all the games I work on tie into the same universe and have overarching plot links, so the events of Future Fragments will directly impact future games, even though they'll be set potentially decades, or centuries, or millenia in the future.

You can read some about a game we'll be finishing off after Future Fragments while we flesh out ideas for a bigger game here;

https://f95zone.to/threads/future-fragments-v0-27ex-march-2022-demo-hentaiwriter.1550/post-6884057

 

[Merlin7]

But no one in the world is as good at marketing our games as I am, and I think that's the same for all developers on their own games.
No one knows a game anywhere close to as well as the people who've grinded out all the work on it for years and years, and Frouge and Triangulate aren't too into doing the marketing/PR thing, so it's pretty much entirely my avenue to do things on.

I see where you're coming from on that, makes a lot of sense especially considering PR fiascos like what happened with Cyberpunk - prominently marketed & advertised gameplay features being cut not only from the final game but apparently from patches afterwards as well. The natural disconnect between specialists and divided roles can be a big negative. That said, have you thought about what you'd change for next time as far as the team goes? I know you've said the composition may change, not necessarily a permanent Three (now 4 with the added programmer) Musketeers thing.

But yeah, uh, what are segments? What's a workday? That'd imply I do anything but work nowadays, hahaha...

Even if you're working every waking moment, it might help to structure it a bit - cutscenes in the morning, clear your mind with lunch and social medias midday, back to cutscenes in the afternoon, touch base with the team in the evening & dinner. Just a random example, I've struggled with work-life balance and crunch myself so I know it's FAR, FAR, easier to say than do. Especially since you hold a leadership role and dev team and PR and human with basic needs to remain alive - all four go nuts at crunchtime much less all four in one person.

Hopefully though, all the above should give a better idea of how I do the writing for the game and what you can expect with the full game.

It did, very cool, thanks! Especially exciting since I'm one of the lucky patrons getting the cutscene character treatment - such a great backer reward idea.

https://f95zone.to/threads/future-fragments-v0-27ex-march-2022-demo-hentaiwriter.1550/post-6884057

What's Triangulate up to btw? Working on Eroding Ego? (tyvm for that link btw, I was out of touch with your other projects and Patreon as a whole for a few tough years) If it's time/money/planning feasible, perhaps simp grunt could make a comeback so there's art to post, to please the visually-based masses. Or non-canon line drawings like the workout clothes one or the ladies all stuck in holes, those were both really cool! Or let him go wild with concept ideas for the future maybe? ...tho I suppose since the art for FF is done having him get started on EE is a better plan business wise.

P.S. I hope you have games for every letter of the alphabet someday! Or use them to spell something.
P.P.S. Congrats on the enormous progress! 277 to 194 in a smidge more than a week is spectacular.

 

[HentaiWriter]

That said, have you thought about what you'd change for next time as far as the team goes? I know you've said the composition may change, not necessarily a permanent Three (now 4 with the added programmer) Musketeers thing.

It depends on the game, really; the most I would probably ever get on the team though for 2D games would be another artist or two, just because you can really cleanly "separate" tasks there (ex. background artist + GUI artist + sprite artist), while with programming and writing, things become hard to separate/not step on each other's shoes.

Even if you're working every waking moment, it might help to structure it a bit - cutscenes in the morning, clear your mind with lunch and social medias midday, back to cutscenes in the afternoon, touch base with the team in the evening & dinner.

To be clear, I was more implying that I didn't know what segments were because if everything is work, then nothing is separate, haha. But yeah, I do segment stuff like that for the most part, although there's some days where my brain just isn't coming up with good writing so I devote the entire day to ripping voicework or something like that where it's more straightforward, vs. referencing 20 documents to write a scene etc.

It did, very cool, thanks! Especially exciting since I'm one of the lucky patrons getting the cutscene character treatment - such a great backer reward idea.

I looked up your character, and yeah, he's actually one of the very next ones I'm going to write.
Originally, all the backer characters were meant to be databanks, but we got so many that I picked the ones that would work best with cutscenes and had them be cutscene characters instead.

Your character in particular also, btw, got a unique sprite, as well as a unique sex scene/animation, so there's that too the character just fit for having both of those, so we set that up for them a long while back.

I can post it here if you want, unless you don't want it spoiled, that is.

What's Triangulate up to btw? Working on Eroding Ego?

So the team for Eroding Ego is actually different; the art for it was done by a different artist, and we're going to be looking for an artist to do the sprites/sex scenes once we start up work on it again.

But most of the content for it is done in terms of music and art and design, as well as the storyline (just have to write the actual script of course). We haven't worked on it since about 2019, though.

P.S. I hope you have games for every letter of the alphabet someday! Or use them to spell something.

I can say right now that the alliterative titles aren't meant to spell anything, it's more just kind of a thing where I like alliterative titles.
But I can say that the title for each game does have two traits;

1) It has the core mechanics/macguffins/objectives in the title, the thing players are introduced to very quickly at the start of the game
2) It also has the twist/final ending of the game hidden in the title as well

So each game title is meant to have the beginning and end of the game both effectively in there.

And yeah, I hope we have that many in the future too

P.P.S. Congrats on the enormous progress! 277 to 194 in a smidge more than a week is spectacular.

Thanks a lot! But to be fair, a good amount of those were quick ones; future weeks likely won't have as much progress, but there should still be solid progress.

 

[Merlin7]

I can post it here if you want, unless you don't want it spoiled, that is.

Ahhh the excitement and temptation are so strong!! Especially because I might not uncover all dialogue variations on my own (assuming I have them). But... I'll let the suspense build and opt for no spoilers. Thank you for offering though! And for being so good to me and presumably to mini-2D-me! ...watch his sex scene turn out to also be his murder for extra violent points or something bahahaha (btw not suggesting or encouraging that unless it's already your plan O_O so scary)
Edit: just realized for all of us being turned into cutscene pixel bros... on a violent playthrough Talia will kill us. What a funny/odd feeling/head-twisting concept. Never fully hit me before - it's not all joy & pleasure in paradise!

[...]the title for each game does have two traits;

1) It has the core mechanics/macguffins/objectives in the title, the thing players are introduced to very quickly at the start of the game
2) It also has the twist/final ending of the game hidden in the title as well

So each game title is meant to have the beginning and end of the game both effectively in there.

This is SO awesome, and I agree the alliteration's cool. Helps distinguish your games too!

Thanks a lot! But to be fair, a good amount of those were quick ones; future weeks likely won't have as much progress, but there should still be solid progress.

Even so! I think the naysayers have to acknowledge that things are on track for release with a turnover rate like that. There's hope and light at the end of this multi-year h-game love tunnel!

 

[HentaiWriter]

Ahhh the excitement and temptation are so strong!! Especially because I might not uncover all dialogue variations on my own (assuming I have them). But... I'll let the suspense build and opt for no spoilers. Thank you for offering though! And for being so good to me and presumably to mini-2D-me! ...watch his sex scene turn out to also be his murder for extra violent points or something bahahaha (btw not suggesting or encouraging that unless it's already your plan O_O so scary)

Oh, there's no sex scenes where people get killed in the game haha, but I will also say that your scene connects to another character's scene to enable a secret variation of it, AND that you're one of I think about 30 NPCs that got "Book" scenes.

There's an artifact/book in the game that ties into the plot in a significant way, but as part of the game's plot/mechanics, every time you start the game, you get a random "book value" of between 1 to 100. This book value ties into multiple aspects of cutscenes and a specific powerup too.

"Book" scenes in the game are ones where you need;
1) Your "Book value" to be within a specific range (or exact number)
and
2) A set of extremely out of the box, special requirements, usually based on your gameplay choices

So very, very few people will run into these, and I look forward to the first time someone runs into any of these type of scenes, and I hope they post them online when they discover them

As sort of a reward for "book scenes", they tend to all be fairly unorthodox/out of the box themselves, so I hope people enjoy them.

Edit: just realized for all of us being turned into cutscene pixel bros... on a violent playthrough Talia will kill us. What a funny/odd feeling/head-twisting concept. Never fully hit me before - it's not all joy & pleasure in paradise!

Just wait until you see how the backers who got their name in the background got tied into the plot

This is SO awesome, and I agree the alliteration's cool. Helps distinguish your games too!

That's my hope yeah, but I also just like having fun with trying to come up with titles with those limitations

Even so! I think the naysayers have to acknowledge that things are on track for release with a turnover rate like that. There's hope and light at the end of this multi-year h-game love tunnel!

Definitely; I wish we could get it even more polished/complete before release, but hopefully it won't be too bad with the bits here and there missing, we'll clean them up as fast as we can though.

 

[HardcoreCuddler]

View attachment 1986588

Aug6: 277 cutscenes left
Now: 190 cutscenes left
Kudos.

Oh, there's no sex scenes where people get killed in the game haha

THANK FUCKING GOD

 

[HentaiWriter]

Holy shit, you're actually above the pace I mentioned a while back for all cutscenes to be done by september 22. That's actually insane, congrats. I'm afraid of getting hyped for this release but damn if that's not insanely impressive.

I mean, in full transparency, it's still definitely gonna take until right up to the last minute to get stuff in and done, but it's looking good still and thanks!

THANK FUCKING GOD

For the record, there's no cutscenes or events where she;

- is physically injured in any way
- gets her bones broken or body bruised or etc.
- is degraded verbally (calling her a bitch, or cunt, or whore, or slut, etc.)
- vomits, shits, pisses (or has any of those done to her)
- bleeds

You get the idea.

The mana barrier she's got is a buffer that protects her from damage, similar to the concept of how in dragon ball z or other series someone can get hit with a bomb or laser or sword and nothing happens because their "ki" or "magic power" or whatever else is protecting them and taking the damage for them.

So you can think of her life bar as more like her "mana shield bar".

When it hits 0, the reason her suit explodes is because the mana shield, when drained, does a final "push" of explosive energy all around her, in a last ditch attempt to knock off anything damaging her (think like if your clothes or skin was on fire, or drenched with some toxin).

Unfortunately, the shock from having the remaining bit of mana she's got left bursting out of her like that, so that's why she gets knocked to the ground and is without much strength left.

The reason her gloves are left intact is because a mage's most valuable body part is their hands; they have to be protected at all costs, because without hands to heal any injuries they COULD get while defenseless (once their mana trickles back), then the entire system would be pointless.

As for the WORM themselves (and other enemies), they all have different (sex based) incentives as to why they'll never beat her up or stab her or step on her or whatever else, once her mana is drained.

Hope that gives a bit more detail into the type of content in the game

 

[itzbob]

will absoutely every bit of h-content be viewable in gallery or will some of it be annoyingly on the 'side' h-content thats in the background/stumbled upon by playing?

 

[HentaiWriter]

will absoutely every bit of h-content be viewable in gallery or will some of it be annoyingly on the 'side' h-content thats in the background/stumbled upon by playing?

Yep, every animation will be viewable

The caveat though is that you need 5 out of 10 achievements per level to see all the animations for that level...
...except for one.

There's a special extra animation for the first four levels each that is unlocked by getting all TEN achievements for that level, and as an added bonus, it unlocks a cheat code (and something else regarding the plot) too.

 

[iamnuff]

Feels like a big reason for all the delays was just honest Scope-Creep.
I remember years ago seeing a post talking about adding a stupidly huge amount of items into the game that gave pretty mediocre buffs, over on ULMF before F95 was even a thing. (or at least long before I'd ever heard of it)

It was such a bizarre post because I could see how much effort had gone into making this, and how much more effort would be taken to actually complete this enormous task and how much it would delay production on the actual game, and the only response I could give was 'But why though?'
Did anybody actually care about the item sets, given the amount of work it would take to get them into the game? Did they really add anything?

I think they went through at least one revision in scope after being initially implemented, but my overwhelming response to them is 'Do they even do anything that matters though?' because the buffs they gave you seemed easily ignorable.
Plus, the fact that you could only equip three at a time out of the 50 or so that you said that you were adding, and the fact that you had to go find the individual parts of the set you wanted throughout the game, and then if you ever swapped any of them out you'd lose the set bonus.
The whole thing just felt like an enormous waste of time.
A game mechanic that i'd probably just never bother using because it was a huge waste of time.

Voice acting? Cutscenes? Additional endings or H-scenes?
Those are all value-adds.

But the items just felt like make-work.
Something that somebody thought up, thought would be cool and decided to implement with no real regard for how much development resources it would take away from things that actually matter.

There have been a couple of posts like that, but that was the big stand-out one, to me.
Although of course, I have no idea how much time and resources actually went into that subsystem, or even how much of it is still in the current version of the game.

I was a patreon subscriber at one point. I'm pretty sure my username will be in the credits somewhere, but... there's no way i'd have stayed subscribed for all this time. It's been unreasonably long.

Plus there was the inevitable engine-change. Every Patreon H-game seems to go through one or two, and most of the time rebuilding the game after the change is what kills the project.

Now, all that downer-stuff said, i'm still pretty excited for the game. ('again', actually, rather than 'still' The hype died and then came back when I heard that it was actually almost done)

Plus, the fact that this game looks like it will actually eventually be finished is a major mark in the Devs favour.
Most games that went through half the shit that this project went through would have just been marked as abandoned and forgotten about long ago.
This one... for all the development project's faults and stumbles, it's actually approaching the finish line.

The jury is still out on the quality of the final product, of course. We'll have to see.
But we will see.
... Probably.

 

[HentaiWriter]

Feels like a big reason for all the delays was just honest Scope-Creep.

The actual reason for delays was just simply running into the following cycle over and over;

1) Neat thing we've had planned for a long time for the game
2) We put in the writing, programming, art for this thing
3) We play it
4) Realize this gameplay feature or enemy or boss or etc. wasn't as fun as we had thought it'd be on paper
5) Scrap all the parts that suck, rebuild it with new knowledge of how to fix things
6) Repeat until polished and high quality, because the players don't deserve anything less

We can think something is great and such on paper, but until it's actually in the game, there's no way to really know.
With the experience we've gotten from this game though, we've got a much better idea of what will and won't be fun for future games.

But we just refused to put out something that was mediocre, not fun, and a cash grab. We would have rather went broke and refunded everyone in full than put out something that we weren't proud of and that we didn't feel was the best we could have done at the time.

-----------

Regarding the scope creep thing; we planned for this amount of content from the getgo.

In fact, the game was originally meant to be much larger than this; here's a short list of only a few of the things we've taken out over the course of development.

- Powerups having "set boosts" (equipping specific sets of powerups = more abilities)
- Every level having a secret miniboss
- Multiple ways to defeat main bosses
- Being able to play through the entire game with a second set of cutscenes in a sort of "genocide mode" with new endings for it
- Playing through the whole game as Faye
- More enemies per level
- Enemies having elemental immunity to your abilities
- An entire item based system of using potions and other items to buff your character
- Much much more content for the True Final Boss
- Multiple full vocal songs for bosses
- Much larger areas
- Portraits for all NPCs and enemies during cutscenes
- A full range of facial expressions for Talia's GUI in the upper left
- Visual modifiers to make the game look CRT style or other styles
- The level editor allowing you to inject your own art/audio (it doesn't allow this now)

And so on.

Here's even a screencap from a document from January 2015, the same month we started development; I'd post the whole document here, but it contains the game's ending (which hasn't really changed too much over the years).



And here's a picture of that document's date;



You can notice quite a few things that are extra in this from the actual game;

- 5 enemies per area instead of our 4 in the full game
- Earth elemental attacks (full game has nothing for this)
- Elemental abilities causing actual status effects to enemies
- Not only databanks, but also archives and books to read through
- Enemies being immune to elemental damage (no idea how this would have worked)
- Healing was completely different; you could only heal with healing potions in a limited supply
- Regular shots would have been elementally charged, not just charge shots
- Fantasy creatures in Ice became aliens

The rest of the stuff on the document is identical to what we have now, from level order and level content, to the purpose of NPCs and sex animations, even how Mage A (Talia) and Mage B (Faye) behave and their attack specialities, etc; even the idea of "respawning" from checkpoints was there too.

I remember years ago seeing a post talking about adding a stupidly huge amount of items into the game that gave pretty mediocre buffs, over on ULMF before F95 was even a thing. (or at least long before I'd ever heard of it)

It was such a bizarre post because I could see how much effort had gone into making this, and how much more effort would be taken to actually complete this enormous task and how much it would delay production on the actual game, and the only response I could give was 'But why though?'
Did anybody actually care about the item sets, given the amount of work it would take to get them into the game? Did they really add anything?

I know this is talking about the whole "powerup sets" thing which we abandoned, but just for the record, regarding powerups themselves, people have spent a good while theorycrafting them.
There's an entire section of our discord (#speedrunning) just dedicated to speedrunning and trying out stuff with powerups to try and break levels.

Here's an example of things people have been able to do with just one of the powerups;


---

And people speedrun levels in the game, too;

I think they went through at least one revision in scope after being initially implemented, but my overwhelming response to them is 'Do they even do anything that matters though?' because the buffs they gave you seemed easily ignorable.

The powerups have been revised to be a lot more versatile and do a good degree of things now.

Some of them include things like;

- Creating shockwaves when you land from jumps
- Being able to hover in the air by firing downwards
- Shooting shots that grip the walls/floor and roll along them
- Being able to masturbate to regain health at a cost of max health
- Stunning enemies temporarily by jumping on them
- Charge shots doing more damage based on your timing
- Spread fire shots with more shots per damage you've taken
- Shots instantly traveling
- Increasing your movement speed based on the damage you've taken
- Buffs that are based on your personality values throughout the game

Plus, the fact that you could only equip three at a time out of the 50 or so that you said that you were adding, and the fact that you had to go find the individual parts of the set you wanted throughout the game, and then if you ever swapped any of them out you'd lose the set bonus.

Yeah, that's why we removed it. It definitely wasn't a good design.

But the items just felt like make-work.
Something that somebody thought up, thought would be cool and decided to implement with no real regard for how much development resources it would take away from things that actually matter.

To be clear, the powerups took probably 1 month to come up with them, 2-3 months to implement, and about 2 months to bugtest.

The reason we wanted to have them in was to allow for players to theorycraft and come up with broken combos, or ways to deal with certain bosses.

For example, if you equip the Blender (fast charge shots) and Knife (shockwaves when you land from a jump while charged up), you can do quick hops and spam shockwaves up and down the maps, wiping out enemies left and right.

Or if you equip the Wall Clock (exponential movement speed), Men's Sneakers (extra jump/hang time), and Brain Implant (ignore enemy collision but lose minimap and alter visuals) you can speedrun through most maps pretty efficiently.

There's also the Maine Coon Cat (heal from damaging enemies), Clover (more shots at low health), and Rugby Helmet (take less damage per hit the lower your HP is) to effectively never die.

I was a patreon subscriber at one point. I'm pretty sure my username will be in the credits somewhere, but... there's no way i'd have stayed subscribed for all this time. It's been unreasonably long.

It has been, but there's a three point thing of quality of content x density of content x time; one of those things had to give, and we refused to give leeway on the first two.

But we always encourage people on the front page of the Patreon, on Discord, on Twitter, in PMs on Discord, in emails, etc. to only pledge a single time and then back out to get their rewards forever, to ask for refunds if people want them, etc.

The last thing we want is for someone to stay backing us for a super long period of time if they can't afford it or don't want to.

The jury is still out on the quality of the final product, of course. We'll have to see.
But we will see.
... Probably.

I do hope the game lives up to the hype, as well as being something that was worth the wait; I have faith in both, but that's from my perspective, and everyone's opinions are different.

I also hope that my replies here cleared up some of the stuff about the game, and its development process as well.

If I came off a bit irritable in this btw, it's because there's some IRL stuff going on that's made things a massive pain in the ass over the last few days, apartment troubles and all that.

 

[HardcoreCuddler]

I mean, in full transparency, it's still definitely gonna take until right up to the last minute to get stuff in and done, but it's looking good still and thanks!



For the record, there's no cutscenes or events where she;

- is physically injured in any way
- gets her bones broken or body bruised or etc.
- is degraded verbally (calling her a bitch, or cunt, or whore, or slut, etc.)
- vomits, shits, pisses (or has any of those done to her)
- bleeds

You get the idea.

The mana barrier she's got is a buffer that protects her from damage, similar to the concept of how in dragon ball z or other series someone can get hit with a bomb or laser or sword and nothing happens because their "ki" or "magic power" or whatever else is protecting them and taking the damage for them.

So you can think of her life bar as more like her "mana shield bar".

When it hits 0, the reason her suit explodes is because the mana shield, when drained, does a final "push" of explosive energy all around her, in a last ditch attempt to knock off anything damaging her (think like if your clothes or skin was on fire, or drenched with some toxin).

Unfortunately, the shock from having the remaining bit of mana she's got left bursting out of her like that, so that's why she gets knocked to the ground and is without much strength left.

The reason her gloves are left intact is because a mage's most valuable body part is their hands; they have to be protected at all costs, because without hands to heal any injuries they COULD get while defenseless (once their mana trickles back), then the entire system would be pointless.

As for the WORM themselves (and other enemies), they all have different (sex based) incentives as to why they'll never beat her up or stab her or step on her or whatever else, once her mana is drained.

Hope that gives a bit more detail into the type of content in the game

PERFECT
FINALLY A GAME THAT ISN'T MADE BY DEGENERATES I FUCKING HATE SEXUAL VIOLENCE

 

[MortimerScharf]

Well, it's amazing to see you and your team have made such hasty progress on this game. It's been sitting on my wishlist on Steam for quite a while now, so I'll make to buy it day one.

One thing though, I find it absolutely criminal that the only corruption and transformation scene is the one we've all seen by now. I wish more had been included in the final game, but that's alright.

 

[HentaiWriter]

PERFECT
FINALLY A GAME THAT ISN'T MADE BY DEGENERATES I FUCKING HATE SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Just being clear, there is a significant amount of dub-con in the game.
But if you're talking purely "sexual violence" as in literal "physical violence during sex", then there's none of that at all, yeah.
She even outright says she enjoys what's going on in all the CG scenes, but she just wants to escape from them because she's on a time-sensitive mission.

Well, it's amazing to see you and your team have made such hasty progress on this game. It's been sitting on my wishlist on Steam for quite a while now, so I'll make to buy it day one.

One thing though, I find it absolutely criminal that the only corruption and transformation scene is the one we've all seen by now. I wish more had been included in the final game, but that's alright.

So there's that one scene, yeah, but also to be clear there, she's still in her right mind; she's not like brainwashed or hypnotized or anything, even with being transformed.

That said, while it may not be in the way that's typical of it, there is a good chunk of "corruption" scenes throughout the game if you manage to play really, really outside of the box.

They're just not sexual corruption scenes; they're corruption of a pretty different nature where things go off the rails.

Endings-wise, all the True Endings are affected by your sexuality Ideal points (or lack thereof), which in itself is a sort of corruption with how sex plays into a good amount of the endings. You don't see the sexual events in these cases, but you definitely hear/read about them.

Finally, there's the three "bad endings" (like actual endings, not game overs); these differ based on your sexuality points too, as to whether Talia and Faye are just ehh about being gangbanged by the entire Kingdom, or they're massively into it.

 

[j01ntr0l1a]

do i still download the earlier version? or the v49?