- Vanlen has a ton of new dialogue and some new quest content almost completed!
- Work is underway on combat animations! We're not sure 100% how we want it to look yet, but we're slowly working through figuring it out. We want it to definitely feel nice, and be simple enough that it doesn't take tons of effort to do, so that we can have variety.
- Ron has been doing fantastic work on the back end, including making a brand new transparent objects system, so you can see when you go behind trees and other objects.
Coding is typically quite a bit of work, and Ron/Hooch are unsung heroes in making things function. The project had a TON of work that had to be refactored, and when Gizmo had to leave due to personal reasons, a lot of what he did ultimately had to be looked through and some stuff needed to be fixed.
One of the biggest issues that we ran into is asynchronous coding, which is fantastic for some purposes but created challenges with timing, such as fading in/fading out of black screens. So if you noticed when playing a flash of black, fading to dialogue or out, that is something Ron/Hooch are trying to fix. This can cause lots of problems such as the near-permanent black screen, as things break.
We have tried over time to improve the process of how we add new things in, but the process of adding scenes into the game has been relatively slow due to the difficulty of working with the animation controller. Something that we are looking to streamlining.
So a ton of work goes into the back end of the project in coding, that is often never really appreciated.
In the meantime we are workshopping on how we want the combat UI to look, which we are taking influences from some other RPGs.
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- I've decided, in writing, to add lore books that you will be able to find in the village that were captured from the Sultari Empire. Just general stuff that you can read and learn from. I've also been writing more general lore for the game, including Kay's new combat record. Not sure where I want to put that in the game, probably when we revisit the Federation ship at a much later date.
- Kuja continues to create fantastic looking Visual Novel style character dialogue art. Nesi and Eri are now completed!
We are also continuing to redline and work on how we want combat animations to work, our animators are going to create a very simple rig for it. The main goal we have is to create EXTREMELY simple but good feeling/looking animations/setups for combat, this is so that we can attempt to have as much variety in combat weapons/enemies as possible. (Which means some more possible fun time scenes at a later date for those enemies).
Animation has rigged Cenvir in spine,
and he's just needing his quest and dialogue finished/implemented. His in-game animations will need to be done as well soon.
Ron is working on implementing the new Vanlen quest changes, and Cenvir's quest as well. Ultimately a complex process that needs to be detailed out heavily, which has been done. Another thing that will need to be done soon is the overworld travel system. This is how you'd move around and navigate the world. We plan for the tutorial of this and the basic system to be unlocked in dialogue with Keakrix about the crashed ship, letting you travel to/from it.
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- Animation has finished idles for Razorclaw guards, making them feel far more lively! Work has begun on Cenvir's in-game sex scenes!
- Kuja has finished Meiri's dialogue artwork! I personally think she looks fantastic now!
- Coding continues to work hard on various of the systems we intend to see in the next couple updates as mentioned prior. A number of things need to be completed still, but things are looking good. The Nesi foursome has been implemented into the game.
- Compound will be going through the Razorclaw village in Unity and trying to make things look/flow better, so that overall the village is a more pleasant experience to navigate and look at. We want to go through the build and improve what we can as we add upon it.
For the time being, I'd like to talk to people a bit about the project and how development has gone, and give people an idea (at least from my perspective, as Vlad) as to how this game has been developed. From the time of the split where we had to restart the project from effectively scratch, the project has been an immense challenge. A lot of it has been us learning how to actually make a game, we have learned so much since we started, and learned how many mistakes we made early on.
Real life has been the bigger challenge for most of us, as the years of Covid provided an absolute nightmare for a lot of us, which was a struggle to work through. Ultimately we want combat to be the glue to pull the game together. We absolutely understand how people want porn, want gameplay, and juggling this is difficult, but we do have a plan for how to do it. The prime idea behind this is having 'defeat' scenes, and random events that occur during the overworld travel (Similar to Pathfinder WotR) which can create sex scenes. I have and will remain fully transparent, I will answer any questions anyone has about how we have developed the game - how we develop the game, why we do what we do, and what we are intending to do/why. Simply @ me with your questions.
I cannot stress how much I value your support, no matter how tough it gets, no matter how soul crushing things become, I continue to put what I have left of me into the project as a labor of love. Thank you so very much for all that you do for us, I absolutely understand how long Lok:R has been developed, and how long you have all waited for the game.
For the current state of the game, we are aware of the issues with the build, steps are being taken to fix them.
One of the ideas we have to speed up development is to have 'placeholder' content in the form of still sexual images with dialogue. The idea behind this is to make it so we can progress further in the game itself, and fill it in later. Much like an 'outline'. This way you don't have to wait so long for us to flesh out a specific quest, or specific anything, you'll be able to play the actual story. Is this an idea you support? Would you prefer we flesh out something as we did with the tavern?
We also are considering making just really simple quests that can result in fairly basic sex scenes, which will help add content and fun sex stuff. Is this something people may be interested in? Something even as simple as:
Meiri: "I need a fire starting stone, the guard Kalvir outside of the storage tent should have one, please get it for me."
Guard: "I'll give it to you if you suck my dick."
Kay 1: "Umm... fine"
Kay 2: "Fuck off, I'll tell Meiri."
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