Hi all,
As mentioned before, I've received messages from some of you asking if it's possible to have i34 put on hold and switch back to making a game from SO/WW universe. I promissed to put it to a poll and I'll do that in a separate post, but first I want to give you some background on how and why I ended up starting i34. Some of you may know all of this since I've mentioned it before, but for the rest I'm going to summarize it in a single post so you can easily make your choice in the poll.
First of all, I intended to take a break from the SO/WW story and make a sci-fi game which had it's own story. I even wrote the general story and the first episode, but when I started looking for Daz3D assets in the sotres, I couldn't find enough of them that would match and create a consistent experience. It was going to be a game about a stranded ship that went through a wormhole and looking to get back home to Earth, meeting civilizations on other planets and space stations, upgrading their ship, building aliances and fighting enemies. The lore of the game would be that the ancient gods took some of their people when they left Earth and seeded the stars so you'd meet different human cultures (e.g. ancient greeks, egyptians, vikings, etc. but with advanced tech) as well as some alien ones and get different upgrades to your ship that would help you fight the not so friendly civilizations. There would be some form of optional resource management so those of you who enjoy those types of games will have the 'full' experience and those who don't would get the more VN-like experience of the game. Gameplay would be similar to what you see in i34 - episodes with story-driven gameplay followed by sandbox-driven gameplay where you can collect resources, fight enemies and enjoy repeatable events with the inhabitants of the planets that you visit.
But when I finished WW I realized that most of you like the SO/WW story and you'd like to see it continue in a future game, so I twisted one of the endings of WW to fit in that game which I already had mapped out. You, Amelia, Rebecca and Lexi will be the (initial) crew of the ship and you'll try to find your way back to Earth and figure out what Megan had planned when she came to this universe.
Most of you are probably asking "what has changed in the past two months that made you postpone this game for a year while working on i34 and you can start working on it now?" The answer is both "nothing" and "everything". Nothing because the reasons that made me postpone the game are still valid - there aren't perfectly matched environments in the Daz3D store for what I'll try to achieve. But the truth is that I don't know if there will be enough of them by the end of 2021 when I plan to have i34 finished and start working on this one. "Everything" because I realized that both you and me like SO/WW so much that we might be willing to compromize some of the consistency in terms of location appearances in the game in order to start the journey in this new universe sooner. Keep in mind though that this game will take longer than i34 (at least a couple of years).