New character: Farina (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

I have started working on adding Farina into the game. Previously named "Sophie", she is a Fairy maid who serves under the Duke, Maya's uncle. Farina is Maya's personal attendant since her childhood. Both girls developed a strong bond and have a great friendship, overshadowing the relationship of a simple master and servant.

Farina is a mature fairy who takes great pride in her work, and thus has a much more calm, poised and composed personality when compared to Maya's naive brashness, which is exactly why the duke assigned her to not only to serve as Maya's handmaid, but also to help keep an eye on and help Maya get out of sticky situations, as she often tends to find herself in.

In the preview above you can see that Farina is a bit different than the island faries in that she is a bit bigger, in more ways than one. She can be seen wearing only her undergarments instead of her proper maid outfit, but trust me, there will be a legitimate in-game reason why she won't be wearing a maid dress. Deep lore or something like that, he he he.

The funny thing is that you could "see" her, or at least the ink blotch representing her, since the very first version 0.1 of the game, in the penultimate panel of the story introduction. She volunteers to accompany Maya on her first adventure due to worrying (with good reason) that Maya's over-confidence could end up in disaster.

My original design plan for Farina, all those years back, was actually kinda crazy: she would fly alongside Maya, as a full time customizable companion, through the whole game! She would fight on her own, shooting projectiles at enemies and casting buff spells on Maya, as well as having conversations and pointg out interesting stuff across the stages.

For the struggle mechanic, instead of mashing up buttons, players would lose control of Maya but would auto-switch to Farina, and then she would have to shoot at specific spots on the enemies in order to release Maya from whatever ero grab or trap that she would be stuck in.

The crazy part is that, being together with Maya during the island's exploration, I would have to feature Farina in a lot of the ero animations as well, because Farina is not even close to being as strong as Maya, so whenever Maya fainted, Farina would just end up being captured as well. The ero scenes, or even bad endings would have to accommodate Farina as well, perhaps even with some interesting interactions between the two girls.

Suffice to say that I've long since scrapped that idea of a companion gameplay mechanic, because the game took on a different direction, and even if I still wanted to implement it, it would hamper my current goal to finish the game early next year. That said tough, I still like the concept and hopefully I'll be able to implement something like that in a future project.

So what will be her actual role in the game? Basically, she will become an NPC inside the castle main hall (hub area, where Haruna also resides), more specifically in the library, and from there she will act as a guide and general support to Maya during the adventure.

Her main gameplay purposes will be:
1) Guiding players towards areas of interest that they haven't explored yet, bosses they haven't defeated, important key items not yet collected, etc. Essentially an in-game guide or walkthrough.
2) Restoring Maya's armor in a legitimate way, with also perhaps a mechanic where Maya can take her clothes off deliberately, potentially tying in with the future Lust mechanic.
3) Lore exposition and plot advancement. Farina will be in the library researching the island's story, doing exposition dumps and looking for a way to get off the island.

Since I'm also working on Farina's cutscene introduction at the start of the game, I took the opportunity to slightly rework that initial beach area, specifically relating to the first tutorial steps that players will take learning the game's controls.

As you can see on the 3rd preview image, I've added some "thought bubbles" that activate on approach to display Maya's inner monologue, where she explains basic movement and the like, and updated and changed the layout slightly. Nothing too drastic yet, but its the start of a refactor I want to do for the stage's layout across the whole game.

Best Regards,
Mega