Public update - February 2017 (Patreon)

Let Me Out!

I've started work on my next short game, Let Me Out, which I promised as one of my funding goals. This game won't take anything like so much time as PAL took me to make, it's a nice, quick project and a change of pace for me. Therefore you can actually expect the first playable versions to start coming out fairly soon! I plan to have this mostly done before I really start work on Pervert Action: Timelapse. (Although obviously I've been doing planning, story and character design for PAT for a while.)

I've thought a lot about how LMI could have been improved, in respect to gameplay, storytelling, visuals and the development process. I think Let Me Out is going to be much better than Let Me In; LMI was an experimental game and while I think I came up with some good ideas for it, I also learned a lot about how to improve this style of game. Remember, LMI was kind of a new genre of h-game so there wasn't a lot of precedent for me to draw from at the time.

Gameplay differences in Let Me Out

If you've played Let Me In then you'll know how it works - you type phrases for a character to say and see if you can get an ending, both through building up trust and lust, as well as by constructing a convincing lie.

I think this was a pretty cool approach but I also found that people expected something to happen by itself when you got enough trust and/or lust. This actually isn't a bad idea, since it's a hard game anyway, so for LMO I'm introducing a kind of 'ticking clock'. There will be a turn limit (200, maybe?) and when that limit expires you will get an ending depending on whether you've got high lust, low lust, high trust, low trust (and combinations thereof) for a possible four different endings. I will, however, still keep the ability to end the game earlier if you come up with a convincing story, and these will lead to different endings.

There will also be more surprises in this one. I don't want to reveal too much too early, but there's a key new element that will emerge through the course of the game that will change how it plays. (Okay, okay, it's another character.)

Slightly different development approach

Normally with games I have a pretty clear sense of where the game project 'ends'. That is, they are generally closed stories with a range of branching possibilities that I determine in advance. That's not the case with Let Me Out - I don't have one distinct story I'm trying to tell here, instead I want to explore where the story could possibly go. I also feel like there's a continuing need for more responses and reactions to make the game better even after the initial rush of activity.

Therefore I think I might keep the production of the game 'in process' after the 1.0.0 release. I'll leave a message in the game encouraging people to continue to send me gameplay transcripts and of course I'll continue to accept commissions for further elements in the game. I'm not yet sure whether this will mean there's any substantial activity after the 1.0.0 release, so maybe it will just fade away, but if people stay interested in it then I can keep putting a little time aside for it.

Graphical improvements

Since making LMI I've long since switched over completely to higher-quality Iray rendering for images. It took quite a while to get the hang of this system, but I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of lighting and surface textures in a way that allows me to achieve the kind of results I want without severe compromises.

Also, thanks to the ongoing support of my heroic patrons I've been able to invest in higher quality 3D resources, including some stuff for LMO. I actually couldn't get the super-duper 4k style standard I was hoping for in this case (although my resources for Pervert Action: Timelapse are looking pretty amazing) but I definitely have a lot more to work with. I don't need to compromise much any more on what I can choose to show.

Storytelling

I didn't go in to LMI with much to say, I kind of felt it out as I made the game. That's still going to be somewhat true, but this time I have more of a sense of how things will play out and how I want the game to feel. This is a subtle thing, so I'll hold off from talking about it too much now, but it's something I want to improve over LMI. I've made a number of choices about the story, but the most obvious difference will be a skippable intro giving you a tiny bit of background info and some sexy fun to get the game started.

What do you think? Are you interested to see what I've got in store for you? Let me know!