(Future Fragments) Faye's Game (Patreon)

Just for those who don't hang out on the Discord that often (which is at https://discord.gg/puXrfSm for anyone who's ever pledged, and you can stay there even after you've stopped pledging!), there's going to be a sequel to Future Fragments that we'll start working on a few months after Future Fragments is completed.

There's no title for it yet, but timeline-wise it'll run concurrently with Talia's adventure.

You'll of course be playing as Faye this time around, but this won't be a simple art swap; quite a few things will be changing fundamentally from Talia's adventure, and as we get closer to finishing Talia's game, we'll get more in depth with what we have planned for Faye's game.

In this post though, we'll go over a few things about her game briefly, since information about the sequel has been pretty scattered around places.

Note though that all of this is subject to change; this is just what we have planned right now.

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EMPHASIS ON ACTION, MOBILITY, AND NON-LINEAR GAMEPLAY

While Talia's game plays like a traditional platformer along the lines of Megaman X or Contra Hard Corps, we're intending for Faye's game to play very differently.

First off, Faye canonically is much stronger than Talia, and her game should reflect this; as such, expect Faye to have more combat abilities from the start; her raw destructive power will allow her to wipe out waves of enemies with ease.

Additionally, her mobility will be far beyond Talia's; from the start, we plan to have Faye be able to dash, run, wall jump/climb, and even destroy parts of the walls/ceiling/floor in some maps to access secret areas.

We also plan for the speed of gameplay to be relatively faster as well.

Due to the above reasons, Faye's maps will be less linear than Talia's, and more of a general "labyrinth" (which won't be too complex, don't worry) that players can move around as they please.

If we had to compare it to something, it'd be like a 2D mashup of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Super Metroid, and Megaman Zero.

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DOWNPLAYING THE STORY

As Future Fragments/Talia's path through the game will cover a wide breadth of story and bring the story to a conclusion through the true final boss/endings, we feel forcing players to rewatch/relive a lot of the core story points in Faye's game would be kind of boring and redundant when they've already seen them (or could see them, if they haven't already) in Talia's game.

Faye's personality also is one of "shoot first, ask questions later", so it wouldn't make much sense for her to sit around and entertain enemies by talking to them, again in contrast to the more analytical, introspective Talia.

So as a result, Faye's game will have less of an emphasis on story, possibly omitting databanks altogether, and cutting down quite a bit on NPC cutscenes.

That's not to say that there won't be any story however; we'll just be delivering it in a different way that fits Faye more (we'll return to this subject later).

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SOME OF THE OLD, SOME OF THE NEW

As Faye's game takes place alongside Talia's, there's going to be some re-usage of assets from the original game; this will allow us to get Faye's game out much, much faster than Talia's game, while still containing a solid chunk of content unique to the game.

Here's what's staying the same from Talia's game/being brought over;

• Tilesets
• Backgrounds
• Sound effects (besides new ones we have to commission for Faye's game)
• The same order of levels/same core levels and level mechanics
• Enemy designs
• The general engine of the game (with a few tweaks)

And here's what's going to be new;

• Enemy sex animations, CGs, and attacks
• Music (remixed, more energetic versions of the original songs)
• Maps for each level to better fit Faye's movement skills
• Endings
• Cutscenes (partially; you'll be able to see how Faye gets in her predicaments from Future Fragments in this game!)
• Bosses

On that last note, let's talk about the bosses some.

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EMPHASIS ON BOSS FIGHTS

One of the things we've struggled with and always been regretful about with Future Fragments is that Talia's abilities as they've been designed have always fairly limited us with boss fight designs/mechanics.

It's been fun to design around them, and we're proud of the bosses we've done and we have planned (we're definitely redoing that Fire Boss fight though, but not the sex animations, don't worry).

But with Faye's abilities, and much of the "core work" for the game being already done as it'll be carried over from the previous game, we'll be able to devote much more efforts towards the boss fights, which will all be brand new bosses just for Faye's game.

We again can't promise just how crazy they'll get, but that reference to "a 2D Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance" was specifically named in reference to the angle we'd like to take for boss fights for Faye's game.

During these fights are also where a good deal of the storyline for the game would get disseminated; not in a "stop/start" way during the fight, but more of a smooth, constant flow that wouldn't interrupt the fight itself, again, much like Metal Gear games or other similar games.

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FAYE'S MCGUFFIN

So mild spoiler; Faye never (canonically, at least) gets any of the Fragments during her adventure. This is played off as a running joke within both games, but since Faye will never canonically get any of them, we needed something else to have players be able to strive for/get during Faye's run.

We also wanted to streamline things in general for Faye's game, given all the information above, so we wanted to combine all the "collection" aspects of Talia's run (databanks, fragments, powerups) into something singular.

While we won't go into exactly how this works/why this works until Future Fragments is done due to actual spoilers, we'll just say that for Faye's game, you'll be able to strengthen yourself by defeating enemies (grinding won't work; enemies won't respawn in this game), and with what you get by defeating enemies, you'll be able to empower Faye's abilities.

It'll be somewhat similar to a skill tree in most other games that have this, where initially you'll just get stat boosts, but once you've put enough points into a particular aspect of her tree, you'll get a special functionality improvement for her abilities.

For instance, if you put a lot of points into one of the "red" branches for power, you might be able to add an extra hit to her combo attacks that does damage over time to the enemy, or you might be able to make your dash knock enemies back and do damage to enemies they're knocked back into, if you went with a different "red" branch.

Green branches would give you more utility, like possibly a higher jump or the ability to do a quick "blink" teleport through walls, or something else similar.

Blue branches would give you defensive capabilities, and black branches would give you huge powerups while coming at a severe cost to your other abilities.

Finally, as enemies would be unique, each one you defeat would contain a short "memory" from that person you could access (which is also a feature coming in Talia's game, but it'll be for entire enemy "classes" rather than specific enemies); this would fulfill the "databank" portion of things, but much, much shorter, maybe a line or two per enemy.

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That's all for now; as a reminder, the next demo will be out by May 7th, and if you pledged $5 or more during April, you'll get it in your Patreon inbox even if you aren't pledging anymore (and it'll be posted to the activity feed as usual, too).