Exploration Mission Overview (Patreon)

Evening all, have a little feature discussion special for you tonight. The development poll is now closed, and Exploration Missions will be our next official objective. Now, I know I've talked about these some in the past, but with some folks coming and going, and some posts being public and some not, I figured it would be good to lay out exactly what this means so everyone's on the same page - particularly since one of the things it means is there won't be a ton of new smut scenes for a bit, and I want everyone to know what to expect.

First, a disclaimer: all of this is currently in design, some of which I wrote down some time ago, and may be subject to change once we've seen how well certain things do or don't work.

That said, what are Exploration Missions? Missions will involve the Overseer taking two of their Specialists along to a certain location, encountering a few challenges, and then earning rewards. Hellfire counts as a Specialist, so Missions will be unlocked once you've taken at least one other Specialist through the Flirt relationship stage (whether you chose Flirt options or not doesn't matter for this). Beyond that, you can expect to see some differences in how Missions work as we go; it's my intention to get a minimum functional version of the feature working as soon as possible, which will be revisited and made fancier once the basics are down. So, our feature list:

Mission Types: There will be two kinds of missions; specific Loyalty Missions for your Specialists, and randomly-generated missions. Loyalty Missions will be the first priority, so that we can get the basics set before throwing more variables at it. Loyalty Missions will be unlocked by finishing a Specialist's Flirt scenes, and will require that you bring that specific Specialist along. The challenges will be specifically written towards that mission, and once it's completed, it will unlock the option to take your Specialist relationship to the next level (the scenes for which will be a feature after Missions are done).

Challenges: These will be obstacles your team must overcome, and may be of minor or major types. The method for doing so will be a rather simple application of your team's composition, at least early on. Each Specialist will have a number of skill points spread out over three areas: Combat, Intelligence, and Charm. These points will add together to create your team's total skill, which you'll then attempt to apply to various challenge solutions. A simple example: Your team runs into a locked steel door, which has a Hard Way solution of breaking it down, requiring a Combat skill of 6, or you can take the Easy Way of hacking it open, requiring an Intelligence skill of 4. Your Specialists will be able to unlock abilities to adjust your team skill levels during a mission, but if you find yourself unable to pass any of the solution options, the mission will fail. Most challenges will not be of a smutty nature, but some may. Eventually, there may even be reward scenes for completing a mission with a certain threesome composition...

Maps: This will be very simple early on. You'll start a mission, proceed forward through a set number of challenges, complete them, and exit. Once that's working, I intend to add maps with branching paths, with some optional challenges or different ways to complete the mission. We may even get so far as to doing totally randomized maps, but we'll see. For the start we'll probably be focusing on a single environment type, probably Generic Scifi Laboratory or the like. However, I do intend to add other environments on both the planet Figura and the space station, each with their own pools of challenge types you may encounter. I intend to experiment with some Unity assets to create these, as our artists are busy with other tasks, and will have to see how it works out.

Rewards: The most immediate reward will be the loyalty of your Specialists, which will be even more of a prize as we go on to the future. Other rewards include: Coup advancement points (which will be split into Liberator or Infiltrator paths, possibly depending on choices made during the challenges), new Recruits, which will help to unlock scenes when those requirements are activated, Impersonation Skill, increased station Tension, and possible mission-specific rewards which grant you bonuses or buffs for facing down other challenges.

Development: This is, honestly, the first real game functionality task we've had since the game foundations were finished over a year ago. What this means is that there may be some updates with very little to show in terms of playable content, let alone smut content. I want to avoid doing any 'empty' releases, so I will try to include other things such as Hellfire scenes or Random Encounters, though this will unfortunately mean less time spent actually doing the Missions and may draw it out. Due to this I can't give a real estimate for how long this feature will take (for whatever value those estimates have had up til now, anyways).

That said, I hope everyone's interested enough to see it through! This is the sort of 'gameplay' feature this game has been rather lacking for some time, and I hope once it's done the game feels much more interactive and interesting. I hope you enjoy it!