December in Review (Patreon)

Hey all, welcome to a special State of the Game! As it's the turn of the year, I'll be doing a more big-picture look at where we are and where we're going.

Looking back a year ago, I'm reminded that for a brief moment in time, I thought Carnal Coup might be finished this past year. Haha, ha...ha...okay, not going to say that again. My estimate got put off by a few months when I needed to rework how Unity scenes/levels were set up, and then much more by my underestimating how long it would take to write all of the mission encounters. To try and avoid that, I'm going to try and be much more specific and realistic about what's left to do. If you're not too worried about development details, I won't hate you if you skim over now. For those looking for the next free release, I'll probably be posting it up on Friday.

First up, Exploration Missions. Each randomized mission area now has six encounters, on top of the Specialist Loyalty missions, and that's where I'll be cutting it off. As much as I'd love to expand the random pools to draw from, it's time to move on to other things. I will still be working on missions for probably the next couple months, but this will be in functionality rather than content. Specifically, the following items remain:

• Revisiting the Loyalty Missions and adding in rewards to the secondary encounters.
• Adding in support for modifying the Overseer's character art whenever they're supposed to be shapeshifted.
• Adding in semi-randomized mission exploration. This will involve adding complexity levels to different missions, with the chance to run into every encounter on large missions, if you explore around. This will probably also involve adding in some very minor tertiary encounters that provide minor rewards or temporary effects.
• Adding in some background images appropriate to the various settings. Some time back I acquired some 3D assets I may use for this purpose, so that our artists can remain focused on other tasks, but I'll have to see how well it works when I get to it.

I'll probably be working on the items in this order. Since they're low in new content, I'll continue the pattern of trying to get in one Specialist Romance a month, until Missions are complete and I can take on Specialists as a focused task. My plan is to have three romance scenes per recruitable Specialist (including threesomes), meaning 24 such scenes in all. Six are already complete, and the remaining 18 will probably be 4-5 months of writing on their own.

After that the last item on the 'Mid Game' development list is content progression systems - implementing office upgrades, splitting up 'advancement' into Infiltrator and Liberator paths, and turning on all the content unlock requirements that aren't currently enforced. Then it'll be on to the End Game, which will probably be much quicker to finish than the other phases, but as it's some time off yet I'll leave the details on that for another time.

To pull it back in a bit, our monthly summary:

December Accomplishments:

• 6 Figura Wildlands Mission Encounters
• 1 Specialist Romance Scene
• 3 Hellfire CG Sets from artists Vin4ART, Suki and TDK!

January Forecast:

• Loyalty Mission Updates
• Overseer Mission Portrait Updates
• Specialist Switch Romance Scene
• More Hellfire Art!

And once again, thanks to everyone who supported us in 2019, and helped us through another year of development!