State of the Game - Scenes & Chargen (Patreon)

Evening, all, hope you had a spooky Halloween! For tonight's State of the Game I'll be talking a bit about my progress so far with some new game systems, and I'd like to start off by noting that THE ATTACHED SCREENSHOTS ARE VERY EARLY AND DO NOT REFLECT FINAL GAMEPLAY OR APPEARANCE. To be honest I was a little hesitant to post screenshots this early at all, knowing that default Unity GUI is as likely to scare folks off as anything else, but ultimately it would have been harder to describe my aims without them. Just keep in mind that Carnal Coup was no prettier at this stage, and my focus right now is purely on functionality.

With that out of the way, I'd like to talk first about my built-from-scratch scene system. Carnal Coup was visually designed in the mode of Fenoxo-style games, with a text window and a specific number of specifically sized and placed interaction buttons. This generally worked well enough, but there were some definite limitations that came to annoy me as various situations came up. Sometimes I would have liked less than eight buttons, and space was being wasted, and sometimes I wanted more and had to use a clunky paging system. Additionally, being limited to only two or three words that would fit on a button meant sometimes actions weren't as clear as I would have liked.

Well, no more! The new system integrates dynamic buttons directly into the dialogue panel, freeing up space in general, and allows for a variable number of buttons of a variable size. I will now be able to put full lines of dialogue or other player actions into the button text, making it clear what you're doing, and there will be as many options as a particular scene calls for. And speaking of options, my new scene system is far more flexible than the one in Carnal Coup. In Coup scenes were generally broken into two parts at most with a single option in between. Scenes can now contain an arbitrary number of parts to go with the arbitrary number of choices between them, allowing for much more back-and-forth during a scene. When a particular character trait or choice affects or unlocks a particular part of a conversation, I can now slide that into the scene flow in a more modular way. The first attached screenshot shows the start in 'Exposition Hall', where the player will have the choice of reading about events so far or just skipping ahead to character generation, with a choice thrown in to note how Carnal Coup ended.

That leads to the focus of the other screenshots, character generation. As you can see from the options listed, the new Main Character will be far more flexible than the Male or Female MC of Carnal Coup. You will generally be able to mix and match gender aspects as you wish, with some more options for Figura and Schen and fewer for Roth. You may also note that there is a whole section on fertility. As you might guess, that would be because I am planning to include pregnancy content in Carnal Voyages. It will be something that needs some working towards (especially considering the many different species involved), but if your MC wishes to parent a future generation, that will be within their grasp.

The next two shots show a bit of the Traits system. There are quite a few Traits planned for the game, some just for players, some for crew, each with different effects. Some will be mostly mechanical effects, while some personal traits will potentially unlock different conversation options - for example, a trait indicating that your character has already parented children. Sexual traits will come into play during interactive sex scenes, however as that system is still entirely on paper I'll wait until a later date to talk more about that.

The final image shows a tab from the character generation of your Executive Officer, your second-in-command for this game. Physically XOs are as customizable as the MC, but during their generation you'll also be able to set the relationship that exists between the two of you. From love to hate, sexual to platonic, and perhaps even establishing that the two of you have had children together, there's quite a few ways to define your relationship. And as you can see, a number of ways to define how you refer to each other as well.

For my current objectives, I have a bit more writing to do to finish up the first stage of the introduction and character creation sequence, after which I'll begin working on the crew member generation system, with which you'll get your first ship crew. With any luck I'll have more to talk about for that system in my next update.

And lastly, the results of the new species poll! Somewhat to my surprise the Seeder Plants were a clear favorite, indicating that y'all are a bunch of freaks, for real. No judgment of course, I was the one who put them on there. The more traditional choices of Slimes and Goblins followed close behind, making the choices fairly clear. My first concern for development is getting at least the skeletons of the mechanical systems in, but I do look forward to writing up some characters and plotlines for these picks sooner or later.

I believe that's all I have to discuss for tonight, so I'll close out again with a hearty thanks to everyone who's supporting the project, and everyone who picked up a copy of Carnal Coup this past month! While it does seem I will not be reaching the financial independence required to quit the day job and make this my full-time endeavor, I am still very thankful for every copy sold, it does help a lot with covering the project expenses. So thanks again, and I'll be back with more updates in a few weeks!