Follow-up Update (Patreon)

TLDR: Skip to the new plan section for the short version.

So, originally I was going to post the public poll today. And, in fact, I probably still will a bit later in the day. However, while working on CQ stuff last night, I had a bit of a combination brainwave/overachiever moment. For those of you who had been around my Patreon for a while, you'll no doubt have noticed that I tend to hyper-focus a bit when I get a good idea, with the occasional result of a bunch of originally unplanned content, or the scale of a particular bit of content expanding massively. This has happened in literally all my games, one example being the Drow and Pokemon rooms in DoL, which are...over sized to say the lease? Given the general results when I go into that overachiever mode on a good idea, I don't think anyone really minds...

ANYWAYS, the result of a bit of that this time was me thinking to myself, 'you know, this ship and the NPCs are pretty good, seems a shame to only do three scene with them.' Before I knew it, I'd expanded my planned scenes to 6...then 9. At which point I realized that I could actually solve some of my issue about what to do with this month's build. The truth is that the the biggest problem with crunching Build 2 down into such a small time frame was/is the fact that I need to actually set up all the locations and NPCs, which actually a fairly time consuming process. I was agonizing over which parts of New Landing I could make functional and how to split so few scenes out in a way that didn't just focus on one part of it.

You see, New Landing is actually where the game widens out a lot. There are THREE separate ways to progress through the hub area (and you can even do all three if you wanted). With each of those focusing on a series of quests/missions that you can do in the Mage's Guild, Rogue's Guild, or Adventurer's Guild. With plenty of side locations like a Brothel, Clothing Shop, and the Pony Express Courier Service. Not to mention Jail time if you get caught doing certain things and...well...and bunch of other planned stuff. The New Landing Hub area will likely be at least twice the size of Hope's Rest, possibly as much as three times the size. This meant that the original plan was to introduce 2 or 3 of the locations in Build 2, with 1-2 things to do in each of the locations. Including variant-but-unique scenes (Belted/Unbelted usually having very different animations, as you should have seen in Hope's Rest), that would have come out to a minimum 15 scenes (including the 3 transit variations), probably more.

But...it would also require me to set up each of those areas and the NPCs for them! Ouch. Not easy to do on the crunched time frame. Then, I hit on the idea of expanding the Travel Sequence with more scenes, and realized that my overachieving nature had produced a possible alternative.

New Plan:

Instead of trying to hit the original super-time-consuming bits of Build 2, what I've decided to do is expand the Travel Sequence between Hope's Rest and New Landing into a three-day journey, with at least 9 total possible scenes (possibly up to twelve). There will be a Dom Path, Sub Path, and Default Path to the journey, with a set of at least 3 scenes for each. As for New Landing itself, I will only set up the main town backdrop, plus the Pony Express Courier service's initial content. This won't show much of New Landing off, but will allow me more flexibility in Build 3, as one of the side-quest areas will be partially complete already. I'll shift the planned introductions to the Mage's, Rogue's, and Adventurer's Guilds to be the main focus of Build 3, possibly with another of the side-quest areas (such at the Brothel) added to the mix!

I think this will actually produce a better result, both for Build 2 and Build 3!

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Mod Spotlight! This is actually the first time I've used an NPC mostly unmodified. The Captain of the Dawn's Rose (name not final) and her Twin sister were sourced from: GK Redguard Followers. Previously, all major characters had been custom sculpted by me, with minor alternations to even most of the minor NPCs, as well. However, in this case, I both needed to save time...and I was utterly unconvinced I could create the type of character I was looking for -_-. I've gotten pretty good at making 'classic beauty' type characters, but I wanted something a bit subtly exotic feeling for these two. After looking through literally dozens of NPC packs, I found the base characters for these two. 

That said, 'mostly unmodified' isn't 'entirely unmodified.' The captain has only very minor tweaks, just some breast size alterations and other minor adjustments. Her 'sister' I did a bit more tweaking to, including completely changing her hairstyle to one that fit what I was going for better.