Roadmap: The main goals and features (Patreon)

I hate putting stuff in stone because it involves spoilers and I also like to change plans mid-development, but I appreciate players and patrons really appreciate it. Therefore I'm going to trust you guys not to hold me too closely to this, and I'm going to very briefly list some features we're planning to implement.

Some of these features are bigger or smaller, and some of them may be available soon while others are going to be in development for quite a while!

Each lady will have a romance arc and more rituals

That all the girls will have more rituals is probably self-evident, but they're also going to have a relationship arc that develops over time and culminates once you get love, lust and obedience up to 100 each. You'll learn more about all of the characters and see this relationship develop over the course of at least five scenes each, including a sex scene.

For the rituals, you can expect something like a hand job, a blow job, a boob or foot job (depending on the girl), sex and bottom sex. I'm phrasing things to avoid setting off alarms here... ;)

Maybe we'll do some others along the way, but I don't know yet. (Getting the art and animation for these takes a lot of time, effort and expense.)

I should also note that there may be other scenes of interest beyond just those main ones, but that's the fun part of developing these sorts of games - coming up with interesting character scenes over the long term.

The Earl of Bugringham

One thing that will be showing up reasonably soon is the Earl of Bugringham, who will demand taxes and fealty. He'll offer discounts if the maids are to give him some private service... but you will be able to refuse that, of course. ;) We know that that option will bother some people, but like everything in this game it's a choice and either way it will have consequences.

Just in case you're really bothered, though... we do plan to have an option to just turn this off altogether in the menu. (Though he'll still demand taxes.)

His scenes are alternative versions of some of the animations you've already seen, in fact (and others in development), which we figured would be the best way to take advantage of the art and animation production chain to get a lot out of our scenes.

Spanking

You already have the option to discipline the maids and you're told there's going to be a spanking, but you don't see it. From the start we've planned to have an actual spanking animation, which is already mostly done and there will be a few short scenes to go along with this.

This is most likely coming up relatively soon, as I feel it's an important part of the daily gameplay, but we will need to polish up the animation a little and get it set up first.

Az'ea's magic and Delia's potions

There are two important gameplay elements that will be available and will expand as you upgrade the castle: Az'ea's magic spells and Delia's potion brewing. These systems won't be overly complex - they're more about giving you options to spend one resource in order to gain something in another.

Really, we just need to set them up and get some nice UI for them; we've already got something in mind for Az'ea's spells, so I might expect those to show up first and relatively soon - you'll be able to cast spells that do things like turn lead into gold, plant skull traps to threaten enemies or terrify the populace into submission.

The town screen

The main screen of the game is obviously the castle cross-section, but we also have a screen for Greenwood town. You've seen the art in one form already, because we're using it at the moment on the menu screen. Once we've set it up, you'll be able to switch over to that screen for access to more things to upgrade, as well as some other things to interact with, like a merchant.

This will not be as complex a screen as the castle, which has many, many rooms and will have lots to do once it's all finished, but you will have reason to visit the town from time to time and it will expand your options further.

The Queen

Getting a royal visit is a huge status symbol and the Queen of the Kingdom of Artuland does travel the country (separately from the King) and visit the nobles. She's quite the libertine and an enthusiast for good wine, so if you want to attract these visits you'll need to have enough alcohol available, as well as possibly make certain upgrades.

She's also known to be rather saucy and licentious, so when she visits you might be able to "entertain" her in some other ways... though she does have standards, of course, so you'll really need to impress her.

This feature isn't imminent right now because she is one of the characters we haven't got designed yet. We'll need sprites or a full animated character model at least before we start to include any scenes for her, and while these are a priority for me, there are a lot of other priorities too.

Sieges

Why do you have a castle if not to repel an enemy siege from time to time?

At the moment the game just gives you a "game over" if you hit certain barrier points: 100 portal power, or 0 food, security or legitimacy. This isn't very interesting but it's just a placeholder for the moment while we get the real system in place - sieges that you have to endure from various potential threats.

Now of course, these will be very short by the standards of real historical sieges and I wouldn't expect it to be the most complex system, but it will impose some penalties and you'll have to make some unique decisions while trying to wait your enemies out. If you fail you'll take a hit but it won't be a game over, just a bit of a back-step. If you succeed then you could even come out of it stronger in some ways!

That said, that's just a loose plan right now because we haven't figured out the details yet and it's highly likely to change a bit by the time it gets to the game. We don't want this system to distract too much from the core gameplay, so it might end up being something we strip down to be more simple or even something that mostly just comes up in main plot scenarios, but it would be nice to fight off sieges in your castle.

The main story

At first I'm sure you're going to want to just see the rest of the introduction and understand what's actually going on! Don't worry, that part is well underway and should be along in an update relatively soon. We just needed a bit more art for it, which is currently in production.

After that, in order to advance the main story to completion, I first need to have the Earl, the Queen and the siege system all in place. That said, once they're all done I see no reason not to power through relatively quickly to the conclusion of that story arc.

The game will be designed to be playable after the ending, and there will even be a choice at the end that will affect how the game plays after that. I can say all this with confidence because I've already written a lot of it.

If the game proves to be really popular then I'd like the idea of continuing to develop new "episodes" of the story after that, although the ideas I have at the moment (while interesting) aren't fully clear in my head yet.