Development Journal 1/7 (Patreon)

I've nearly completed the planning for 0.4; I expect I'll start actually creating stuff early next week (I'll probably start with maps). For the journal today, I want to give you a peek at a couple of things that are on my mind.

1. More H-scenes: I've been averaging around 2 per update lately, and I think that's probably a bit low. My target for 0.4 is going to be 3 scenes. I don't know if I'll stay at 3 per update in the future - I have no intention of tacking scenes on where I don't feel they belong just to hit some arbitrary target - but I'll be experimenting a bit with it.

The explicitness of the scenes has gradually ramped up from the first release, and that's a trend you can expect to continue. By "more explicit", I don't mean that the scenes are going to become more crass or vulgar - you'll probably never see the ubiquitous porn "bumpin' uglies closeup shot" in my work - I just mean that what's actually taking place in the scenes will be more, well, sexual. It's always been my intent to frame and compose the H-scenes in a titillating, tasteful and visually interesting way, and I hope that will continue to improve as the game progresses.

2. Switching to an Overmap: By "overmap", I mean one of those maps where towns are represented in miniature on the field, and you can actually see the lakes and mountain ranges on your screen. It's how the game would look if you were playing as some massive giant. You aren't a giant, of course, it's just a way of filtering out information that isn't particularly relevant to the game or story. It's an abstraction. 

The 'overmap' approach is designed to deal with the fact that walking through The Forest of Gloom or The Endless Desert isn't all that interesting. I've found myself including a number of more or less useless corridors in the game, just to illustrate that Elian & Celie's farmhouse isn't literally right next to Tal'thelas' cave, for instance. And I suspect it would break immersion if Ogremarsh, the capital city of the orcs, were right next to some tiny little human military outpost. I mean, why wouldn't the orcs just crush it?

I could just insert long corridors, but the game isn't meant to be a walking simulator. The overmap seems a better way of handling this problem. I can focus my development efforts on the actually interesting parts of the game, and it also lets me gate when things will appear. For instance, I don't have to put the Big Evil Cave into the game when I first make the map; I can simply have it appear at the appropriate time in the story.

There is a price, though. The abstraction is another layer between you and what's actually happening to the character. It takes you away a little bit from immersion in the game. I think it's a price worth paying; boredom from pointlessly long walks would probably break immersion more, and besides, I doubt players typically spend very long in an overmap - it's usually something you go through as quickly as possible to get from one interesting place to another.

Anyway, please let me know what you think, and thank you for your support!