Weekly Update/Preview Oct 30-Nov 6 (Patreon)

Honestly last week I didn't think I'd be writing one of these for this week, but here we are anyway. Hopefully everyone enjoys these enough to be happy about that, although it's probably offset by the reason I thought I would end up skipping it being wrong. I had expected the Beta 1 update to come out, which obviously hasn't happened.

I alluded to this in the content poll post yesterday, but the update is in a weird spot. Work has been done. There's good stuff in there that I'm sure people will be happy with, but the overall feeling I have is that there just aren't enough scenes added yet.

That's kind of a silly thing to think about though, or rather it isn't very productive because it's not really driving me to work any faster than I otherwise would, I suppose. At some point soon I'll have to tell myself to just stop fussing and go through with uploading and everything, but with the timing being off now and that probably leading to throwing off timing for updates after this as well...

I dunno. It's frustrating. I'm not sure if talking about it here actually helps or just makes the delay look worse or whatever, but it is what it is. At the very least I can say that the delay isn't really even an indication of anything negative with the project as a whole. Work is still happening, and that's probably what I should go on to talking about here.

Bypnofis

I've had a couple of people scratching their heads over the anatomy in this picture, which I didn't expect at all. Bias from seeing the original render it came from I guess. Lucette's right leg is not in the shot at all, as it would be off to the left of the frame here. She's sitting with both legs in front of her, with her upper body turned and leaning down somewhat. Hopefully if you can't help but see some other interpretation of it, that doesn't end up too distracting from however hot (or not) this scene ends up being.

But other than that I don't know that there's a huge amount to say about this one here? Actually, I guess I can talk a bit about hypnosis as a trope/tool. One thing that I don't know if anyone has commented on much in the story is how very instantaneous mind control is, especially with regard to the main character doing it. This is rather intentional and a matter of personal writing taste for me I guess. I COMPLETELY understand the appeal of long form hypnotic inductions as a thing that exists in this sort of fetish sphere, but actually writing it is often kinda tedious. For me the good bits are the actual doing of the mind control, rather than all the preamble that a proper induction requires.

Still, I've certainly wrote out long induction scenes plenty of times in the past, and will almost certainly end up doing it plenty more before this game is through.

It wasn't me

Moving on to another mind controlly thing, we have mantras. Previously, there have only been a couple of them that are accessible through the desire manipulation system, but currently I have a few more lined up, and will probably end up doing more over time. Taking this image as an example here, while it isn't as gameplay important as the other mantras, it does provide something of an opportunity for another long lasting effect type, which would make sense in certain cases.

There is some concern about that in my mind though. As I start putting more mantra effects in the game (up to and including mantras that are applied by people other than you and may not have as positive of effects), that means yet another category of status effects that are competing for player head space (as far as understanding how they work).

Like in my head I have an understanding like:

Compulsion - Long term effect that is hidden from the player but will cause the character to perform some specific action. Basically always negative.

Curse - Long term effect that is heavily built into/integral to the game's mechanics. Several different levels of what exactly each one does. Negative, but has some edge cases where some could be helpful, and mostly unavoidable

Mantra - Long term effect that is largely internal to the character's mind/desires, with comparatively less of a gameplay effect than the previous types.

So it should fill a different sort of niche for what it accomplishes, but that relies on me implementing things properly to do that. If I implement it poorly and don't make them distinct, they just become bloat.

Although, I guess the whole "slow mind control through having thoughts altered by a repeating mantra in your head" thing is also kinda hot, so it may be an okay kind of bloat to have.

Dunno. I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Character Poll

This is still on going, so I probably shouldn't comment too much on how things have gone over the last day. I suppose I can at least say that I had a couple of different scenarios for how I expected votes to go, and the current totals were indeed one of them.

Again (or I guess for the first time if you're reading this from the Page tier), I can say that I'm not taking this poll as a popularity contest or anything of the sort, so don't feel bad about voting for a character you think would result in interesting content associated with them over a character that you personally like due to aesthetics or their personality or whatever. At the same time though, your vote is yours, so if you do want to just vote for whoever you think is best girl, have at it I guess.