Dev Journal: Beat 'Em Up Vore Game (Patreon)

    I can't give a specific date yet, but I'm still aiming to release the next build in around a week or so! In the meantime, for this week's update I thought it might be interesting to go over a potential concept I had for a different vore game before I started working on Vessel Tactics. I explored a lot of ideas for different projects before finally settling on this one, so I hope you don't mind if I occasionally share some of them here!
EDIT: Just to clarify, this an old idea and not a game I plan on making concurrently with VT.

Plot:
   In this game, you play as a demon girl working a 9-to-5 in one of the countless layers of a loosely Japanese-inspired hell. Each layer has its own special punishment for human sinners, and yours is [The Hell of Endless Cannibalism] wherein sinners are repeatedly devoured whole and digested by demons. By doing this, you gradually purify their souls, allowing them to one day ascend to heaven. It's hard work, but you do your job with pride and take great satisfaction in repeatedly churning up all the delicious humans there.

   After your best friend (A pink-haired catgirl wielding a Kanabo) finds a strange shrine hidden away in an isolated section deep within the hell, you venture out to it together and discover a human sealed away within the shrine locked deep in prayer. Unable to resist the helpless meal in front of you, and against your friend's warnings, you quickly swallow him up and digest him.

   As you do so, however, the shrine begins to fall to pieces and a massive winged lamia rises out of it. She instantly devours you and your friend before loudly proclaiming her intent to take revenge on the heavens for imprisoning her. Fortunately, given that you're already in hell, neither of you can actually be killed, and, as she soars up into the sky, two blue flames float back to ground and reform as the two of you.

   You quickly figure out from texts in the destroyed shrine that the lamia is an incredibly powerful elder demon governing gluttony, and is capable of raising an army of voracious monsters that can pose a serious threat to the heavens. Resolving to take responsibility for your screw-up, you run back to the only gateway to heaven you know of, the digestive tract of your boss, the head demon of your hell. (A massive, nude woman relaxing in a hot spring with a gut bloated by hundreds of struggling sinners.)

   You and your friend force-feed yourselves to her and purposefully agitate her stomach, making her digest you alongside all of the sinners within her. As the countless souls float up to heaven, she bemoans the fact that now she'll need to start collecting souls all over again. Reforming in heaven, you find it already overrun by monsters, and so you resolve to send all them back to hell one by one through your gut.

   Battling your way through heaven, you grow in strength as you devour the Demon of Gluttony's forces, before eventually facing her in battle. Using your new powers to defeat her, you swallow her massive body whole and digest her, sealing her away again much more permanently inside your gut. There would possibly multiple endings where you either return to hell a hero or become the new Demon of Gluttony.

Gameplay:
   This game is, as you may be able to guess, heavily inspired by Echidna Wars. The above mock-up sprite of the main character was also made to be in its art style. Unlike that game, though, in this one the player would be fully capable of both devouring and being devoured by enemies. In order to vore an enemy, the player would need to stun them (Which may sound familiar) or reduce their HP to 0. At any time after eating an enemy, they may hold down for a short period to sit down and enter an invincible digestion state after a brief period of vulnerability where they may enjoy the animation for as long as they want. Just like in VT, voring enemies would cause them to recover a small amount of HP and level up. They would also need to be limited in the number of units they could eat at a time, two or three at the absolute most.

   The game would feature a good number of NPCs, other vore-capable girls from both heaven and hell of course. At any time, the player may eat and digest an NPC, causing her soul to reform nearby afterwards, likely pissed about her treatment. Occasionally, the player would encounter human denizens of heaven that they may eat and tease inside their stomach to replenish energy.

   Rather than being purely level-based, the game would make use of checkpoint system making it easy for the player to re-experience areas. The fast travel system would involve the player being swallowed whole by a harpy-like girl and carried to another checkpoint, possibly being digested upon arriving and triggering it. If the player hung out around the harpy for too long without doing anything, she would also devour them and attempt to digest them.

   Boss fights would often feature gigantic enemies. When the player defeated them, the screen would cut to black Raging Demon-style before fading back in to show the player character with a ridiculously massive swollen gut, working hard on digesting its oversized prey. The first boss, for example, would be a giant oni with a gut filled with countless humans and intermittently leaking their flame-like souls as she digests them. Digesting her would cause the protagonist to digest all the humans within, as well, sending them to float away into the heavens.

    ...Of course, this game is way too ambitious for me to make with my current skill level and budget. Even with a skilled sprite artist working full-time, it would be a tall order to make anything that resembles the concept here in a satisfying way. Still, it's fun thinking up game concepts like this, and some of the ideas I had for this game have actually ended up making their way into VT, such as vore being based around a stun system. Thanks for taking the time to read this long and somewhat rambling post, I hope it was interesting to you!