FutureFragments

(Future Fragments) Lots of stuff in this post, be sure to read it!

Added 2018-04-20 04:43:20 +0000 UTC

Alright, lots of stuff to cover this time, so this is going to be a pretty huge post, but it's all important!

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ELECTRIC LEVEL UTILITY ABILITY

So above you can see the WIP for the Electric Level utility ability; once you beat the Electric Boss, you'll get this ability, which is basically a super jump!

You'll only be able to use it on the ground, and for the duration that Talia is charging up an electrical/magnetic field around herself to free her from gravity temporarily, she'll be vulnerable; however, after that, she'll be invincible, just like the Fire Dash.

Not only that, she'll cause damage to enemies on the way up, as she's surrounded with the electrical aura, and at the top of the jump, she sheds the aura in a burst, damaging nearby enemies.

You'll also be able to move left and right during the jump slightly, too.

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CUTSCENE MECHANICS CHANGES

While a lot of you have expressed that you enjoyed the cutscenes (and we're really happy about that!), there's a good degree of people who just want to run through and enjoy the game and not have to go through many cutscenes.

As we want to have a game that caters to both the "give me lots of plot" and "I'm not too into the plot" camps, we'll soon be making an adjustment to how cutscenes work.

Important, core storyline cutscenes involving Faye, Vie, or Seeber will still be automatically-starting cutscenes, and for the most part, unavoidable.

However, all other cutscenes will now be triggered by the player pressing Up on an NPC when standing near them; this will allow people who want to still engage with the full story to do so (or to get extra "value" points, more on that next update), but those who don't want to engage with the story beyond the core cutscenes won't be forced to either.

On average, a level would have around 5-ish "core" cutscenes and 25-ish "non-core" cutscenes, so we're aiming for about a 1:5 ratio for core:non-core cutscenes.

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BATTLE SYSTEM CHANGES

While the Electric Level was mainly updates to the visual and audio quality of the game, the Earth Level will be updates to the battle system and general gameplay mechanics.

Here's some of the updates you can expect during the duration of the Earth Level demos;

Elemental Charge Shots will be getting changed drastically, so that each elemental charge shot is completely unique in function and design (instead of being just a re-textured graphic with an extra function).
Powerups will be integrated in full during the Earth Level, with the remaining 30 added, as well as a general rework of a lot of them for balance issues and the new "destructibles" system involving them (more on that next post, too).
Aggro will now be something that's on all enemies in different ways, but in general, when you attack an enemy, it will turn to face you and attack if in range, or walk/run towards you if not; enemies will no longer ignore you while you're shooting them.
Health Bars will be added above the heads of enemies you're attacking, to let you know how much more you've got on them before they're defeated.
The stun mechanic will be getting reworked too, to be both more engaging and not so much of a mash-fest as it is now.

There's other smaller changes too, but hopefully these main fixes will make battles a lot more engaging and interesting!

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REMOVAL OF FIRE LEVEL FLYING ENEMY ANIMATION #1

This is something I've talked about on the Discord a good amount (and if you haven't joined already, you should join at https://discord.gg/eADgu38 ), but for a few reasons, we've removed the Fire Level Flying Enemy sex animation #1 from the game. (To be clear, we're not removing the enemy, or his attacks, or his second sex animation.)

Part of it was that Triangulate just wasn't satisfied with the animation; it was just her getting off, no actual direct interactivity with the enemy, and he highly prefers actual direct interactivity between the enemy and Talia with animations.

I was unsatisfied because it seemed to be out of nowhere lore/design-wise; you have this half-human, half-demon character that for some reason has a seduction power... despite being in a facility solely with men, so his power would never actually get used most of the time.

To make matters worse, with the established story that sex is outlawed unless it's with gratters (vibrators/sex machines), and that the Rebels wouldn't be really bothered or annoyed by getting turned on... it just makes no sense for the WORM to create this perfect weapon of sorts and then have its abilities be useless most of the time and focused on something that they considered illegal.

I know this will disappoint some of you, but we hope that it's not a huge letdown for those of you who've been supporting the game. We don't have any plans to remove or alter any of the other existing sex animations though, if you were worried about any others.

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RECLAIM REALITY CHANGES

In the interest of full transparency about the game production process, we wanted to tell you all about a change regarding another game that I'm working on and that some of you know about called Reclaim Reality.

As with the above, those of you on the Discord already know about this (seriously, you should definitely join; https://discord.gg/eADgu38 ), but our programmer for Reclaim Reality recently decided that the game was too much for him to work on while trying to balance other life responsibilities, and decided to drop from the game.

As a result, I'd talked to Frouge at length about it and for now, he's offered to take on the role himself while still doing Future Fragments as his first priority.

Now, normally having a programmer on two projects would be something difficult to deal with for the programmer, but there's some clarification you need to know about;

Frouge isn't going to start until May 1st, and we'll be looking for replacement programmers for a while if this ever does cause any delays, but we don't expect it to cause any delays for Future Fragments or for Reclaim Reality.
This is because the programming for Reclaim Reality is already about 90% done, and because the programming density for Reclaim Reality in general is a lot less complex than what Future Fragments has (since it's mostly a VN).
To add onto that, most of the complex stuff in Future Fragments is already done; the only remaining complex systems we have yet to put in are the cutscene/databank gallery and the full version of the megamap, everything else is just enemy AI and injecting art/sound/writing assets for the rest of the game.
Given that Reclaim Reality and Future Fragments are linked, and that Frouge meshes so well with what we're going for with the game, it should help speed things along even faster for RR.

We're only making this choice with full knowledge that Frouge is skilled enough, fast enough, and that the progress of RR and FF is at a point where it's not a huge time sink for either one programming-wise; he's all up for this, and offered himself, and we've got faith that he wouldn't do so if he wasn't up to the task.

As said above too, we're confident this won't really delay either game much at all, and the final result will be a lot better for RR without impacting the quality of FF, and if it does somehow cause any delays, we'll look for a replacement programmer ASAP for RR.

(Since some people were afraid of this too on the Discord, the quality of both games will be retained to the degree we intended; we're not going to rush either game out and kill the quality as a result, but we're not going to sit on our laurels and take our time on them, either.)

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Thanks so much for your support; we're aiming to give you nothing less than the best game we can do!

If you'd like to join in on our Discord, feel free to at https://discord.gg/eADgu38

The next demo, v029, will be out April 30th, and will have a number of improvements and additions :)

(As an extra note too, if you wanted to check out the other two games of mine, they're at http://www.patreon.com/reclaimreality and http://www.patreon.com/hentaiwriter.)