Project Plan September

After the long-term roadmap post, it's today time to focus back on the present and what will be happening this month. It's an SKA focused focusing on the next bad ending: The Roland Bad End.

Note that as I mentioned in some past post, the Roland Update will be split into two smaller Major Updates: 1.2 (1 Dev Cycle, so going into beta already at the end of this month, focusing on his bad end) and 1.3 (2 Dev Cycles), focusing on expanding his events outside of his bad end by adding events involving Lorraine.

Let's take a closer look at the weekly breakdown for 1.2.

Week 1: I have the mountain of Platinum Hair variations our artist Emubi created last month lying around and will be integrating them over the next days. There are quite a lot of them and adding them into older scenes will be a bit of a pain, so I expect this will take up a chunk of the week. I also have some more character pixel art animations from our pixel artist MemorableMan which will need integrating.

The rest of the week I plan to spend on creating some first drafts on the Roland Bad End to structure his events. If I can, I will try to already implement a post-battle event where you need to pass a willpower event or you will lose your Soul Dust (which would currently lead to a game over, but once the bad end is there, would instead trigger the bad end).

Finally, we have a lot of bug reports to deal with from the Liora 0.1.0 release (a lot of people don't seem to know this, the patreon version has no time limit like the demo! x_X), most of them will be for our assistant developer Trihan to deal with but I will try to also squeeze some bug fixes in. Expect a 0.1.0-a release containing the most important bugfixes to drop in the following days.

...Also I need to squeeze some bookkeeping accounting work in... If you remember, I reported in a previous post I had some issues with the tax office, I was able to resolve them as I had just missclassified the income from steam + someone at the tax office who understood how digital market places work came back from summer vacation and was able to properly process it on their side. Because of the trouble I'm currently behind on the bookkeeping work from the last month though. x_X

Week 2: And then I will be working on the actual Roland Bad End. In contrast to the Maid Bad End, it's less of a big thing. There will be an epilogue, a unique ending lewd scene, and a new costume - but there won't be further build-up work like with the Maid Bad End. I believe the current Roland events should be sufficient here.

Week 3: I will be cannibalizing some SKA dev time to make a small Liora update in this week. Maybe I can squeeze in integrating the art output from the artist for Liora deniis in the other weeks, if not, I plan to do it in this time slot. The same goes for implementing improvements for the 0.1.0 build that are not quite bugfixes but still important iterations to tackle early.

Week 4: The final week is a bit less structured. Hopefully, Emubi will finish the artwork for the Roland Bad End by this time and I will be integrating it. Other than that I will be focusing on smaller polish work, not yet sure what I want to focus on. I still feel like Verdeaux could use some more complex NPCs wandering around to make it more lively and provide more fallbacks for lore&tips. These kind of NPCs that go around, talk to other NPCs and even enter buildings always take quite some time to make but I think the continuous addition of them I started about a year ago has been quite valuable. Other than that, I will just tackle more low-hanging fruit for dialogue variations.

As for our freelancers, here's their activities:

RPGMaker Dev

Our assistant developer Trihan will be further improving the Deluxe Console by improving the character customization menu into a proper character editor (already available in a plugin we are using for the dynamic run-time assembly of Aura's pixel char, but needs to be adjusted). The goal is to then also carry over this functionality over to Liora so you will be able to customize Liora's appearance on-the fly without needing clauses.

Trihan will also be working on a "clause selection menu" for Liora which we can then use to implement the ability to select & remove clauses that have already been negotiated. It will probably be limited to combat clauses imposed on Edgar so in case you aren't happy with one, you remove it. Lewd clauses will probably not be removable to keep the corruption progress monotonicly increasing.

Finally, he will be doing some refactoring work on the Roland NPC which is spaghetti incarnate.

2D Art

For Emubi, there is no change to the art plan. As for deniis, here is the projection for the next two months:

The first goal is to finish up the remaining tier 1 corruption costumes & hair styles. For each, one more is missing: For the costumes, a frilly super girly-pink dress costume, kind of going into a bimbo direction, and for the hair style, the side tail hair style will be making a return.

Then the focus will shift to a new class of assets: Reusable cutin effects. This will be used for generic actions that won't be getting a full CG to keep the costs with all the costume and hair style variations manageable. For example the ass groping event during the Rean Date will show a Groping Ass cutin.

I also plan to support in-combat triggering of harrassment actions by Edgar if Rean is out of commission (and probably if Liora is wearing lewd clothing). They will also use these cutins for visual representation.

In September, we will continue with the cutin work and then focus on raising the lewd bar by moving on to handjobs. Likewise, I plan to focus on expanding the masturbation scenes with dildo variations to further progress the lewd progression on that front.

Should there be time left-over in this month, it will be spent on creating dedicated compendium icons for the individual body parts that get lewder with increasing sensitivity as we already have it in SKA.

Aaand that's about it!