Devlog and Miscellaneous Thoughts

So this post has been sitting in Drafts for a while, and I thought I'd add some "what we're working on" to the front of it here, and then get into the nitty gritty details of design and design philosophy down further below.

What we're currently working on: the Ogre Femme animation, the colon animation display, improving animation mixing in general (noticeable on the harpy, centaur, and Fire Elemental, as well as the lust orb), adding more rectum statuses with cumming cocks and the like, little sperm and heart particle effects for the stomach and penis respectively, sperm amount indications in the combat log, skill selection quick jumping, and adding a lot more information to  the Help screen.

Next we'll be working on Kylira expansion, Lewd Energy Attacks, the remaining character portraits, and then probably a new CG. :D

So, on design:

We've been balancing competing interests for a while: making ToA into a repository for sexy scenes with art, and making ToA into a fun game to play.

I say "competing", but it's not like they're diametrically opposed - only that on occasion working to maximize one is counterproductive for the other, or that it can be difficult, but not impossible, to maximize both. 

The primary focus has always been the sexiness, while making sure to push the needle forward on laying groundwork for gameplay systems that need to be in place. Things like balance normally come much later, once everything is more or less settled, but we have made some effort to make sure that things are somewhat reasonable. That being said, sometimes the elements which will balance an existing over or under-powered gameplay aspect are not yet implemented - and balancing them in their existing state just leads to more effort to rebalance later once these new elements are in place.

The plan has always been to add scenes and fun sexy scenarios with some light-weight gameplay integration - stat checks, resource management, character attributes changing, etc. - and then add the heavier, more tightly designed integration later once there's plenty of content to find no matter which direction you go.  If you've found yourself wondering "I'm given two options, but one is clearly better for my resources," this is why - we're designing with getting content accessible, avoiding things like continuity errors and the like, and strict gameplay balancing is, yet, a lower priority. 

One aspect of the transition to tighter gameplay integration is is breaking up some of the monolithic encounters, and creating a bunch of mini-scenarios that share characters and mechanics. We're starting to see this with things like the harpy egg-stealing encounter, or the brigand thief. 

Don't worry, there will be more "serial" encounters as well, and we'll try to keep a nice mix of the more spontaneous encounters and continuous side-quests, mini-stories and the like.

One design point that's going to become important for this is how we treat characters - as individuals, or as species. And I think where we're landing is somewhere in between, possibly to the point of having characters that represent a species as well as more generic members of said species. This isn't that different from other common enemies in games - "goomba" and "slime" as a species have their own characterizations, separate from any characters which may happen to be a goomba or a slime. We'll definitely be differentiating characters from their stereotypes (the more generic representatives) visually.

That being said, some characters are going to be the only representative of their species and are characters in their own right - the Dullahan being a prime example. While there will certainly be more werewolves and harpies, goblins and orcs, there will only be one Dullahan. Cherish her.