[Devlog] Development challenges and progress

Hey friends

I hope you are having a wonderful day

Today I want to write a little about the challenges I’m facing when designing and developing an RPG.

Since I already told about the delay on Deviance, I started working on a new project, codenamed “Castle”. 

For this project I wanted it to be bigger than my current small projects, but smaller than Deviance. This to me is mostly translated to mechanics, the more “realtime” stuff, the more complex it becomes and more time-demanding it is. At the same time, I have been wanting to do a RPG for quite some time, and with Deviance development going so slow due to the nature of working on a new engine, with a baseline slower iteration speed, I decided to make this new game an RPG.

So something along the lines of Persona, or the old Final Fantasy games came to my head. 

What are the first challenges for this project then?

[Super raw parts of player movement and the player "base"]

First I would need to make a way to traverse the world, while not fighting, and decide either on a top-down view, or a third person view. 

Second, I would need to make a combat system, where characters can fight, but without going through the whole soulslike style complexity. 

Third, I would need to make a good system for adding the adult content to the game and make it interact with the world.

Since I already made a prototype for a soulslike on unity, I already had some of these systems, yet I decided to go on a turn-based combat, because I don’t want to just make Deviance but on unity, and also because debugging and adding more functionalities to realtime weapon clashing combat is much more time demanding than working on turn-based, at least for me.

So I ended with an interesting compromise: 

While not on combat the player could walk the work and interact with stuff, but when entering combat I will be using a turn-based, ATB system (Active Time battle!). 

How is this different from traditional turn based combat?

Each character has their own turn gauge, and once it is filled, they can take their turn. This allows for a lot of interesting possibilities, where the player is more powerful and faster than most minions, yet it may sometimes end up fighting up to 5 enemies at the same time!

There will also be a setting for pausing the game during your turn, so you can read your attacks and abilities without any rush or pressure.

One of the main advantages of going turn-based is that I feel like I have complete control over it, and I can focus on adding complexity via status effects, spells and special abilities, so I can go more deep with this system.

[First concept, donde inside kinky fight club 2, enemies will be farther away on the demo]

So in a way, this game will be a mix between Solas city Heroes and Kinky Fight Club 2. The player’s character will have both a Combat talent tree and an Ero talent tree, so player will be able to customize their fighting style and their fucking style without one obstructing the other. Player will also be able to choose between a bunch of different melee weapons or spells to use, allowing them to build their own characters!

During combat, there will be two important mechanics to pay attention:

Block: Like most games, there will be a defensive option to just block attacks and receive less damage, but, some special attacks from enemies will have a bonus effect that only happens when the attack is not blocked or dodged!

Interrupt: There will also be spells being cast, and if those are not interrupted they can do all sorts of nasty stuff, starting from just some damage to all kinds of bonus effects.

Examples of the bonus effects range from massive damage, stuns, poisoning, putting a restraint (or two!) on the player, or even just straight up start a sexual interaction!

[First concept for the combat talent tree progression and possibilities, starting from the center]

For game overs, I will be using a system similar to the one in Solas City Heroes, where whenever you cum you will lose some Willpower. If you run out of Willpower you will be captured (or just respawn on the city if you disable that module). Whenever you rest/sleep, you recover your Willpower, and there will be talents to modify these things.

Right now the challenge is to not only make all these systems, (from which, because of my incremental development style, I have the basis for the systems) but also make a whole architecture to support the interactions of those systems and the sex and bondage system.

So how is the progress on this?

I have been working a lot, like, a lot, and as such progress on this project is really fast. I’m very confident I will have a first demo ready for september. (It is insane to me the difference on speed when developing on unity vs unreal, I wish everything on Unity looked as cool as on unreal)

Of course a first demo will not have all the features and modules added, but I’m planning to include the player’s most loved features on the game, such as:

• Bondage

• Heavy bondage

• Capture system

• Threesomes

• All the 200 sex animations

• New Heavy restraints (such as the sybian, or wooden horse)

• Dialogues with important choices to make

• Having a companion*

*While the game is intended to be one vs many, I plan to add summon spells, and the possibility for a party member to go with you, so they can assist you with fighting (or you can assist them!), however this is more complicated than other features and may end up being added a bit later than the rest.

All in all progress is going great on this, I think by the end of July I could have ended the core gameplay part, and start looking into the world part of the game (as I don’t have a level designer anymore haha) and figure out what to do with the overworld and “dungeons”.

That’s all I have for today friends, I just wanted to tell you a bit about the work I've been doing lately, and what I still have to do.

This last week I was working a bit more on Kinky Fight Club 2. I'm remaking the Story mode, so it is more fun and simple.

Have a great weekend friends!

Cheers!