Mortis Invicta — MORE LOOP Update: From cannibalizing your ship to whipping daemons with your purified whip

Guys, this week has been absolutely hectic… this loop system has been driving me insane. The build crashed a few times, and I ended up getting stuck in hours of completely unproductive bug hunts. Jeez. But I’m actually pretty satisfied with the design. It’s nothing fancy because, well, this is still Ren’Py, but I think I really like the idea.

I’m trying to design the game so the systems feel intuitive and simple, so I REALLY HOPE IT WORKS. Sometimes it’s honestly easier to complicate everything than it is to make something simple and fun… especially with a busy mind like mine. If you know what I mean…

This week, I’ve mostly been working on the ship economy. Well, if your ship is stranded in the Warp, you’re obviously not going to be using money like normal. So the basic philosophy is pretty simple: you cannibalize your own ship. You salvage whatever can still be used, tear apart broken equipment, and turn whatever you recover into Supplies.

So, here’s the loop…

Salvage Hunt + Fighting Daemons

During Salvage Hunt, you’ll move through different rooms around the ship and search for equipment that can still be salvaged. Broken batteries, damaged servos, spare parts, random equipment… basically anything you can tear apart and turn into Supplies.

But I didn’t want Salvage Hunt to just be a safe little click-click activity, so I made it a bit risky. Some items can explode if you mess with the wrong thing.

and sometimes you’ll also get chased by daemons while trying to salvage stuff. You can stop them from stealing your Supplies by whipping them with your purified whip… and yes, there is NSFW art for it, which of course I can’t show publicly because of Patreon policy… but this is more or less a little sneak peek of it.

You’ll be able to tap them to whip them, and I intentionally made a lot of daemons float around on screen so it feels more frantic and gives that nice frenzy feeling.

Anyway, these daemons also come in both futa and non-futa versions.

The Supplies you collect will then be used for different things around the ship.

One of them is: cooking.

You can collect recipes and then cook certain items in the Mess Hall. But every time you cook something, it costs Supplies.

Later on, as I expand this system, you’ll also be able to start fixing things and upgrading different parts of the ship, even your kitchen, so you can make food with better effects.

The Action Point system is also working now, and I’ve started adding items that can restore or increase your AP. So eventually there’ll be more reason to cook, save certain items, and manage your resources if you want to do more things during the day.

Next week’s plan
I’m going to start working on what happens when a retinue member’s corruption level maxes out. If one of them becomes too corrupted, they’ll be thrown into the brig. From there, the player will be able to decide what to do with them. The plan is for the brig system to eventually develop into different alternative NSFW interactions that are separate from the relationship route.

For this update, almost everything is still text-based for now. I really want to make sure the loop and the systems are actually fun first before I start putting too much artwork into everything. In future updates, I’ll slowly start adding art for these systems, events, and interactions one by one.

Schedule

The Mortis Invicta update is still on track for September 30. But I’ll probably need your help with bug hunting before release. If everything goes according to plan, I might give the bug hunt build to high-tier patrons around September 25, so there are a few days to find issues before the public update goes out.

So yeah, this week has mostly been about making the ship actually feel like a place you need to manage in order to survive: tearing things apart, collecting Supplies, cooking, managing AP, and slowly watching everything get more and more messed up because of the Warp.

That’s it for now… I need to get back to work.

I honestly didn’t expect setting up a loop like this to be this complicated. It really needs a stupid amount of attention to detail.

I REALLY hope it isn’t buggy and everything actually works the way it’s supposed to… *Anxiety kicks in.

Cheers,
Celeng