Project Plan November

After a bit of a messy October with all the delays and the interference from the business development shooting into the development pipeline, I think we can finally go back to our usual business with this month.

It's a Liora month and the beginning of a new part: With the release of the 0.8.0 release we have reached the roughly 60% mark of the game's completion and the end of Part 3, the Midgame. We are now in the weird spot where the first game ending is not yet far off, only about 8 more months until its planned that you can challenge Barbatos and get the good ending; but also only just a bit above the 50% mark and still only a little bit less than half left to go.

The big idea of Part 4 is to make the move from "corruption of the body" to "corruption of the heart/mind" (First Half). The second half of it will be in Part 5.

Before go into the week-by-week breakdown, I first want to do a quick recap to where we stand, so we can better discuss the big picture ideas of Part 4.

Because it means talking about lewd stuff I will need to put a paywall around it...

• Part 1: We developed the foundation of the game, including the contract system.

• Part 2: Expanded on the corruption system to allow Liora to go from allowing groping to allowing sex.

• Part 3: Created the consequences of triggering lewd contracts in the form of body corruption.

• Now Part 4: Create the consequences of body corruption in the form of mind corruption.

If we consider body corruption to be a consequence of the contract clauses, then we are now at the consequences of the consequences :'D As to examples for what kind of mind corruption we will be doing, I think that will become clear when we discuss this month's weekly breakdown.

One more item before we go there: My goal for this part isn't quite to reach the point where Liora falls, but get her into the spot for that in Part 5. My current plan for Part 5 is that it will introduce two "finisher" game states, one focused on Decay and one focused on Lewdness.

I will talk more about the Decay one when we get to Part 5, for the Lewdness one I plan to do the staple story of where the antagonist leaves the Heroine alone - removing her obligations as a gift of goodwill - but the sexual frustration eventually brings her back to him and things then get worse and escalate from there. This phase will then lock you into the corruption ending.

The goal of Part 4 is to prepare us to get there.

Now with the scope of Part 4 set in place, let's discuss how this update will concretely contribute to our goals.

Week 1: Liora will be getting some more reaction scenes as her lewdness progresses. Not sure how much I will be diving into this, my plan here is mostly just to work on some minor scenes I had in mind.

Then now that Part 3 has significantly increased the number of H-CGs for sex, I can finally do the next level of masturbation scenes: Liora fantasizing about having sex with Edgar while she masturbates. This will simply use the regular sex CG for Liora's imagination, which is why it was important that we first reduced its usage by introducing the other scenes - or else I would probably get murdered for using that H-CG so many times. :'D

Then we will be doing a sort of "level 2" for Edgar. As Liora's Submissiveness increases, he will unlock new Harass skills. Kissing during combat, double harassment actions, and his Quick Harass will improve so that he can use it while Rean is in the party even if not KOed.

Week 2: Essentially a continutation of week 1. This time focusing on advancing sexual service, so Liora will change her reaction to servicing Edgar, drinking cum, etc. The CG will be the same, we definitely are not ahead of schedule there to allow for a separate CG for higher corruption variations.

Finally, we will get started with a new mechanic: Habits. As Liora keeps triggering various social clauses, she will become so used to them that she will perform the actions even if the contract doesn't compel her to it. For example giggling at Edgar's jokes even if you reached the 1 trigger per day.

Once it has become a habit, Edgar may also graciously offer Liora to remove the clause either as super low valued negotiation option or as a gift, I'm not sure if I will go down this route. It would help in triggering the habit effect more often to show Liora's change, and would help in relationship building and also have the nice side effect of decluttering the contract. We will see.

Week 3: It's been a while since I last worked on Highwarden, but with all the new side content helping you get stronger, we should now be in the position to implement the first entrance which ironically will not be the first floor. I will be starting with the second floor of the Main Building which you can enter via a high AGI jump check. The reason for this is that it's planned to contain some impactful books which I want to introduce as soon as possible to evaluate their balance impacts.

Week 4: Back to lewd stuff. If our artist manages to finish the new cut-ins in time, we will be adding new clauses that compel Liora to wear dildos while out in the dungeons. The reason we need cutins for this is because I plan to have them reflected in the groping CGs, not sure yet if just subtly or in X-Ray style, currently tending towards the latter.

The rest is a bit of just buffer time and then we have a probably simple to implement but major story milestone: When you come back from dungeoneering and trigger a sexual frustration based lewd action, you will be able to go to Edgar and trigger a date with him. Of course, at this point Liora will have some excuses here like it's for improving their teamwork or something like that.

That's the content development plan. Let's take a look at the other stuff.

Business Development

After things had stalled in September while I was waiting for various registrations at the tax office to go through, I was finally able to make major progress here again in October. A lot has now been migrated to, I was able to register myself for I hope everything, perform my first salary payments to myself, put in the letters to avoid being taxed for both the corporate business and my old sole trader business, migrated to a new accounting software that can also deal with employees and so on and so forth. I'm glad I'm through with filling out so many tax interviews... And I think I already complained in a previous post how the corporate onboarding process for Paypal just completely failed me.

Anyways, the only things I have on my todo list now:

• Wait for Steam to approve my new corporate developer account and transfer my steam games over. (Beeing waiting for two weeks now...)

• Update my tax interview for itch.io - for some reason they don't have an automated way of doing that and you need to put in a support request... Which I put in two weeks ago....

• Some remaining payment stuff where I'm still using the old paypal because my new corporate paypal somehow still doesn't work as payment source ("hasn't built enough trust" according to paypal support).

• Have either my tax office or my accountant confirm that all the stuff I did in October was actually correct. (I will either find out when the tax office deducts/doesn't deduct the expected taxes or if my accountant replies... after now... a month.............)

• Finally unregister my old business.

The good news is that if everything worked out, the process for hiring a new employee in Germany is then very simple and just a matter of entering the person's data into my accounting software.

Aside from accounting stuff, I have also done a bunch of internal organizational things in my vacation week. Just light work of unifying various things into Google Workspace and improving documentation to make it easier to onboard new people in the future.

RPGMaker Dev

While not yet employed (as UK's tax office still hasn't picked up his case to apply for a taxation scheme that allows me to do so...) our assistant developer Trihan will begin working full-time from this month forward. So there are quite a few more items that usual in this section because of that. Rather than writing it out as I usually do, I will just copy paste his work plan and summarize the individual points. WP in the following stands for work package.

Content Work:

• WP 2.1: Implement 1 post-demoncracy character lewd scene (Liliana/Twins/Fleura) based on a manuscript written by our assistant writer Absurdity.

• WP 2.2: Create a first concept for the second trial quest. The defendant will be Luna.

UI Work:

• WP 2.3: Custom menu for negotiations.

Juice Work:

• WP 2.4: Improved general support for in-game environmental particle effects. (E.g. bubbles when you are underwater).

• WP 2.5: Improved battle flow by moving status effect and buff effects from battle log to popups over enemies.

• WP 2.6: Visual enemy drops.

I personally have not figured out how a good UI would look like for the negotiation system, so I'm curious as to what Trihan will come up with for WP 2.3.

WP 2.5 is a thing that you have probably seen in other RPGMaker games, I have been a bit hesistant towards it as we work a lot with states and make use of the battle log to warn/give hints to the player to the effect of a state. So we will need to see as how we best strike a balance her to improve the gameplay feel and the combat speed while maintaining the ability to transmit extra information through the battle log.

For our other freelancers, there isn't much to say. Our artists still have their pipeline filled with the art plan from last month. As you can see above, our assistant writer will be on to write new lewd scenes for post-demon-cracy content.

As for SKA, we just need the brothel H-CG and we will be ready for the 1.5.0-beta release.

Aaaand that's the plan for the month!