A Royal Pain

Not very happy where progress on the game is right now. But, what else is new?

As you might have been able to tell by the fact that blog posts the  last three weeks have been two posts from Conash and one week of… Conash  and I forgetting there had to be a blog post. Also, the schedule on the  website never got updated.  But, if we were to spend this blog post detailing my many small failures, we’d be here for awhile, so I’ll move  on. 

We’re behind, is the important thing. Conash seems confident that  we’ll get the core stuff done, but the “Royal” update will,  unfortunately, be going to go out without a lot of content for the  “Royal” it was initially intended to celebrate.

Maybe I’m just being pessimistic. The real Iron Waifu reward is  probably best celebrated with Quinta’s love quest, which will be part of  v0.43, coming out in November. We’ll not have to rush our way through  any preceding quests, just focus on the love quest, new art, dialogue,  sex scenes, etc, and putting out a really great, um, “Princess” update  or something.

I still think that the quest capping off the Kellos Invasion, where  you finally get to recruit Quinta, will still be a nifty piece of  content- similar in size to “Hell to Pay” but with a very different feel  and direction. It has more of a “heist” vibe than the drama of finally  hunting down Xaven, though, which has proven a challenge to express.  Conash and I feel we sort of hit the apogee of what RPG Maker is capable  of in terms of stealth mechanics in Shipping Disaster, and besides,  sneaking around is not what the Hero is made for, anyway.

In some good news, we also made some progress on stuff for ILTSDK.  Namely, a semi-finalized list of enemies. Er, heroes. Adventurers. The  people invading your dungeon. Because the nature of ILTSDK is more  strategic, it’s very important to our design that you, as a player, be  able to figure out an attacker’s behaviours just by looking at them, and  that means having a limited number of enemies.

Right now, ILTSDK is in a state where we’re laying plans still and  feeling out the limits of what we’re going to need, including what we’ll  require for art assets. I intend to fight hard against feature creep  for our next project, So knowing in advance the extent of our plans ,  and what we can choose to expand on is very important.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll get in touch next week with an update on how things have been getting the backer release ready!