Immersive Buxom Wench Yuriana O.o

This is a post to talk what I was doing lately including some stuff I talked about on discord too. ;)

To help me get the update sooner I decided to better reduce the scope of what I had planned and mentioned in previous posts, I will talk about what I will "cut" until is ready and why.

Arabella's Quest

Oh boy, this had a lot of attempts to be completed and I always felt it was not the way I should do it. The thing about Arabella is that in the mod "her role" was changed a lot of times, remember that she was the one finding the player before? That even changed several times too. These kinds of things left "spaghetti code" related to her. I tried to adapt the wip quest about her for how the mod works now but I dont think it will work.

Another thing about Arabella is that as Yuriana she pretty much has a "Wench" and "Slave" path that is shared with the options for Yuriana so her quest should be adapted to that too.

The update will set the "base stuff" for all wenches and I can start with her after things are set, giving her an interesting quest similar to Ethel's quest. I think for her it's worth it. She is one of my favorite wenches and I think for several people too ;)

Khythaela's Quest

Different issues like her needing a different custom home and handling Chadrus. Currently I think I'm not exactly improving her that much and it just feels "rushed", I think she needs a dedicated update for her similar to Arabella, well, maybe not that specific since she is somewhat involved with other things (Yulia and the priestesses) that I think it's more about them. So I better leave her for later. Still some minor tweaks about her like being able to unsummon Chadrus.

Subjugated Wenches and Salla

 This is not working as intended for a long time, mainly because of getting duplicated wenches when trying to capture subjugated wenches, I tried to set this in different ways to avoid that but I think the issue is still the randomness of this and I think it's better for it to work in a more controlled way. Other "issue" is that Sanbri/Raca's quest is related to this and I think I should just make that a prerequisite to this (it pretty much is anyway). I think removing the randomness of this and actually placing the subjugated wenches would be better, I may remove the current random spawns since I think some "trained wench slaves" (who are a weaker version of subjugated wenches) are enough for random encounters.

Another thing about this is that it was planned to add Subjugated Wenches mini bosses (Salla's friends) similar to how Salla works in the mod but they dont just spawn from bandits but other places too. They are mentioned in some books so they should be added too.

Slave system

 I think the current system should be focusing mainly in the humiliation options. I think the main different here compared to other "slave mods" is that it should be more about the buxom wenches reactions related to the curse or not and also the new true self options. That's why I think I better set this after that is working as intended.

Reducing "True Self" options to 3 instead of 6When setting options for this I noticed that in some cases the options were to similar, I thought it could be fine to share some here and there but I finally decided to better just focus on the three options I always though which are basically being "good", "evil" or "pervert". I always put them in quotes since I don't consider the options to be always following "their idea" and that's why I named them The Guardian, The Tyrant and The Deviant instead.

As mentioned I think this also should be related to the slave system.

The three options shown in the pic above will be in the next update.

Dungeons Boss Room

I think I will leave some dungeons as just "boss rooms" to start with the scripting related to them working and them improve them later on, similar to how it was done with the cannibal dungeon which was way simpler than what it was now (It's not even finished yet u.u)

I'll still not sure If I should just add simple corridors with very simple navmeshing and some enemies to make it more like a dungeon though, but I'm mentioning this just in case :P

There are some other "minor things" like an outfit system, proofreading more books, dialogues, questlogs, etc or more parades so I will leave that for another post o.o

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See what I mentioned above as something I will add in the future so now let's talk about what is going to be in the next update, specially related to my recent inspiration to make "Immersive Buxom Wenches/Slaves" o.O

Stuff that will be included in the next update no matter what!

Yuriana's quest restructured and the new main quest

This is the main and big thing that will change about the mod. As I mentioned before Yuriana's quest will be something like Ethel's quest. Yuriana's quest could be considered more related to the main quest than Ethel's quest but that doesn't mean it can't be considered optional too. You can even get the ending/credits of the mod without even rescuing Yuriana. The main quest will be more about the player and the Enslavement Curse.

The main idea about these changes is also to reduce the "unneeded steps" of Yuriana's quest, in previous versions things/quests were added just to give the player something to do but that ended up making the mod (in my opinion) very long even to test it and made some things related to the previous main quest like Ashra quest and the unfinished Arabella quest very difficult to get to.

Optional quests like the poster/card quest will stay almost the same, they are optional after all but some quests like getting Yuriana's shield will be removed or will be optional too.

Yuriana's quest will technically end when she gets to the temple in some path, you can say that's where her quest ends, the player rescues/claims her and she is no longer the bandit's slave. After that the "progress of quest" will be about "situational quests" that people can do or not.

For example this is how Enslaved Inquiry will start, just going and finding Hewnryr with Yuriana, this is the idea of a "situational quest"  that is not related to the main quest or Yuriana's quest, you can call it an optional "Yuriana quest". So why do this kind of thing? mainly because I can later on add more "situational quests" related to Yuriana or other wenches and those don't need to be "hard-wired" to their quests or their stages. You can start this quest right after getting Yuriana from Riverwood or whenever she is with you, obviously some things and mentions could change like Yuriana not mentioning she is looking for Ashra since she already found her or that she has accepted being a slave in the slave path.

I think this way of setting the quests helps me to make and add more quests and also gives the player the choice to do or not some quests instead of just following a really long linear quest.

Skyrim is an old game and I think most people play the game from time to time, just to walk around and try some new mods or specially try what new things I added to the mod :P

I think making the quests somewhat "modular" helps since people can choose what quests to do again or not. Some wenches will still require some quests to get them but I think it would be better than having to do all the main quest over and over again.

"Wenches situations" is also something I will start to add for Yuriana and eventually other wenches, this works in a similar way to how "situational quests" work where something is triggered when X wench is in Y place or meets Z NPC. In these cases a quest log pointing out the player what to do is not needed and it's more about following the interactions or dialogues, I guess it could be said these could be considered "quests" but there won't be markers or anything like that.

New Quests

Most new quests will be related to the new main quest but they will be optional too. They will follow the same structure Yuriana quest will have which is having a "main quest" for a wench that after completed situational quests/wenches situations are available related to that wench.

As mentioned several things will change related to several wenches quest too. I think the mod will feel shorter but that's also part of the idea of making more things optional. I will try to set them as bugfree as possible cleaning some unfinished stuff. The mod is still a wip but I think having minor things unfinished like books without images for example tend to make the mod feel buggy when that was actually something intended. I think it's better to disable things that are not ready to avoid that.

By optional quest now I mean any quest that doesn't exactly lead you to the credits of the mod. Technically you can also ignore the main quest, pretty much like with Skyrim lol

Trainers

I mentioned this before and it's pretty much a replacement of the current trait scrolls, I think this works in a better way and it makes sense since paying some gold should be enough to change the traits of some wenches, obviously with some limitations like not all wenches would agree to become a prostitute for example, or at least not that easily. Same with turning rebel wenches into submissive ones, like the scrolls this is more a way to change them until those wenches have more quests related to them where they could be changed by the player, which should be more fun :P, so see this more as a helpful option to change some wenches in a more immersive way since the scrolls feel like cheating.

Immersive Buxom Wench Yuriana and npcs interactions

In previous posts I mentioned that NPCs should react to Yuriana and the other wenches but I think I was making a mistake focusing too much on that when the wenches themselves need to react more.

For example when Yuriana is being paraded around Riverwood, Goragz and the other "guards" have idle dialogues talking about her but Yuriana doesn't say anything unless the player talks to her, I think it makes sense they will order her to say something.

Yuriana being "aware" of what's going on in Skyrim main quest is something I think it should be added but to start I think she should react more about her own quest

She should have more things to say depending on her quests, or her situation as a slave or not

I still think adding dialogues to the wenches so they could talk about themselves is important but I think it works better if some things are just random comments. Yuriana could say several things while traveling or in a specific point of her quest, like wishing Ashra is ok before finding her or thinking what could she do about her situation as an undead after finding her.

Adding a main dialogue like "What are your thoughts?" that have random responses could be fine but I think they would work better just as idle dialogues, I still wonder if they could end up being too repetitive but I also think the way to solve this is adding more, also I will add an option to control how often they trigger.

For now I will start with Yuriana and I will try to add several reactions to several situations that could work for her. These dialogues also only work when voiced so I will always try to voice them and leave other regular dialogues unvoiced for now.

I will also try to check some of those AI mods that make npcs talk, I'm not sure what they could do exactly, I assume it's more about making a npc talk on demand, so you have to ask something first. I guess eventually they will get to the point where the wenches talk more by themselves like having conversations with other npcs, that would be cool.

In any case the idea is to make mainly the wenches feel more "alive". Before I didn't care that much about them talking but after seeing the lifeless NPCs of Avowed it inspired me to make the wenches better. I still think npcs reacting to the wenches is also important but as mentioned wenches should react even more!

ETA

Soooooooonnn

Yup, I wish it was last year, I even mentioned on Discord that this is going to be the last time I take that much time for an update, that's why the structure of the mod is changing to make future updates a little easier with what I mentioned about situational quests and I also always wanted to update Immersive Wenches which I would like also to be out of beta.

So how soon? I'm 99% sure before: Half Life 3, GTA 6, TES VI, FO5, Bloodborne 2, Sekiro DLC, Hollow Knight Silksong, Skyrim Remake, the end of time.

Soooo almost there o.o

I don't think I'm missing something but please let me know if you have any questions or doubts. Thanks for supporting the mod and patiently waiting for more stuff. Have a nice week ;)

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P.D: I also just wanted to mention some things I shared on Discord that maybe some missed about trying to make the mod more immersive:

I will most likely remake the posters and add optional versions of them like the one above, even tweaking it more like changing the word "slaves" to "servants" but still implying what is really going on. This is also a way to add SFW options for the posters since that was something requested for a long time. As mentioned it will be optional so if you prefer the current posters you can still have them around.

Lately I was also generating some ai images based on screenshots and I'm still not sure if I should add them to the mod in some way like with cards or maybe as part of the wenches books, maybe making them look more "rustic" could work. Sharing for the ones who may like them :P

Some good enough others fine I guess. In the last ones I was trying to make some Pathfinder portrays for the wenches. In any case just something I shared. Besides remaking the posters I dunno if I should add this kind of stuff to the mod in some way, maybe it's more about finding a good model/style that goes with Skyrim, we will see. Just a side thing that I thought it was worth sharing ;)