Progress Update: Sound FX & Creator Thoughts

Happy New Year and Holidays!

Apologies for the lack of updates these past few weeks -- it's been pretty busy with the holidays and traveling this month.

I've been moving around a lot lately as I was "locked" out of my home country (USA) until December -- around April I left for vacation and due to that country's quarantine following the pandemic, I wasn't able to arrange for travel outside of the country. It wasn't too bad since I had my laptop and family to stay with until I was finally able to arrange for travel back to the US.

Now that I'm back in the US, I shouldn't be spending so much time moving around and reorganizing my life. Whew.

Now that that's out of the way, I want to give you all a heads up on what's next and what I've been working on.

In my last post I mentioned that I'm learning FMOD studio to add  custom audio and I've successfully managed to import some sound fx into Lustiest Lair! 

Some of the first monsters I'll be adding custom audio for is the Cursed Witch boss fight, the Slaver random encounter monster, and a new monster that I'll be spoiling next week Wednesday -- thanks again to Hersir for their fantastic work! :)

Audio: FMOD Studio & Sound Editing

When it comes to the audio that I've purchased so far, when I first heard some of it in-game, it wasn't exactly to my liking, so I've also picked up the audio editing software, Audacity, to start making adjustments to the audio -- so far it's just been small changes.

One thing I noticed is that Red Hook seems to add some audio effects to their sounds; that and they just edit their sounds in a certain way. It's subtle stuff, but their sound effects at least sound as if they're all occurring within the same scene or room (if that makes sense?). Some of the audio that I've received has some kind of reverb or small things that appear in the background that I need to edit out, adjust or mask in some way to get the audio to where I want it to be.

So I'm also learning about sound editing on top of the additional work that goes into modding Lustiest Lair -- I might consider seeing if I can just contract this sound stuff out later (by using Fiverr or some other marketplace), but so far I've been having fun with it and the clips I've been working with have only been between 1-3 seconds long, so it hasn't become too much of a time sink beyond the learning curve (as of yet). :)

I'm hoping to either upload the new creatures with the custom audio by the end of the month -- and update the Nexus version as well. I want to set deadlines for these things, but at the same time sometimes major things pop up and I'm tempted to say "Lustiest Lair will be delivered when it's ready" -- but I've seen what happens to projects that don't have deadlines (both on Patreon and at work) and I don't want that to happen here.

Speaking of things to come, Hersir has sent us another creature (a pair of monsters this time) -- this time involving hounds! I'm excited for them and I'll be spoiling their art next week Wednesday. Due to certain rules, I'm going to be taking some precautions with the art I upload here. You'll see what I mean next week.

Dev Thoughts:

The next section I just wanted to share some of my thoughts about Lustiest Lair here. I'll put a TL;DR at the bottom of the section.

Platforms for Lustiest Lair:

I've been considering uploading Lustiest Lair to the Steam Workshop for the longest time, but I've had a few hesitations about doing such a thing. For one, I'm not even sure it's Workshop appropriate -- considering a similar mod, Darkest Desires, was banned from the workshop. Secondly, while the reception of Lustiest Lair on the Nexus was very positive, Steam has a very different audience and I'm not entirely sure what reception to Lustiest Lair may look like -- assuming it's even appropriate for Steam Workshop.

On the other hand, one of the biggest benefits of it being on the workshop is that Lustiest Lair will automatically update to its newest version whenever a player loads up Darkest Dungeon -- it would certainly encourage me to post more updates and when getting feedback on bugs, balancing issues and so on, I'd know exactly which version of Lustiest Lair they're referring to.

Another massive benefit to this is the workshop will delete the appropriate files as well.

My hesitation currently is that I want to be 100% sure Lustiest Lair is allowable because there are so many benefits to uploading to the workshop and I wouldn't want to lose that privilege. I'm also going to "officially" release it on Patreon going forward -- on the off chance that someone might only look for the file here.

Gameplay:

The mechanics in Darkest Dungeon are limiting in their own ways, but also allow for some interesting interactions. For example, there's a lot of lewd potential in monsters that "capture" heroes. I'd love to expand on this and even create some "friendly" critters that capture heroes and give benefits to the captured hero and even their teammates. Considering you'll be down a hero for that portion of the fight, there should be upsides and downsides that can make something that feels so devastating more "fun" -- that and you'll get to see one of your ladies in a lewd situation. ;)

Additionally, there are effects in which a player or enemy can "summon" a monster. I've already created a few situations in Lustiest Lair where a "summoning" was implied as something else and I'd like to expand on that. One way is really expanding on the "Pregnancy" system, the pregnancies, as they currently are, are just "there".

I'd like for them to result in something if the player leaves them "unchecked". Similar to the Crimson Curse having an end result, I'd like the pregnancies to have their own as well.

Another way is the trinkets system. There's tons of potential with it and I'm aiming to make these items more "flavorful" as well as having interactions when a hero is "afflicted" or "virtued" since a large appeal of Lustiest Lair is your women losing their minds to lust.

On that note, when it comes to Afflictions and Virtues. The player should be encouraged to increase the lust of their ladies and get rewarded for that -- it'll still be risky, of course, since a hero can still be enslaved if their lust gets out of control. But I feel like with the Stress mechanic splitting it into just a "Good" result and "Bad" result makes it less interesting. It's certainly stressful, which I suppose works fine for Darkest Dungeon, but I want it to feel "lustful" so it works for Lustiest Lair -- and that brings me to the "flavor" side of this mod...

Storytelling & Dialogue:

I've always wanted to tell a story with Lustiest Lair. When I initially released Lustiest Lair, the first thing I wanted to do was see if there was interest in a sexually-themed Darkest Dungeon mod which would lewdify just about everything. In order to get the thing released, this led me to just making everything "sexy" or "lewd" in some way even if it didn't make sense or fit thematically for the direction I wanted to eventually take Lustiest Lair.

A lot was put in to be sexy for the sake of being sexy -- granted, I want Lustiest Lair to be very sexy, that's its appeal after all. :)

But I'm also interested in creating a plot -- instead of it just being Darkest Dungeon + Sex, I want it to be, well, Lustiest Lair. It needs to feel like it's own world, with it's own rules, cults and monsters in which all of this fits together and "feels right". It'll still be lewd, sexy and degenerate as hell, of course. :) But it will look and feel like a world crafted for groups of lewd heroes with their own motivations getting into erotic situations to fulfill their own desires.

That brings up the methods in which modding DD allows us to tell a story -- the obvious ways are the journals, but I'm not interesting in just dumping a bunch of text -- instead I want to leave the journals as interesting side stories and tales that occur within the world while the main story is told through gameplay.

The second method is the monsters themselves -- their designs, the way they fight, the names of their attacks, the items they carry and their environments should tell a story as well. Fortunately, a lot of mods have been released on the Nexus lately that change up each of the environments and some of the items -- I'm interested in in writing in that direction to fit thematically with these mods -- I'm considering reaching out to these creators at some point later as well, fingers crossed on that one.

The third method, which is the most impactful for DD, is the narrator. It's also the most difficult to mod. The reason for that is the steps involved in this process. The first step is finding a fantastic voice actress to record hundreds (if not thousands) of lines of dialogue. Then there's writing dialogue for this actress that doesn't come across as "cringey" which a lot of erotic dialogue tends to. My personal temptation is recording the dialogue in some foreign language (or a made up one -- what would a "Succubus language" sound like?) and having the dialogue show up as a "translation" instead via the subtitles feature.

One could just as well create their own game instead of dealing with the limitations that modding Darkest Dungeon provides -- but then it becomes work. And treating Lustiest Lair as a mod/passion project has proven to be inspiration enough for me to want to see this through.

Timelines:

As I mentioned above, I want to set deadlines so that this project doesn't fall by the wayside. I'm aware that this might lead to issues such as bugs, balancing and myself not always being satisfied with what I've published. At the same time, I get a lot of valuable feedback which helps me improve in future releases. I'd like to keep a balance of these things going forward.

The reason I bring up timelines, deadlines and bugs, is because I've been playing a game that "should've" been held back and not released when it was -- I'm sure you know which game I'm talking about here ;) -- but I realized, despite the bugs, I've enjoyed the experience and don't regret supporting the developers of this game and still want to see it reach its fullest potential -- and I realize that's how you guys feel about Lustiest Lair! You're supporting Lustiest Lair and you see the potential in this project and are helping it to fulfill that potential.

Which brings me to communication.

Communication:

Now that I see myself having more time for non-modding stuff for Lustiest Lair once more -- being cozy and back in my home country that is -- I plan on spending more time going forward towards "community outreach".

Really what that means is I'm going to be spending the next couple of days responding to the backlog of comments, DMs and bug reports that I've received that I haven't had time to respond to.

Personally, I feel like I've "gone dead" quite a handful of times these past few months when it comes to Lustiest Lair and it's not something I like doing -- but surprisingly, life's gotten even busier following the lockdown. Business for my dayjob has actually picked up rather than died down and I've had to adjust to life in a foreign country until only very recently.

TL;DR:

I want to publish Lustiest Lair to Steam Workshop, but I want to make sure I won't be banned from uploading there by doing that.

I want to make some more changes to the gameplay for Lustiest Lair, I want it to play similarly to DD still, but some things need to be changed so it works for Lustiest Lair too.

I want to rewrite a lot of dialogue I wrote initially for Lustiest Lair because I want to make something that's not only sexy, but sexy & plot-driven.

Deadlines are important and I'm going to keep making them instead of not making them and delaying releases.

Things have calmed down a bit here and I'll have more time for communication.