Dev Log — April 2025

Hi everyone, and thank you for all your patience!

The next update is finally very near completion! I am currently wrapping up any loose ends, making final validations of new features to minimize the number of stray errors on release, and looking for a suitable time to roll out the update.

Desires

This update is particularly massive! —and I realize now I should have bitten it into two updates so players could have enjoyed parts of the update sooner. I didn't expect the desire feature to unravel quite as many partial features, nor did I expect it to grow as exponentially as it did!

There are now more than 2,000 unique interactions through the desire feature, with a good pipeline for introducing even more in the future! The pipeline supports alternative events for different stages of size difference between players or their body parts, such as their genitalia, whichever is more applicable, and it can display variants of the same event messages to keep sexual actions fresh. In the future, I hope to hire an author from the community to assist with fleshing out the list, but for now, the desires are ready to be released with fewer variants upon release!

Inanimate Actions

With the introduction of desires, I've also made changes to how players use sex toys, and with it, I've added actions for inanimate characters, giving all inanimate players a bit more autonomy and the ability to better express themselves!

All inanimate players will be able to perform one action per minute, and every ninth action, they will be able to cast a form-specific spell, if their form allows for it.

Generally, inanimate players will need to be worn in order to perform actions, but inanimate players are also able to react whenever they are used. Say, when a Feather Duster is used to dust off an item, the Feather Duster can react to being used by its owner. Inanimate players also receive a reaction whenever they are picked up by a new owner, and for equipment, when they are removed.

This also means that when a Fleshlight or Onahole, etc. is used, the inanimate player can react to this interaction to show their owner how they feel about the interaction!

Using sex toys also no longer locks either the owner or the possession into a scenario, but instead displays potentially lengthy messages in local chat that describe the event, similar to emotes or sexual actions. For a long time, it's been an issue that an inanimate player would lose out while locked in a scenario, which will no longer be an issue, while also giving the inanimate player a more active role in how the scene plays out!

I have also made a more advanced messaging pipeline that can send custom messages to the inanimate player that might be used. For instance, if a player is licking another player's strap-on, which is an inanimate player, the scene will be described to the inanimate player from the perspective of the strap-on, instead of using a third-person perspective!

All-in-all, the next update will bring huge improvements to animate and inanimate players!

Foci & Cores

After watching my partner play Honkai Star Rail and helping them with min-maxing their characters, I was inspired to take another look at Foci and essences, now called cores, for Battle Mages.

I've updated the design document for those who want to read about the system in full: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wJWRbUzpo9nJJ9Uz-Nanb5Nvvjibons-Gp5IBKSyuNE

Crafting & Leveling Up Cores

Previously, core crafting was designed very similarly to crafting Last Epoch, which was the initial inspiration for the system. In Last Epoch, items have forge potential that allows you to alter the item, which provides no inherent benefits, otherwise, and players must find already great items and hope to make them exceptional using whatever forge potential is available and rare items to manipulate the item.

Honkai Star Rail takes a slightly different approach, where you must level up an item by fueling it with low-grade items before you can discover its potential, and you have incredibly limited means to manipulate the outcome.

For Battle Mages, I'd like to do a mix of the two, where players can fuel low-grade items to any dropped core, which will fill empty modifier slots and improve an item until it hits its upper limit, similar to Honkai Star Rail, but where 'forge potential' can be used to manipulate an item more significantly, similar to Last Epoch. It's the best of both worlds!

Set Bonuses

Relics in Honkai each belong to a set, and each set provides bonuses if you use multiple items from the same set. There are many benefits to having set bonuses:

• When introducing new effects, you can introduce a new set instead of flooding the modifier pool with an ever-increasing amount of modifiers

• Set bonuses can be much more impactful than modifiers and are easier to balance, because you can't stack the same set bonus multiple times, and because you can have powerful set bonuses require more or bigger items that take up space that could have been used for other bonuses

• Flavor!

Foci are heavily inspired by wands and other mythical or religious foci thought to channel your magical or spiritual powers, and the composite (core) of such a focus was often thought to be crucial, as represented in Harry Potter.

In Battle Mages, cores will fit into matching sets (say, a dragon's fang and a dragon's claw) that enhance the quality of your focus when used together.

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That's it for this month's dev log!

It's difficult to say exactly when the next update will go live, but I hope it will be late this month or early May at the latest!

Thank you for all your support, and thank you again for being patient with me!❤️

To the people who celebrate Easter, happy Easter! —and to everyone, I wish you all a wonderful time!

XOXO,

Tinon