April News Update (Patrons only)

Hey again.

Time for the monthly news update. Today, I'll talk a little about some of the mechanics in "The Art Of Diplomacy...And Love" and "Private Eyes & Secret Desires". I'll also lay out the roadmap on how development will proceed.

But first, a note regarding "The Point of No Return": I uploaded version 1.0a, which mostly fixes typos and grammar issues, but also includes fixes for some rare pathing errors, to my itch.io page. This will be the main place to download the game from now on, with TPoNR being finished and this page focusing on my new projects.

So, let's proceed, first with a look at "Diplomacy".

"The Art Of Diplomacy...And Love"

If you've played the teaser, you've noticed that there weren't any kind of real game mechanics implemented yet. So, with the next release, this will change. Let's get into that:

What you cane see above, is the personality stats screen of the MC. You can also see, that the slider will be in the neutral "middle ground" position on every scale, at the start, giving the players the chance to determine the overall personality themselves. This will happen over time, via decisions. The personality of the MC will also determine the type some of the decisions, the player can choose from.

The first scale will have a big influence on the diplomacy related tasks. Will the MC be an uncompromising hothead? Or a naive appeaser? Or will he go for a more balanced approach?

The second scale will influence, again, mainly the diplomacy tasks. Let's say, that down the line, the MC gets the task to solve a dispute between two bickering nobles. Maybe one of the nobles will try to bribe him with money. Or, if it's a lady, with a "good time". Well, a MC, who is more on the corrupt side of the scale, will have the option to agree to such advances. An honest one, not so much. However, some Love Interests prefer honest men...

The third scale is pretty straight-forward. Who wants to be craven, after all? But then again, sometimes, being a little weasel can get you out of trouble.

And then we have the fourth scale. This one will very much affect the MC's love life. Will he be a romantic, who's looking for true love? Or will he chase after every skirt and be a no-good pervert, who only cares about satisfying his sexual appetite?

To finish this little talk about the MC stats, here is the skill screen. These skills are pretty self-explanatory and will help the players to get positive outcomes on some of their decisions (or not, if the skill level isn't up to snuff). There will be opportunities to buff these skills, over the course of the game.

Now, with the MC stats out of the way, let's get into the Love Interest stats. Above is a screenshot, showing Neela's personality stats, as an example. As you can see, unlike with the MC personality stats, these aren't starting off at a middle ground. Each LI has a unique set of stats, which require different approaches to win them over. F.e., free-spirited ones won't like getting talked down to, cynics aren't particulary interested in the idea of love, prudes won't be easy to convince to jump into bed with the MC.

However, their personalities can change over time, via MC interactions. But this won't be a quick process...and there might be unforseen consequences.

And finally, we have the affection meter, which also is pretty self-explanatory. This, plus the LI's and MC's personalities, will be the deciding factors for what kind of love scenes the players will get.

Private Eyes & Secret Desires

This news update wouldn't be complete, without getting into "Private Eyes" mechanics. They are similiar to "Diplomacy"s mechanics, but not quite the same.

 Above is the stat screen of the female MC, with her default settings. The one of the male MC looks pretty much the same, just switch the potrait positions of MMC and FMC. It's pretty straight-forward, just that I'm not working with a scale with sliders as the relationship indicator here, and instead chose words as the variables. So, f.e., "disdain" can change over time (depending on the outcome of her decisions) to "dislike", then to "ambivalent", then to "warming up". And so, she could actually fall for her new boss and fall out of love with the MC...or not.

Now, below the relationship stats, you have the corruption meter. This keeps you up to date with the MC's morality. Basically, more corruption means, that, while solving cases, our MC's might use some less moral (and potentially quite saucy) choices. Or they take on cases, that a moral upstanding detective wouldn't take. And it, of course, also determines the likelihood of betraying their partner...

The Roadmap for the future

Lastly, I want to give a short overview on how things will proceed, development wise. Over the next two months, I'm planning to have releases for both games ready, which go beyond mere teasers. Proper version 0.1's, basically. Exacty release dates will be announced at a later time. After that, I want to go back to the regular, monthly schedule, comparable to the one I had for TPoNR. There are now two scenarios, on how that will look:

1. The ideal scenario

The Patreon gets a significant raise in support in the near future, allowing me to go full-time with development and also get a designated render workstation. This would allow for a big bump in development speed, meaning I could work on both projects at the same time, without having to compromise.

But it's called "ideal" for a reason. Right now, the more plausible one is

2. The realistic scenario

This one is based on the current support level, which means I can only do this part-time, next to my day job (gotta pay those bills). Basically, in this scenario, I'd have to prioritize, just like I had during the TPoNR dev process. Meaning, polls to determine what project I will work on that month, f.e..

My current plans take scenario number 2 as the default one, but we'll have to see how things will look in 2-3 months.

That's it for now, let me leave you with some recently created in-game renders from "Diplomacy". Till Next time.