Long-Term Development Roadmap: Liora's Price of Dignity

With me working on Liora for a couple of months now and pushing out the first proper release, I think it's possible now to try and extrapolate the current development velocity to obtain a decent view on the long-term development map. Please keep in mind that everything here is just an estimation, delays will obviously happen! x_X

So, similarly to how Aura was partitioned into 4 parts (Chapter 1, Chapter 2-A, Chapter 2-B, and Chapter 3), I subdivided the development plan for Liora into 5 roughly equally sized parts as follows:

Each part will be about 3 development cycles (= 3 Major Updates = 6 Months with 50% of them being spent working on Liora, the other 50% on SKA) long. The first part, the creation of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is done as of now. Furthermore, starting with 0.1.0 we will be returning to a major update model where I will be putting out a major update after each development cycle (Which is 2 months now, however, due to the alternation with SKA).

In total this gives us currently a total development time of 15 development cycles = 30 months (or 24 remaining months). With development having started in April this month, this leads us to a current extrapolation for the release at around October 2027. Furthermore, since we have finished 3 / 15 development cycles, we can roughly estimate the game to be currently about 20% complete. Probably less in terms of raw content as the first part mostly focused on setting the technical foundations over content development.

Originally I planned the development time to be only 12 development cycles long, but during the development I have increased the scope here and there a bit as I realized the game would be lacking otherwise. For example, originally, each side dungeon was only supposed to have 1 level. However, when I was creating Brightwood I realized that wouldn't be a good choice as it would force all checks to scale (such as jump checks), so I ended up planning in the creation of a second level for each side dungeon, which will make it easier for me to tailor checks to the current progression & it should prevent dungeon clearing from feeling repetitive.

Alright, so much for the larger picture of the project planning. Let's take a closer look at the individual parts!

MVP: The current game version. I have talked extensively about this during the development process so I won't write much more here.

Early Midgame:

• Goal 1: Introduce enough lewd actions to theoretically scale up lewdness enough so that Liora would be willing to agree to a sex clause. I say theoretically, because at this point it might require quite a lot of scene repetition, but it should be possible. If we can finish off this part with one sex scene triggered by the clause, I think we will be in a good spot.

• Goal 2: Have all level 1 side dungeons in the game (since we are a bit ahead of schedule actually, I was able to already implement the mine area, so only Darklake remains now) and start building up the "Main Area" of Highwarden Keep. Highwarden's Main Area will be a rather large multi-map dungeon with vertical movement (think Draknor Fortress). The goal will be to enter the Main Building to fight the end boss at its top floor and there will be multiple ways to find a way inside, focusing on different checks. I think Clockwork Tower would be the conceptually closest thing in SKA. Enemies will probably be too tough to tackle at this stage but at least the player should be able to do some basic sneak exploration.

Midgame:

• Goal 1: Scale up the lewd content to the point where Liora can be corrupted to the point that she can trigger at least one lewd scene by her own volition (similar to SKA's pink only scenes), or somehow otherwise agrees to lewd actions/decisions due to sexual corruption. I will need to see where we exactly stand to make more concrete plans.

• Goal 2: Finish implementing all side dungeons & ways to enter the Main Building in Highwarden Keep.

Late Midgame:

• Goal 1: Prepare Liora's corruption to make it ready for the ending triggers. Probably the corruption content here will focus more on the deterioration of Liora's and Rean's relationship, and her accepting of Edgar's.

• Goal 2: Implement the Main Building dungeon - a multi floor dungeon with tough enemies. Kind of the "Richard Domain" of the game. Ideally at the end the end of this part, the player can arrive at the end boss.

Ending:

• Goal 1: Implement the endings. I will most likely use a similar structure to SKA, splitting the endings between two main types (Victory, Corruption) and then creating sub-variations depending on the state variable such as Liora's Lewdness, Rean's Decay and Edgar's Prestige. In the case of the corruption ending, there will most likely be a fast-forward where the game skips to the party defeating Barbatos.

• Goal 2: Round out the quest content so that you can reasonably defeat the end boss.

Please keep in mind, these are all just plans based on the current development; it's not a prophecy that's set in stone! x_X I will post another roadmap update either at the end of the next part or in a year after the completion of part 3.

Post-1.0

I don't have plans for a structured Post-1.0 development strategy for Liora like I do with SKA, however, provided that our artist Deniis is interested in continued work and we have the funds I can keep commissioning him for some more time. Furthermore, while there won't be a structured development plan, there will be sporadeous major updates after 1.0 release (provided Liora is at least somewhat successful), aligning with important dates for future projects. The reason for this is mostly to get attention to the new projects.

I think that's currently I all I have to say on the long-term development plan. For the more immediate plans such as what our artist will be up to, I will post that in the Project Plan post for September.