Project Plan July

Finally time to wrap up the 1.1.0 release! July will be a bit of a weird month as it won't be a clear SKA or Liora month, but rather a mix of both. But I guess June also was kind of like that. I hope it's not too confusing with the jumping between projects - the flexibility does help in the development.

The main goal of the month is clear: Create Maid Ending Epilogue to finish off the 1.1.0 release. Before I dive into the weekly breakdown, I will give the important dates here:

• The SKA 1.1.0-beta will release on July 18th. It will release on patreon (+subscribestar), itch.io and on beta branch on Steam. I won't be putting it on the main branch yet. It's not clear yet if there will be a 1.1.0-beta adult patch, as the patching tends to confuse a lot of people and I don't want to introduce another element of confusion by adding a patch that would only work on the Steam beta branch.

• The SKA 1.1.0 will officially release on August 29th together with the 0.1.0 release of Liora's Price of Dignity here (+subscribestar) and on itch.io. For Steam I will be launching Liora's Steam page a couple weeks before that so it will be up for wishlist gathering by the time of the releases.

Alright, then let's take a look at July's development plan in detail: Week 1: I will be catching up on the lewd event work I ended up swapping for an SKA dev week last month. Basically replacing [NOT IMPLEMENTED] messages in some of the existing dummy events with actual text. While it's a "lewd" week, it's not suuper lewd focused as we are just at the beginning of the story. The first Edgar Date event will probably focus more on character building of Edgar and Liora being uncomfortable needing to hang out with him.

Since lewd scenes are more flexible in Liora and in this case can trigger with the masturbation or allowing groping clause, it's possible to trigger the first date with an actual lewd action happening but I'm not sure if I will get that far with the writing this week.

Week 2: Then we have two consecutive weeks of SKA. This one will be fairly straightforward: Creating the Maid Ending Epilogue. Since Chapter 1 doesn't have a lot of story decisions, it will be mostly a linear sequence of events.

However, I would like to make one major variation: Should the player be defeated at the Festival, I would like to also trigger the Maid Ending Epilogue, but with the difference of Aura being more resistant. There would also be some other differences for the companions, but essentially this would be a less corrupt Maid Ending (let's call this one Maid Ending A and the one resulting from submission after the Full Time Maid Job Maid Ending B).

I don't think I would be able to finish the variations this week so--

Week 3: I will be finishing them in the third week. Since I don't think it makes sense to start any major development work on new things, i will then just be closing out the week with some minor polish and balancing work. Richard's Domain dungeon will become just a little bit easier. And then I will be clicking the release button for the 1.1.0-beta release.

Week 4: With 1.1.0-beta released, I will morph back into my alter ego Liora-dev and pick up where I left (at the time of writing) last week to continue the tutorial and introduction events, this time focusing on the post-intro ones. Adding one week of dev to Liora will allow me to add one more side dungeon beside the Brightwood Forest dungeon, which I think will be a huge plus for evaluating the balancing post 0.1.0 release, as the difficulty increase of having only one side dungeon isn't representative of the game loop.

As for our freelancers, the work looks as follows:

RPGMaker Dev

Our assistant developer trihan will be working on improving the flexibility of the portraits in the various menus so that they can be assembled in a paper doll way the same as the standing images. This will be a necessary feature for Liora and for SKA it will allow us to extend the Deluxe Console with the ability to set Hair and Costume independently from each other.

SKA Artist Emubi

Emubi will be creating a new costume for the Maid Ending and the necessary variations for the CG he's currently working on so I can use it again in the Maid Ending. The plan beyond that isn't clear yet as I have not yet created the art plan for 1.2.0.

Liora Artist Deniis

For Deniis, this is how the remaining art plan looks like for the 0.1.0 release

As you saw in the last post, Edgar is currently in production. After that we have some more expressions that I need, the test commission CGs need cleaning up to be production ready, etc.

And then we have the work on new CGs. One for the Liora Masturbating (alone) event and then for the Intro I would like to add a "Kabedon" style CG when Edgar pressures Liora after they signed the contract.

With all that going on, there is some buffer in August to wrap the work up and then the focus will be on replacing the current placerholder lewd costume. Currently, the costume choice itself is fixed when Edgar makes the proposal, later you will be able to parametrize the choice by picking from a pool of costumes on (roughly) the same lewdness level. Probably there will be some game mechanic like variations in lewdness requring more / less lewdness and giving more / less negotiation value in return. The costumes will be represented in the CGs.

Same story for Hair Styles. If we have the time, we can also already look at hair color changes, but if not, that will be on the September plan then. Appearance changes will be moving faster in Liora (if the player choses so) than in SKA since they are triggered extrinsically through the contracts rather than intrinsically through mental changes as in SKA.

And I think that's all I have to report on for now. See you next time!