Liora's Price of Dignity Devlog 1

For the first time around on this platform, the name of the game isn't Star Knightess Aura. I have started doing some rough outlining for the next game previously simply titled "Project A" in my previous roadmap post. The current name is still a running title and may be subject to change - as is the name Liora I have chosen for the heroine for now, but it's good enough to run with it for now.

So, I already gave a rough outline of Liora's game in my last post and what I want to focus on, namely the Contract System. In this episode I want to talk a bit about the rough setup around the game itself.

Note that I have only chosen the name for our heroine as of now! The following are mostly expanded excerpts of my game design document where characters are usually more addressed by their role instead of their name. In general you will also find a lot of comments like "I am not sure about this yet" or "this may change" or "I need to figure this out" - a lot of things will require an actual prototype to figure out and can't really be done on just paper.

Key Concept

The player controls the heroine leading a party of a party of three (Heroine, Boyfriend, Antagonist) set out to kill a common enemy. The Heroine may gain the Antagonist's cooperation by agreeing to rules or gambles enforced by a magic contract from the Antagonist in order to achieve the greater goal.

In Star Knightess Aura, compulsions were mostly created trough mental changes - sometimes also through negotiations, however. The core theme of Liora's game is on the latter part.

Furthermore, in contrast to SKA which was mostly a single character game (+Slime and guest characters), the default party will be made up of the core cast this time around. And that even includes our bad guy! He won't be the one that the party needs to hunt down this time around, but will be joining the party. Although you won't be able to control him directly.

As we will see in the following, he too has a motivation in ultimately succeeding, but our Antagonist won't be in a major hurry. In fact, for him it would be better if the party took their sweet time in accomplishing their goal. Our pair of Heroine and Boyfriend on the other hand will have a good reason to not dally around too much.

Let's take a look at some more points of the setup to elaborate!

Basic Setup

Their goal is to slay a demon corrupting the nearby region through a Disease.

The Boyfriend has been infected with said Disease.

Treatement costs increase each time.

Failing to treat the Disease progresses the Disease.

This time our equivalent to George will be the one suffering from the equivalent of Aura's curses. Conceptually you can think of the debuffs this time being spread around between the Boyfriend and the Heroine. The first getting Diseases releated debuffs and the second remaining subject to Perversion debuffs.

Progress of the Disease would correspond to major curses and would instill various debuffs, making the Boyfriend less useful not only in battle but also outside of dungeons. For example in bed :) - I think that should give a rough direction on where this would be going.

Effectively the recurring treatment of the Disease is similar to using Blessed Water in SKA (or generally in rent-like mechanic that is popular in many other h-games).

Now, what if our pair faces troubles in progressing through the dungeon and need a helping hand?! Or maybe there is someone who could offer to pay for Treatments in exchange for certain favors?!?!?!?!?! Wow, where could I be going here??!?!?!

So, this brings our Antagonist into the party.

The Antagonist is a bastard child of a noble family and seeks Prestige to become the successor.

Antagonist has Enchantment type magic. Can protect from demon's sickness and necessary to enter dungeons.

The Antagonist has a spell to create Magic Contracts, which cannot be defied.

By negotiating deals or winning bets, he and the Heroine can control each others behaviors, development, and also enforce other events into their schedule.

Just like our other two characters, our Antagonist has a motivation to be in the party and actually achieve the final goal. His key progression I decided to call "Prestige" - kind of similar to Popularity for Roland. Not accomplishing any progress in the dungeons, will cause his Prestige to decline, making him more cooperative in battle.

However, otherwise, he will be trying to sabotage the party and slow everyone down in order to achieve his secondary goal of corrupting our Heroine before triggering the end of their journey. The means for that are the key part of the game, the Magic Contracts.

Clauses in the Magic Contracts will be able to affect any character participating and signing (so in particular everyone in our core cast). This way, it will be possible for the Heroine to agree to a clause that's negative for her, in exchange for putting a rule onto the Antagonist.

I have yet to work out how I want the rules to work out and probably will only really be able to do so once I start iterating the prototype, but here are some example clauses I had in mind:

Heroine

If [the party is defeated], the Heroine must wear costume [X] on the following day.

On the day of [defeating a miniboss], the Heroine must celebrate with the Antagonist by going for [Y] drinks together.

The Heroine must cast buff [X] on the Antagonist before being allowed to cast it on the Boyfriend.

When the Antagonist contributes in battle, he must be rewarded by [making out] in the next time slot.

If the Antagonist lands the final blow on boss [X], the Heroine must learn skill [Y] before being able to learn another skill.

The items I put in [ ] would be placeholders would be negotiable and upgradeable. Most likely I will prepare a set of clauses similar for these and in the [ ] then the player would have some room to negotiate / pick from a list.

As you can see, clauses are rather conditional than universal. This means that giving the Antagonist a clause is not necessary the end of the world - you can still deal with by trying to avoid triggering it! But of course, the more you take, the more difficult that would become.

Clauses would be upgradedable (for example upgrading making out to a more sexual activity or upgrading an initially tame costume to a lewder one) and ideally could be used multiple times with different triggers and different results. For example encording costume A through trigger 1 and costume B through trigger2.

And please keep in mind that this is just the design phase, so I might throw out a lot of these ideas I have here because it turns out their aren't fun in the real game x_X

Antagonist:

The Antagonist must use skill [X] when receiving buff [Y].

The Antagonist must use item [X] on monster [Y].

The Antagonist must erase clause [X].

The Antagonist must provide [X] Gold.

I hope that the contract system will allow for enough freedom to make strategically interesting decisions. Allowing certain trigger conditions to cause progress on corruption events, but trying to avoid them, while making the most out of the gained clauses.

I'm not quite sure about the ability of removing old clauses, but it will probably be available for lower level ones so they can be traded in for upgrading another clause, just to have some sort of mechanic of reducing the number of clauses in exchange for stronger ones and causing less litter. But we will see about that.

Not every trade deal will be leaving permanent clauses. For example, when providing gold for a Treament, we can also have one-time deals. But generally speaking I would like to focus the game on building up the clauses of the Magic Contract, so lasting changes would be the main focus, while one-time things would just be playing a supporting role.

For the Boyfriend character I haven't yet created a set of examples. I am also not fully sure if he will be participating in this system. Ideally I would like him to get into fights with the Antagonist and makes bets on who kills more enemies and if he does, that the Antagonist needs to leave his girlfriend alone. Something like that, but I also kind of would like him to not know about the Magic Contracts. We will have to see. Perhaps I could also just make the bets I had in mind without an enforcement system - at least our Boyfriend character would most likely be honorable enough to uphold his side.

Next week I will be talking a bit more about the core cast (perhaps besides Liora they will have names by then?!) and maybe about the dungeon gameplay loop. Although I might move that to the week after next one.

Either way, next devlog post will be next week!