Dev Log — July 2024

Hi everyone!

I've been working on the early stages of the PvE overhaul and playing other games for inspiration, and it didn't take long for me to realize that I was missing something important; a comprehensive overview of how sex should work in the game.

Almost every aspect of the game will tie into sex somehow, and while the individual pieces were thought through, I've missed the holistic picture of how those pieces should come together.

Training, for instance, represents a character's acclimation to things like oral or anal, where your body needs to become accustomed to the act. You cannot simply deepthroat a huge phallus and expect your throat to take it in strides.

Skills, on the other hand, represent a character's technical understanding of a spell or sexual discipline, and with enough training, a character can improve their technique and raise their skill level to perform better during certain types of sex.

Abilities, which are not to be confused with stats, are bonuses given to specific types of challenges in PvE, such as dancing, empathy, survival, nature, swimming, brawl, technology, oral, anal, and many more. A character can receive bonuses and penalties to abilities, which will affect what their optimal approach to any challenge is, and a character's nature will also give them a base bonus to a subset of abilities.

Filter Tags are used to limit the kinky transformation content a player can experience in the game, but it isn't an exhaustive list and doesn't include sexual kinks. For instance, the tag list doesn't include things like anal or oral sex, or breast expansion and size play kinks.

Sexual Orientation is paramount and something most people care strongly about, and with the introduction of the PvE overhaul, players will be able to set their sexual orientation, which will affect which characters, player and non-player, can interact sexually with their character. This will also be taken into account when matching players.

Lust is the health bar closely related to sex that most prominently controls when your character will orgasm, but it also plays an important role in PvP combat and balance, making it a closely intertwined piece of not just sex, but also combat in general.

There are a myriad of other status conditions and effects like Mindless, Hindered, Restrained, Gagged, and many more that are also directly related to sex and combat as a whole, and all elements need to come together in a way that accommodates an incredibly diverse player base for sex to be compelling in the game, and in this months dev log, I will share with you some of the changes coming to sex in the game that will improve both PvE and PvP interactions!

Lust & Orgasms

Since I introduced lust to the game I've had a hard time figuring out how I wanted orgasms to work in the game in a way that wouldn't ultimately undermine the tactic of inducing lust in your opponent to bypass the mind health bar, seeing as an orgasm resets the lust bar. As a result, orgasms were made impossible during PvP combat, but I've come up with a simple change that will make widespread and potentially frequent orgasms possible! 

• In the future, when a character has an orgasm, the character will lose mind health equal to their max mind health times the lust percent lost

This means at 100% lust the character will lose 100% of their mind health, while at 50%, they will lose 50% of their mind health, which drastically undermines any benefit of resetting the lust bar during a PvP or PvE encounter.

Desires

We'll be adding another concept to sex in the game that will be essential in tying everything together. Desires will control what sexual activities can be done to your character and while your character doesn't have any desires, they are protected from any sexual activity engaged by another character. Fortune cards and status effects will be the primary source of desires, and though your character might not start with any desires, other characters can induce them through the use of spells and other effects. This lends itself well to the theme of pseudo-consent, where there's an implied yes to anything sexual happening to your character, and things like fortune cards will allow players to customize their initial desires and open themselves up to the content they enjoy.

For anyone familiar with White Wolf (Vampire: The Masquerade), desires work like punch cards with three dots that can be punched, and the more dots that get punched, the more indulgent and deprived actions other characters can involve your character in. Some actions also require multiple desires to be punched, such as a blowjob, which will require both cum and oral desire.

Common desires will have a maximum of 3 dots that can be punched, while some hidden desires can only be unlocked through fortune cards, which prevents them from being punched by other characters. These include things like pain and shrink desires, and all unlockable desires only have one dot for whether they are unlocked, however, most of them have flavored interactions with other desires. For instance, the pain desire will unlock things like pair pulling during sex and butt slapping, both of which require other desires. Some unlockable desires also have special effects, like the shrink desire, which causes any sort of shrinking to deal additional lust damage, or the slut desire, which will increase the gain rate of status effects that increase submissive desires during PvE while also spicing up PvE encounters with more slut-themed antics.

Other common desires include humiliation and exhibition desires, which control things like whether public sex is available, and in the case where it isn't, another character can instead forcefully drag the player to a more private location before they can engage in certain things like stripping or having sex, if otherwise available.

Many fortune cards will now grant desires that further enhance how the card impacts a character and helps build a certain fantasy. Many of the effects granted by fortune cards will also be available in-game, which would make many of them obsolete to players who attempt to jinx their character, but since many of them now unlock otherwise inaccessible desires, fortune cards will continue to play a big role for any character.

Fringe kinks or kinks that tend to stir a strong reaction from people who don't enjoy them, like futas, egg-laying, DL, pregnancy, and golden showers, are also planned to become unlockable desires in the future. But like sexual orientation, players without a given desire will be able to opt into whether they want to be matched with a futa or pregnant mommy.

Dom & Sub

Dom and submissive activities can be difficult to pin down, as the same action can be either depending on the context, execution, and motivation involved. In open-ended PvP, it's up to the players, but in close-ended PvE, the author needs to make some assumptions, in particular when it comes to how a character might spiral out of control sexually. My approach to this is the following:

• By default, player characters will spiral into submission

• Characters with the dom desire unlocked will instead spiral into becoming a dom obsessed with putting people in their place to the point where they can get off on that act alone and might lose to that desire. Where a sub might become a mindless maid roaming the halls for 15 minutes, a dom might become a mistress roaming the halls for 15 minutes

• A character with the dom and slut desires unlocked is treated as a switch and can spiral toward either

Sub, dom, and switch gameplay are equal, and all rely on the same fundamental mechanic in PvE, which is your desires spiraling out of control, and eventually, you'll either have to give up, risk failure, or start leaning into your desires to keep going a little longer, at which point you might lose to your desires.

In-Combat Sex

With the introduction of desires and the changes to how lust and orgasms work, I will also be able to allow for in-combat sexual activities, and in the future, I plan on allowing players to exploit other characters' desires. Sex in general will be a lot less forceful, and will instead be flavored around the inability to resist the temptation of someone giving you what you desire, or have come to desire. I have also decided to post-pone sex actions further, as these will instead become in-combat actions, allowing players to engage in sex without ending the encounter. The only thing that will abruptly end an encounter in the future, is something that causes one player to lose control over their character (inanimate, absorption, becoming a pet/slave, etc.)

The exact execution is still up in the air, but I imagine things like kissing someone or slapping their ass to be a single action, similar to an attack that causes lust damage and can potentially trigger an orgasm. Things like penetrative sex could be a channeled action that continues until interrupted or orgasm.

I still consider it important that a defeated or underdog player has a way out. For this reason, channeled sex actions that prevent either player from taking actions cannot be engaged while the other character is attempting to leave, so it cannot be used to prevent another player from escaping. Sex will also be possible without necessarily defeating an opponent, and being defeated will only be a prerequisite for severe transformations in the future.

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That's all for this month's dev log! I still have a few things I need to iron out from the last update and I've also been working on some other improvements that I plan on releasing ahead of the PvE overhaul, including emotes and action bars!

Afterward, I'll start properly tearing things up on the backend to implement all these new adjustments to sex-related mechanics on the test server!

Thank you so much for your support and for allowing me to make a game with this much sexual diversity and sex positivity! ❤️

Cheers,

Tinon