slaen
patreon
Open fields and lore brainstorming
🕑 Added 2020-07-15 00:08:47 +0000 UTCEnvironment work continues. A lot of the landscape stuff is roughed in. Started bringing over the interior sections from the old map.
Did another pass on the NPC spawn system especially for the town inhabitants. Now when an NPC is spawned it will check the time of day then assign where that NPC should spawn, and what tasks they should be doing. I think this is the way I'll handle NPC schedules for day/night routines. This way if the player enters someone's house at night the spawn system will detect that and spawn the NPC at home in bed (depending on the hour). Rather than trying to simulate every piece of the NPC's daily schedule this will just be broad strokes. I think it's roughly the level of fidelity that is in Skyrim as far as NPC daily routines.
Took a bit of time to polish the gobin's AI behavior tree. There's still a few edge cases that she doesn't handle too well but her combat is coming together. I had one test build where the AI was too good and would react instantly to any of my actions and she would just stomp my face in every time. Figured I should tone that down a lot.
Lore stuff (possible/maybe minor spoilers???). Nothing here is set in stone and will almost certainly change but I wanted to get the overall campaign story arc roughed out. It drives me nuts when a long running television show gets to season 2 or 3 and they completely lose the story and go off the rails. I'm hoping to avoid that if I can. The main story is centered around 2 factions the demons and the inquisition.
The demons entire goal is to corrupt humanity by indulging in their baser instincts and also opening up more and more doors to the demon realm (sort of like the gates from Elder Scrolls Oblivion). I'm hoping to give the player the option to fight the demons or join them and help them in their goals. Not sure if I need one main big demon to be running the demon faction or if they should just all have the same / similar goals and drive?
Then the inquisition is sort of but not quite a religious / policing order that on the face of things has this noble intention of fighting the demons but the reality is there's a lot of politics, corruption, and abuse of power. They won't be nice people and will try to push people around and control them through fear. I want to give the player the choice to join them or oppose them. If the player joins them they'll get to see the career of another inquisitor that will rise through the ranks to the height of power and be completely corrupted by it. I'm thinking something very similar to Kefka from Final Fantasy 6. Sort of unstable to begin with but then completely insane and with too much power by the end.
So that's a lot of work and I don't want anyone to expect the grand final battle content anytime soon. But the next few steps will be designing out the low level Inquisitors and the low level succubi/incubi/omnibi? and finding a way to introduce them to the player early on in the game. What do you think?
Comments
slaen
Hmm, I think you're right about making the Inquisition side a bit more appealing. I was thinking about adding a really straightforward quest path for people that want to play the good guy, leading the inquisition, and defeating the demon hordes. That's a questline I can get behind and I have a few ideas of how to make it run in parallel to a corrupted Inquisition all depending on the choices of the player and how deep they want to dig into the lore and political intrigue. Is that sort of what you were thinking? or would you like to see more depth to the "good guy" path?
slaen
For the most part it's going to be open world. There are going to be the loading screens for building interiors and stuff like that but those will be small "pocket" areas that will be children of the over world. While I completely agree with you about saving work and tedium there's also some advantages to the open world system. Partly because the Unreal engine's tools by default seem to work better for one large open world and also having a large open world gives a ton of room for content. The plan / hope is to keep putting out updates for the next few years and building a huge epic game. This is also why right now I'm putting a lot of work into the base systems so that there's a really stable foundation to be able to add all that content on top of.
I down with the lore bits. Personally I think the demons should have a leader(sexy demoness???) Also I think the inquisition faction should be a bit more appealing to side with rather then just be all about abusing their power. It would be understandable if a good amount of them do this, but show us the good side of the faction because they sound like they could be like the Brotherhood of Steal from Fallout in a way. Super interested in seeing what you have in store for us!
Buzzbomber
OK, so I was goofing around in the world a fair deal and it got me curious. What's the plan with the broader worldspace? Is all traversal going to be purely open-world, or are you going to be doing something more akin to chunked segments ALA Witcher 2/3? I ask purely because I feel like a game like this with this being a single-developer endeavor it might make more sense to lend yourself to the latter rather than the former. It saves a lot on work and generally cuts down on the tedium of larger empty spaces.
slaen
Soon(ish)! But yes, there will be some slender NPCs coming out. I'm trying not to jump into new NPCs until I finish all the base animations for the current ones. But the list of NPCs that I currently have some rough sculpts for are female imps, and cowgirls, (both of those will probably be pretty curvy/thicc though) but then there's also the low level succubus, and bee girls both of which will be slender compared to the current NPCs. Once those sculpts are further along I'll try to post up some screenshots for feedback!
slaen
Awesome ideas! I hadn't fleshed out the demon faction that much yet but I love the corruption aspects. Then the idea of making the player try to advance through the ranks or gain power with the demon faction but always with the threat of being corrupted / turned into a bimbo/himbo if they aren't careful. Also the tiers of demons I'm totally with you. I've been doodling with a few ideas for a female imp and a low level female succubus. I totally agree with you about the inquisition and having some of them be paragons of virtue. I was thinking the people that are actually still pure would typically be the front line soldiers or at least the ones in the trenches that really truly believed in the cause. Then the bureaucrat would generally be the ones that were already corrupted. Thanks for the help these really are great ideas. I can't wait to get far enough along to really start implementing this stuff.
Buzzbomber
Dig what you've come up with so far, definitely looking forward to what's to come.
Opticon Studios
Would like some slooths.. hehehe slim sexies
Opticon Studios
Curious if NPCs and characters you interact with will take on different forms Seems to be alot of fatish goblin looking characters
Artem
The lowest demons should be imps (of 2 genders) - very weak, pesky, not using much direct magic or might damage, but somewhat fun to mate with, if the player decides. But mostly they should be there for exp earning. While any lower succubi/incubi should be a much much bigger challenge. Those are sexual demons that somehow saved their sanity, so, they are very strong and cunning and the brute force approach can be used only if the MC is a very high level. Or... maybe if MC is very pure and follows the inquisition faction (would be a nice bonus) after rejecting the fun of mating with imps or (in)succubi.
Artem
Adding the inquisition is also a great idea! Religious fanatics would add even more tension to the game universe. Don't make them too corrupted though (maybe only the highest leader), otherwise they'll be not much better than the demons) There should be completely innocent (yet strong) characters in that faction, so it would be fun to see them tempted by the demons (or opposite - fanatically burn those red-skinned guys without any mercy).
Artem
"The demons ..." - love that idea! About one big boss or similar goals - it probably will be realistic (if demons are realistic at all, lol), that they have internal factions and hierarchy and fight between each other for their prey. The biggest boss maybe somewhere far away and doesn't even care of those pesky little imps that try to invade into the human plane. I would make a couple of generals/leaders though and fighting factions, like succubi and incubi, maybe, or those who prefer to look more human vs more monstrous. If each of them try to tempt, conquer, contract MC to their specific side offering some different effects, that would be cool. Like, incubi and succubi faction would try to turn a player into a helpless imp or will-less slut if you're not careful enough with them (just mating with each of those, not caring of MC's sanity, will, or other possible params), but if you happen to make a "good" deal, they'll send MC to different mission that will help their factions and slowly turn him(her) into bimbo (succubi) or himbo (incubi). Maybe MC could even climb their hierarchy ladder) Each of them would want to rule over humans and other factions, and mate with everyone, so they should have a magic that shifts character's sexual preferences to make them more tempting to the specific demon kind. Like, turn normal male villagers into gays or females into lesbians) Maybe even the monster demons (tentacle beasts) could have this sort of magic, making villagers (and MC) want their monstrous appearance and not accept any other forms for mating (in the extreme case or that magic possession).
