The future of Legacy of Hestia (Patreon)

Happy new year, everybody!

With the fresh beginning of a new year, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to talk about the future of my current project, Legacy of Hestia, and show some very WIP previews and my plans for the sequel.
While I mentioned many times how the current game would only feature the first two seasons/8 LNs and how (storywise) it is almost completed, I thought I'd make it official by making a public post and explain my reasoning to split the game in two, and what to expect in the sequel.
 

When making a parody game, I read and watch the source material multiple times in order to be able to develop ideas, alternative and extra routes, or generally be able to replicate the general feeling of a scene and its characters, that is why I need to genuinely love something to be able to make a parody of it.

An advantage of doing this is always having a few ideas of how the series might develop and end, that is why I always had a clear vision of what I wanted to do with Overlord H, my previous project.

Legacy of Hestia is no different: I wanted a game centered about her "legacy", and giving Bell the chance to overcome his fears/excessive respect which prevented him to accept her feelings or alternatively let Eina's date go slightly different by not making Bell being extremely shy. These are just two of the main choices you can make, and the way I pictured them as a fan of the series.

Both Ainz in Overlord and Bell in DANMACHI evolve throughout the story, as main characters often do, and this is another aspect I try to replicate in my parodies despite the protagonists being slightly different from the original source (Both because my understanding of the characters is that of an average fan, and because they need to work in the context of a hentai game).

However, while Overlord H and Legacy of Hestia are similar at their core, they differ in something important: One is a pure Visual Novel, while the other is not.

This might not seem very important at first, just a different style and a way to make Legacy of Hestia feel more "gamey", but this is not entirely true.
In a Visual Novel you can keep the core mechanics consistent throughout fifteen volumes, no matter how much the main character and the world around him change, but this is much harder to do when gameplay is involved. This is, for better or worse, Legacy of Hestia's case.

At the beginning of DANMACHI, the protagonist without Liaris Freese is almost just like any other adventurer. He slowly grinds, but the first four floors are still full of dangers.

Even once he gets Liaris Freese, the dungeon doesn't stop being dangerous since the deeper you go, the more challenging it becomes.
By all means, the dungeon and the survival within it is the main challenge of the series, at least until Bell doesn't acquire the Hestia's knife and subsequently enough power to easily one shot any monster he encounters, especially since in the game you can actually choose to max out his stats.

I think I replicated this feeling well in the game on hard difficulty: At the beginning of the game, you can barely survive the first floors, but once your stats go up and you acquire the Hestia Knife everything becomes much easier and navigating the dungeon feels boring and safe, which is around the time in which you unlock the expeditions to quickly jump to the latest floor you have visited.
The last floors up the challenge once more by having stronger monsters, lack of visibility, and much larger floors... However, this challenge is temporary: You just need to map out the floor and level up, which happens shortly after their introduction. The addition of abilities, new spells (Coming soon) and artifacts make those challenges even easier.

This is fine since Middle Floors happen, once again, the protagonist needs to survive in a new environment with strong monsters appearing from every corner.
However, with Bell levelling up quickly and Hestia's Familia expanding, this Core Loop works only for so long... By the end of Volume 7, Middle Floors become easy as well.
With Haruhime's ability and the possibility of maxing out Bell's stat every level up, he could easily defeat adventurers of higher level than him.
At some point (Around the end of Season 2), I feel like this Core Loop can no longer work.
Xenos are introduced, and the challenges shift from the dungeon as a whole to more individual ones such as Asterius or the Juggernaut, and more political challenges that can be handled through the Visual Novel part.

However, while the political challenges can be handled just fine, what is the point of a Dungeon Crawler game when the dungeon stops being the main focus?

This is a question I had in mind since the beginning, hence why I have always planned for the game to cover until this Core Loop works, which is the end of Volume 8, in my opinion.

 

So... How do I imagine a DANMACHI fan game to be like after Volume 8?
When it comes to the "political" part (such as Xenos), similarly to Overlord H, the Visual Novel format is perfect and it will keep being the main part of the sequel.
I will use this opportunity to redo the older characters to fit more their original appearance, but I will also reuse some of the current assets (Newer maps such as Hestia Mansion, and some of the newly done characters such as Cassandra, Aisha, Daphne, ...).

The dialogue box still needs to be changed, and once I do, I will be making Liliruca even shorter (Another change I'd like to make is to try and keep the characters to scale as much as possible, however... Since Liliruca is 110cm, and I do not want her to be constantly hidden behind the dialogue box, it will not be fully accurate).

As for the gameplay part, I believe it is essential to have something "quick", something that no longer focuses on survival and exploration, but individual challenges, stages with a clear objective to pass in order to win, and after much thinking I decided a "Tactics style" gameplay would fit nicely, and it would be a nice change of pace from the current battle system.

That stage is the Beginning Road on Floor 1, while the UI and the character sprites are final, the stage itself is still very "Work in Progress", I was testing the palette there (Trying to get the colors of Floor 1-4 right), before adding texture, lights and details to make the stage nicer looking.

Other things are also missing, such as Enemy's AI and other UI components that I still need to make as I test things out, however, even in its current state it should give a good idea of what I am going for, especially if you have played Tactics Games before.

Rest assured, despite the changes, your current save will be importable in the sequel but the data will be used differently depending on how I will balance the various challenges throughout the testing: For example, if your Bell has 1300 endurance with 1300 HP, in the sequel he will still have 1300 endurance, but his HP might be different because I will input the endurance stat in a different formula to calculate his HP. Other things will stay the same, such as your Valis and the prices of items.

I think that covers pretty much all I wanted to say, Legacy of Hestia will cover until the end of Volume 8 (more or less) before being considered a completed game with a predicted length of 20 hours of gameplay as a whole, and 5gb size (If I manage to fix the compression that broke in the previous release :D).

My current plans to complete this game are to finish this last chapter (Which will be quite long since it will include all the new routes), then before doing the Epilogue and roll the credits, I will refine up the game: Missing sprites, reported bugs, suggestions and other things I noted in the to-do list.
So, by the time I finally do the Epilogue, the game will be truly "complete".
Not sure how long that will take, but as for the next release (January), we'll finally cover Ishtar's arc, and that means introducing Haruhime! So that is something to look forward to :D.

Sorry for the giant wall of text, these were originally different posts, but I thought I'd make a single big public one instead.
Enjoy the New Year's Eve! =)