February Development Log: Vorevival Overview & Managing A Micro Colony (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

It's time for the development log of the month. In this development log, I'm going to be giving lots of juicy details on the upcoming Vorevival! Not the old version of Vorevival if you remember that from way, way back when... but the new and shiny and totally different version that I'm working on this year! To be honest, I might end up changing the title to distinguish it a little from it's old self...

But that's for the future. For now, let's talk about Vorevival! First we're going to be doing a basic overview of the game - story and gameplay details - and then we're gonna bust right into the brand new colony management system thing that I've been working on for the past couple of weeks.

Ready? Go!

In Vorevival you're going to be managing the survival and upkeep of a colony of micros that's living inside of a disused vent that runs through a huge and sprawling megacomplex for macros. 

What is a megacomplex? Well, Vorevival is set in a cyberpunkish future where buildings have been very girthy and very tall to compensate for the planet's rapidly growing population. A megacomplex is a huge building purpose-made for this. It contains everything that a living being might need to exist all under one extremely tall roof: apartments, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, arcades, gyms, clinics, stadiums... the list goes on.

The micro colony you'll be managing is the same race as the micros from Macroville: Jepis. In Macroville, Jepis were pretty weird little gooey jelly sorta guys that people grew as pets in their apartment, kinda like Sea Monkeys or something like that. If you've played Macroville then you'll know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't played Macroville then, hey, play it and it'll explain a little more about what I'm talking about here. Regardless, it's not too important: just understand that they're gooey and vulnerable little guys. Also, they taste like jellybeans?

It's been a few years since Macroville - a little over a hundred, actually - and since Jepis are a rapidly evolving species, they've changed quite a bit in that time. In Macroville they were a hivemind that lacked any form of individuality, but since then they've become a lot more, well, individual. They still work together and naturally form colonies, but they have their own personalities and desires now.

Since there aren't a lot of resources inside of an abandoned vent - either in terms of food or building materials - it's essential for the colony's survival to go on supply runs into the megacomplex. Naturally, though, when you're only a couple of inches tall and the building is stuffed to the gills with macros who are, well, many, many times bigger than that, this is quite dangerous. Especially for the average Jepi.

This is where you come in. You are The Hunter, and you are responsible for both running the colony and for venturing into the world of giants for supplies. You're a little tougher, a little stronger, and a little smarter than the average Jepi. In other words, you're something of a natural leader...

In January's development log I mentioned that the new and improved Vorevival is part Macroville and part, well, old Vorevival. In other words, part colony sim and part survival RPG. These two genres nestle in well together I think. You aren't venturing into the dangerous world of macros for yourself this time: instead, you're going out there to find materials to expand and develop your colony. 

In my opinion this is a little more interesting than going out there to find nothing more than food and gear for yourself. Not only that, it leads to more interesting choices in the events that you'll encounter out in whatever area you happen to be exploring. For example, for succeeding in an event you might be offered a choice between stone or wood or food, or even a choice between resources or personal equipment, or a choice between a bunch of new building blueprints... which is a lot more diverse than, yup, you succeeded in the event, now you get an arbitrary amount of food and maybe a new piece of equipment.

Naturally by venturing out you'll also be able to... well, encounter more things than resource. There will, naturally, be an ample amount of vore, paw, and other macro/micro related scenes out there to discover amongst everything else. Some will be non-lethal, others will be... well, very lethal. What I'm saying is: expect the usual hand-written erotica to be here in spades, too.

This month I have mostly been working on the colony development side of things, and now that the preamble explaining the game and it's setting is over, it's what the rest of the dev log is going to be about! 

For a while I tussled over exactly how to do this side of the game. The easiest way would be to have it all done through a series of menus (ala Macroville) because this would lead to it being pretty easy to program and make assets for. Just buttons and text and maybe some basic graphics? You know, something like that.

However, I think it would be quite boring to do it this way. It's very basic and I've also done it before, and it would also be a poor way to use the tools that I have at hand. So, I wanted to make something that had much more of a visual element to it and a bit more interactivity because, hey, that'll make things a lot more interesting.

So why don't I stop talking about it and just show you what's going on instead?

Wait, wait, wait. Actually, before I do that, quick disclaimer: everything seen here is very placeholdery and is more proof of concept than anything resembling final gameplay footage. Everything from the background to the Jepis to the houses to everything that you see here will be changed and polished up and actually made to look good rather than, well, placeholdery.

Okay... now I'll show you what I'm talking about.

So, here's the basics. We got three little Jepi milling around a pretty cosy vent-style environment. Sometimes they even stop to think about things. Wonder what they're thinking about?

Naturally, we can have more than three. Three isn't much of a colony, so let's see what three hundred looks like.

Three hundred looks like a writhing mass of little guys. Amusing, but probably unpleasant for them. Such a tiny room isn't fit for such a large colony, so let's size up their environment a little.

I can even assign each Jepi a random color for a little visual variation, like so!

Like a bunch of jellybeans...

Anyway! I'm sure you get the message by now. They can walk around, climb ladders, and sorta do their own thing: no matter how many of them there are or what color they might be. So what else can they do?

Well, let's go back to our smaller environment with our three very small guys. Easier to show it off when there's not a whole swarm of 'em.

You might have noticed when the screen was a little clearer that there was a rock. By clicking on said rock, we can send all of our Jepi down to it.

Then they will SMASH the rock to bits (this next piece of footage sped up slightly for your convenience)

Naturally they don't have a ROCK SMASH animation yet so they just sorta walk into it. For now, at least! Rock smash animations are in the works, much like the rest of the game...

So, this 'rock' represents a pile of junk that's kinda been swept into the vent somehow. Sometimes these will turn up when you go back to the colony. Clicking on them will get you a couple of extra resources while also clearing some garbage out of your colony. Right now resources aren't completely implemented so the only thing that happens for now is that the rock gets smashed, but since resources are probably the easiest part of this thing I'm making all of that one of the last things that I do.

So... they can walk... they can smash rock... what else can these Jepi do? Well, it wouldn't be much of a colony if there were no buildings, right?

By moving the mouse down toward the bottom of the screen a menu will pop up. On this menu are four shiny options. Here's a basic overview of what they will do! Bear in mind that these buttons may change, new ones might be added, so on and so forth...

Build lets you build stuff. Obviously.

List gives you an overview of all the Jepi in the colony as well as the structures they've built.

Offer will let you, well... offer some of your population to resident macros. By doing so, you'll be able to bear witness to some good ol' fashioned vore scenes while also scoring yourself some resource and influence with the local macro population.

Venture allows you to venture into the outside world, which is where the vast majority of the gameplay will take place and where you'll also be getting the bulk of your resources. You'll also be able to get in a whole bunch of trouble out there naturally... and by trouble I mean gettin' eaten or maybe gettin' stepped on or sat on or... yeah, you know. But... more on this another month.

Let's focus on build for now.

By clicking build we get access to a few options. For now, these are really just test buildings, and, like most things, more meant to represent rough concepts than anything final. H stands for house, L stands for Library, R stands for Restaurant, and G stands for gym, because I have those on the mind recently for some reason...

Let's build a house.

Like with the rock, the Jepi all run over toward it and make building that house their priority.

When the house is built, it gives birth to... no, spawns another Jepi. Right now I am not sure how Jepi spawn mechanics are going to work exactly, but, for now, one pops out of pretty much any building that you create.

Now let's build the rest of the buildings, because why not? Sped up once again for convenience... and file size...

Now we have a colony has four buildings and seven whole Jepi.

As you can see, the Jepi can now even visit the buildings, where they take some time in them to relax and... not do much else right now, because this is very early sorta stuff. But they will do useful things in there in future. Things like boosting The Hunter's stats, or crafting goods, or passively producing resources...

So you can see that visiting buildings thing better, here's a clip of a Jepi goin' a gym in normal time.

So, yep! That's about all they can do right now. Well, there's a couple of other things, but they're even less polished than this is and they're not really in a proper state to show, so...

Once again, bear in mind that this is very early stuff that's been crafted in about two weeks, but I think it works as a nice very early look at what's to come in one part of Vorevival. In many ways, this is what I wanted to do all the way back when I was making Macroville, but I didn't have the experience and Quest wouldn't have been able to do all of this anyway.

You may well be thinking: Kyobi, this looks great, but I don't really like building games and I'm really just here for the tastefully wrote vore erotica. I hear you, and I'm keeping you in mind. This part of the game will be optional, as in, there will be settings available so you don't have to engage in it at all if you don't want to. You can just look at the vore scenes or enjoy the survival gameplay or really do whatever you want. 

The last thing that I want to do is heap a whole bunch of distasteful gameplay onto people who don't want it, so, rest assured, this is not something that you have to do, and, indeed, is really only a fraction of the gameplay that will be on offer. Like maybe a quarter of it. The other three quarters of the game... well, you'll see them over the coming months. Pretty soon! I'm planning on getting the first proper playable build of this game done by July or so, so it's going to be shaping up a lot over the next few weeks.

For now, though, I'm putting it to the side and focusing on A Tiny Furry In A Huge World Plus for the rest of the month.

I think we're done development logging! This is a couple of thousand words big and a couple dozen megabytes large because of all the GIFs, so... yep! Big enough I'd say.

Next month we'll be talking about what happens when you hit the venture button. All going well, at least!

Tomorrow I'll have a story for everyone. There's a big boot, a big fox, and a real little guy. Until then!