New Build!! (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Today is update day, a long time coming. 2021 has been rough for everyone, and very much so has made things difficult, but we persist and push on. I'd like to take some time to talk about the future path of Lok:R and make sure everyone is informed of what we're doing/planning.

For those unaware we have an expert in the industry helping us refactor our pipeline and get everything sorted. This, along with the experience we've acquired from developing, has helped us get together a much better plan as we move forward. This means we've made some compromises with the original scope, which I shall discuss in this post later. All of this is in the vein of pushing out updates every **two** months at most, rather than the long delays you've seen so far. Non-patrons being 1 build behind the patrons.

The Build

Okay so what exactly is in today's update? Well, quite a lot beneath the visuals actually. This is the last of the foundation builds. What that means for those unaware is that much of the work that has gone into the game up until this point has been in the foundation and skeleton of the game itself, i.e. making sure we can smoothly make content for it, and get everything sorted before hand. Because if we were to build a big game onto a foundation of rotten buggy garbage, it'd collapse almost immediately.

That said there were a LOT of bugs that we've had to iron out. Tons. And likely still more, which is where everyone can help out by giving us feedback and bug reports. This will help us completely iron it out even more. In this build we have some Vanlen content, sadly we encountered a bug with rigs that cause them to be slightly misaligned, and we haven't had the time to fix them the last few days before this update. We desperately wanted to make sure we could stick to schedules this time, and push out a build.

Despite that, you can interact with Vanlen's minigame, and there are more characters to speak to in the village so far, with more to come. We also have a few CG animations for you to see, which I will discuss later in this post once again.

Another recent issue we discovered is how Kuja's amazing backgrounds were being imported into unity was problematic, and sadly a number of these had to be redrawn, which cost us quite a bit of time, but the benefit (which you'll see ingame) is that the backgrounds look 20x better than they did. Figuring out this bug now was vital for progressing development, because if we figured it out later we'd have a ton more environments to have to redraw.

We've also spent more time with the help of our industry expert in shaders/lighting. The game looks beautiful, and I personally cannot wait to see more of the planned environments in the future with this degree of lighting and detail.

So now that we believe we have the foundation mostly in place, now begins the effort of populating the game with content, so now I shall discuss that.

Planning For the Future

So what kind of content will we be expecting? Well we have a roadmap for you involving the main line of content (Minus spoilers) to help you understand exactly where we are in development:

 
From this you can see our progress and general plan for main locations. With this foundation update we're going to start with the ship section again, the Absolution.

We're also going to focus on CG scenes for a while due to how much easier they are to make, and we have a neat idea for the sex content of the game, which we will hopefully be able to show you in a patch in the coming days. We have already been planning the content for the ship, and have a rough idea of what we're going for.

(Screenshots of Compound's work in Blender, which we are using as concept art for Kuja's amazing 2D art)

Proper planning will help a lot as we pump out content, which we are entirely focusing on now.

So now I'll get to talking about mechanics and compromises for the  future as well.

Mechanics and Scope

So as you know, it has been a while since our last decent update, and a lot of this is due to just general nonsense this year, but a lot of it is also because our scope was a bit too large. So we've been thinking about ways we can reduce scope for the future.

One of the methods for doing this is cutting out the 'connecting areas' between all locations of interest. So in the future you will navigate the world via clicking on areas of interest, such as Razorclaw village, and then you will 'travel' to that place on the world map. Random encounters and events will occur during this, as well as the simulated passing of time.

(Map of the planned world)

This will greatly reduce the stress on the artist while also keeping the world feeling large and enjoyable.

We would also like to shift more to using CG to take a load off of the animators. And we have an idea of how we want to implement that as well. So you'll be able to unlock CG through dialogue or quest achievements, and they will play like memories being retold by the character in question. So if you speak to Keakrix about the time she tripped on a particular tentacle mushroom, you'll be able to view a CG of the event in question, and she'll 'retell' the story through 1st person past tense narrative, about how the mushrooms were a liiiittle too invasive. I intend to show this in a near patch involving the current CG (Which are also missing audio cues due to personal emergencies with our animation team this month).

I think you'll agree upon viewing them that the CG is absolutely beautiful, and we won't be losing much with this planned method, we'll even have limited customization. It'll also give us a method to show sex scenes in places where there might not be a lot of horniness, aka the absolution, where a character might recall one of their 'adventures' with another crew mate ;).

Dungeons. When it comes to dungeons we're going to do something similar to the overworld, to make them feel spacious and dense. When you travel to one of the future dungeons on the map, you'll be presented with an in-game entrance you can move around, loot, sort your inventory, set up a fast travel position, etc. From there you'll be able to enter the dungeon itself, and then be transported to an overview map similar to the main world map, and travel through it room by room, switching to in-game view on rooms with enemies, puzzles, or platforming.

Combat will be introduced sometime near the end of the village section, and we will first be adding an 'Arena' mode which will allow us to balance test and bug test combat easily by setting up fights between the player (and their chosen build) and NPCs of our choosing, as well as NPCs vs NPCs. Fine tuning balance is important to me personally, and I think an arena mode like this will be fun to mess around with for players.

The combat, for those unaware, will mainly be real time turn based RPG, similar to the combat found in games like Baldur's Gate I/II, KOTOR, and Pathfinder.

Going forward in the future, we may make alterations to the scope to help development, but the goal here is to produce content at a reasonable pace for people to play. No more waiting long periods of time, come hell or high water.

We also want to further involve our patrons in development, giving more choice and by releasing more often we can gather more feedback from players, which will further aid in our pipeline.

Which comes to the final conclusion

Final Words

I must apologize for the long delay this took, I cannot stress how problematic it was to get to where we are. It was also a little psychological, like a sunk cost fallacy. "Just a little more time, and we can put more stuff in", and the longer it took, the less we wanted to release. However no longer.

I want to thank everyone for supporting us, for continuing to believe in us. You are all fantastic, and are allowing us to make what will turn out to be a great game. From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much. We won't disappoint you.

Launcher/Website Link: Here