Current Development Progress (Patreon)

This is going to be a development-oriented but more theoretical post. I have been steadily working on a large new system: Blessed Nephelym. Indeed, it is a large implementation, hence the silence and lack of an early build. While writing the basic framework for the system, I took a good look at my current characters and realized their designs are too limited for what I want blessed ones to be.

They will work great for the lesser wild Nephelym and the customizable breeder, but to get the designs I want, the blessed ones will revert to a more manual path. Each one will be handcrafted and not rely on the procedural system at all. The procedural system was built with gameplay in mind first, and now it's time for another system with art, story, and lore at the forefront. The game lacks in this area right now.

Speaking of lore, it has been refined significantly and now has better synergy with the gameplay. The reasons why you breed, why there are both wild and blessed Nephelym, and why the world is the way it is are now solid. I won't give away all the details here--they will be discovered in the game once implemented.

Alright time to talk design and art now. As mentioned above, the current characters are built to solve gameplay problems. That's great and useful, but it leaves the game feeling dull and certainly can't drive the narrative and world. In addition to the wild Nephelym, the procedural system is used for the NPCs: Amber, Cassie, Falene, and Camilla. In accordance with the refined lore and art direction, these characters are being uniquely redesigned from the ground up. And, they are all becoming blessed Nephelym if they aren't already. That's right, under the new lore you are the only human in the world.

While on the topic of design, there's a thing that needs addressed: males. Back when I first launched I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, so I took all feedback as "good" feedback, even if it wasn't something I wanted. One such piece of feedback was to introduce "more human males to offset the mostly human females". The result: hominal males. Bluntly, I don't care much for having males in the game at all, but especially the hominal ones. It's a breeding game though, so males will stay; however, over the next few builds I will be replacing the hominal males with their feral equivalents. It's back to the roots and my original design on that one. Just to be clear, the Nephelym are, and always have been a monster girl focused race. 

Ah yes, ferals. Be on the look out for a poll to decide which race gets their feral variants next.

Lastly, I discovered a plugin that will greatly help my animation pipeline. Instead of the traditional guess and check approach, it will allow me to build animations directly in the editor with characters as they appear ingame. This will be beneficial for all characters, but especially blessed ones that have scenes around the world. My intent is to use this to help improve the quality of the procedural animations as well. Those animations are very challenging to make since the characters can change shape.

Thus concludes the Patreon post. The NPC redesigns are already underway, and I should be ready to post images of them soon. Since I am implementing a large new system, it will take a few weeks, so let's have...

Yet Another Hotfix

...for the public build.

Update April 6 2018:

I keep getting the same questions/concerns over and over, so I will solidify my answers here.

Are males being removed?

No. I am improving their designs and replacing concepts that don't work. Pulling off well-designed hominal males is not only very hard, it doesn't represent the game I want to make. When I say the game is female focused, that means I'd rather design and build monster girls instead of males. I understand that a breeding game needs a strong M/F component, so that's why males will always exist. However, their existence and design is now governed by a different set of parameters. And that is, basically, how great a sex scene they can create with a female.

Is the male breeder going to be an option?

Always. You are the only human in a world full of horny mythical half-monsters, most of which are female. Playing as a male in this scenario is too good to pass up and has always been one of the design goals.

Is this new system another rewrite/transition?

No, never again. Aside from refreshed designs for existing NPCs, it's purely new content from now on.