V0.15.0 progress report:
Hi everyone. As I mentioned, the next few months are going to be extremely busy for me due to my work schedule, so the next major game update is still months away, but I wanted to provide some information about what it will entail. (A tease if you will, hahaha.) The major new content will be a new zone (the water temple in the north eastern forest) and the inquisition system. I haven't done much work on the inquisition system yet, but the new zone is under construction.
The water temple is a handcrafted zone, a bit like the cathedral north of the graveyard, but larger and with more puzzles and secret chambers and the like. The game consists of a mix of procedurally generated zones and handcrafted zones. This was a very deliberate design choice to try to get the best of both worlds. The main quest will continue in the temple as the essence of water is located there, guarded by a 3 star boss. There will also be some side quest content in the new zone, but I'm still working on writing those.
The temple is a level 9 zone and will feature 5 new enemy Psyons. These include 3 normal enemies, a one star elite, and a 3 star boss. The monsters are water-themed and so are their psyonic images (bubble baths, lesbian shower scenes, and water sports in the case of the boss). The new zone will of course also include new higher level loot including valuable items, enchanted items, spells, weapons, and gear.
The temple poses a significant challenge with respect to finding suitable artwork. After months of painstaking searching, I still came up short, especially given some puzzles that require altered images and the like of such a specific theme. I decided that AI has finally gotten good enough to be considered. I'm very picky about the art in the game, so thus far, there is very little AI content. Well under 1%. Wanting to avoid AI slop, I've spent hundreds of dollars building AI agents that spit out hundreds of images that both they and I can shift through, to find a few here and there that I consider high enough quality for the game. Far fewer than 5% make the cut, but there were some that met my standards. This does open up more creative content ideas as an added benefit. I also pass the images through many filters and the like to adjust the colors. It's a lot of work. I will probably wait for Nanobanana 2 (may release under a different name) before I settle on the final artwork, as this is poised to be a significant advancement in AI image generation. I do a lot of work with AI, so I follow the field closely.
I decided it was also time to give the estim aspect of the game some attention. During the month of August, when I had time dedicated to game dev, but was unable to work on most elements of the game due to uploads being broken on Milovana during that time, I spent a good chunk of that creating new audio estim files. I give each file a lot of attention, including extensive testing and calibration to provide consistency across both pleasure and pain signals. The next update will come with 9 new pain files (used for damage and punishments), 10 new general pleasure files (used for psyon encounters), 12 new themed pleasure files (used for sex scenes and specific sex acts like footjobs and the like), and 3 long files in the 5 to 12 minute range for use as background psyonic energy in new zones and boss encounters. The boss will have a minion that first tries to defeat you via orgasm before the fighting starts. These files are more than I'll need for the new zone, so some will be retroactively inserted into previous content in areas that had previously used the same stim for multiple purposes.
I'm still designing the inquisition. The sin system is already in place, but there is no consequence yet. With the next update, once your sin gets over a certain value, the inquisition has a chance to track you down when you are in town and drag you off to the church dungeons. They will use some of the most painful estim in the game to cleanse you of those sins. You can repent via tribute to the statue of Milovana before your sin gets too high if you opt to avoid this fate, however I know that many of you are looking forward to it.
Here is some sample artwork (not yet finalized and made lower resolution for uploading). Let me know what you think.
