Hello and welcome to the first Marry the Dragon devlog! After last month's data loss, I started work on a smaller project to pick up the momentum I lost. Catgirl Care and Rockin' Resort are still happening, but, after nearly a year of development being lost, now feels like a good time to take a break to develop another project. That's where the Lust Potions sequel, Marry the Dragon comes in!

I already have a bunch of progress made so let's dive in.

What is Marry the Dragon?

At the end of Lust Potions, Lil' Dude summoned a character who I only referred to in advertising as the "secret character". They were never really that secret but this character was Aurelia, my dragon girl.

The setup for Marry the Dragon is that Lil' Dude is determined to marry Aurelia. To achieve this goal, he intends to use magic to lock himself in a time loop where the only way out is to be married to Aurelia by morning. He has 12 hours to explore Aurelia's castle, find useful items, and helpful characters (the succubi are returning!) in order to achieve his romantic pursuit.

I'm still finalizing the design at this point, but I hope to have the first demo for Marry the Dragon available by Halloween.

Early Development

The following screenshots use placeholder assets from Lust Potions that will be replaced in the final game.

Development for Marry the Dragon actually started with Rockin' Resort. The complex adventure game and dialogue system that I built for that project was able to be recovered (and upgraded) quickly and was imported as a starting point for Marry the Dragon.

Since Marry the Dragon is mostly an adventure game with platforming, the adventure game and dialogue system cover most of the code for this project. This is the main reason I felt this project could be playable in such a short amount of time.

I'm also a lot more familiar with game design and programming principles. This means faster development overall and typically better features. For example, in Lust Potions, Lil' Dude could run, jump, interact, and toss items. His jump was very simple with a vertical impulse that launches him up and gravity to bring him back down.

Platforming is a much larger focus for Lil' Dude in Marry the Dragon. He's short and her castle is large after all. As such, new systems have been added to his jump. I added:

Some squash and stretch to jumping and landing along with some dust particles.

A drop shadow to help players land jumps.

Coyote time, a system where he can still jump for a few frames after dropping off a platform.

A Jump buffer, which allows him to react to jump inputs that happen moments before landing.

A bit of extra air time at the apex of jumps.

A system that lets players hold jump to get a little extra height.

A new input system which should work with any gravity direction + camera angle.

Lil' Dude's interaction system has also seen a huge upgrade. Lust Potions only supported using "interactable" objects like his computer or the cauldron. Potions had a second system which used similar code.

Instead of separating these systems, Marry the Dragon marries them. All "interactable" objects are now built from a base class and their behavior is determined by their subclasses. For example: the potion object has "pick up" and "toss" functionality while talking to Aurelia is a different subclass. This new system means that adding unique functionality (like a potion exploding) is easy to put together which should massively improve development pace.

The final core piece of development that I need is a system for navigating the castle. In Marry the Dragon, time only moves when Lil' Dude performs actions like change rooms. There's no ticking timer, just a limited number of actions he can perform each night.

To make time easy to track, I added a clock that can appear in many different parts of the game such as the loading screen and map screen. The map screen itself is also going to be 3D, with some filtering support to make finding where you want to go much easier. I'm still working on this system but I'm pretty happy with the early results.

Data Recovery, Catgirl Care, and Rockin' Resort

I've made some large progress in my file recovery. Most of this progress comes from a few scripts I've written to compare files from my backups with the unsorted files. This cleared around 136 GB of files. I also automated sorting a lot of anime art I have saved and manually cleared out most of the leftover Linux files. I'm at the point where I can reliably find my art and game assets which is a huge step.

I was able to reconstruct and upload the Pokemon Black YouTube video I made and I'm almost done doing the same for the Sweet Tea devlog video I was making. Once that's done, it'll just be my games that'll need to be rebuilt.

Sweet Tea herself is back now. Rebuilding her has made her much more reliable and she's back to where she was before the data loss.

As for Catgirl Care and Rockin' Resort, the latter is essentially fully recovered and is ready for further development. I'll likely return to working on Rockin' Resort once Marry the Dragon is either complete or further along. Catgirl Care will be a much more significant effort as I'll be restarting a large part of the project. I still plan to make the game and I'm sorry to delay it. Catgirl Care is a very important game to me, so I hope you all can wait just a little longer.

There's still a lot of sorting that needs to be done but I'm much further along than when I started and I feel comfortable working on projects again.

What's next?

Marry the Dragon and my regular art will be my primary focus for the next few months. I intend to get a demo out by Halloween. Data recovery and YouTube videos will be my secondary focus.

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I'm happy with the progress that I've made on Marry the Dragon and my other projects this month. Losing my data was a huge setback but your support here on Patreon and with commissions has given me the support structure I need to pick everything back up and continue.

Thanks as always for your support! This month was very productive for me and I'm hoping to have more to share with you next month as well.