Lust & Lead – Dev Log 06 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Light on images again today, but a lot of work has gotten done the past couple of weeks. After finally getting casting sorted and managing to recast the roles that opened back up, I’ve been able to separate myself from that whole process and focus almost entirely on gameplay and the first real map: The Graveyard.

I’ve been very happy with the progress over the last two weeks and feel like I’ve managed to finally get back on track. There’s actually quite a lot to cover this time, so I can’t guarantee everything I’ve worked on will make it into the Dev Log, but I’ll do my best.

Voice Acting

Voice acting for the game’s Alpha is now mostly complete. All of the cutscene work has been recorded and around 30% of the initial enemy roster has also been voiced. Two enemies have an actress who is currently busy but should hopefully get to them soon, while the rest haven’t been sent lines yet.

Rebby’s voice acting is essentially finished outside of miscellaneous conversations and any NSFW content, which none of the non-monster cast have been given yet. Both Rebby and Richard’s voices have also provided a lot of gameplay dialogue that has been great fun to work with. I won’t showcase any of that here, but I’ve been very happy with what the cast have done so far. The performances have been great and the voices fit the characters really nicely.

Gameplay Voices

One of the bigger systems I worked on over the last couple of weeks was a gameplay dialogue system for Richard and Rebby. The main goals were to avoid characters talking over one another and give me a much easier way of triggering dialogue and displaying subtitles. Sin Spire’s approach to this was fairly convoluted, whereas this one is much more dynamic, handles priorities and uses tags. This means I don’t have to rigidly define every possible thing a character can react to without room for expansion.

To test it, I spent quite a bit of time with Rebby and made her react to a bunch of things the player can do. If you recall, Savina in Sin Spire would react to you attacking her or climbing on objects. Rebby, by comparison, will now react to you attacking her, aiming at her, staring at her, staring at her breasts, standing on her head and various other things. She’ll also greet you when you approach and congratulate you after completing an arena.

It’s been really cool seeing her come to life, especially with her VA doing such a good job. It makes me want to keep adding more interactions, but there are already hundreds of lines in the game and I probably shouldn’t go completely insane with it just yet.

Richard can also talk, though I am going to implement a toggle for his gameplay barks. Most of the time you’ll just hear vocalizations when he jumps, takes damage or climbs, but he does have some proper gameplay lines as well. Right now, every now and then, he’ll voice his frustration while reloading. With the music blaring, guns firing and enemies making noise, those lines tend to blend naturally into everything else rather than constantly demand your attention. I’ll experiment more with his side of the system later, but for now I’ve moved onto other things.

Gameplay Loop and Loadout

I’ve mentioned a few times that the loadout is going to be important to the game’s progression. You’ll unlock Artifacts throughout the game and be able to equip them before heading into an arena. The loadout is tied directly into the travel system, so when you speak to the character responsible for taking you between locations, you’ll be able to choose your destination and manage what you’re bringing with you.

That includes your starting weapon, which is actually a fairly recent addition. I came up with it while designing the game’s out-of-arena currency because I wanted players to have more meaningful things to spend it on. Being able to purchase weapons and choosing one to start with made sense to me.

Another idea I’d had floating around for a while was Special Artifacts, and those are now in and working too. Unlike regular Artifacts which give you passive bounses, these give you an active ability that can be charged during an arena. I haven’t fully decided how the charging will work yet. I’m currently leaning toward either a simple time-based recharge or tying it into purification. The first Special Artifact I’m testing with lets you trigger bullet time and slow everything down for a while with a sepia overlay. It’s pretty cool.

More to Come

At this point, almost all of the gameplay systems needed for the Alpha are ready. There are still a handful left, but most of those are now tied directly to actual content rather than pure gameplay systems.

One of the big ones is boss battles. Waves can already progress into a boss stage, but right now that stage simply ends after a timer because there isn’t actually a boss there yet. Getting that working properly means designing the boss, making the model and animations, and writing dialogue, so that’ll be a decent chunk of work.

There’s another remaining system tied to one of the side characters, but after that I should mostly be moving into pure content production: more enemies, more weapons, more animations, characters and everything else needed to fill out the Alpha.

I’m skipping over quite a lot from the last two weeks because this Dev Log would become enormous if I gave everything its own section. I haven’t even properly talked about The Graveyard despite it being one of the main things I’ve been working on, so I’ll probably save some of that for next time.

I also want to narrow the Alpha timeframe slightly. Previously I was aiming for October or November, but at this point I’m just going to say November. There’s still quite a lot to do and, while it would have been nice to have something ready for spooky season, I’d rather spend the time making sure everything is actually working and reasonably polished before putting it in people’s hands.

Anyway, that’s all for today. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next time!