Lust & Lead - Dev Log 07 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! A nice and by-the-numbers Dev Log today. I'm happy to say that progress has been going pretty steadily and the past couple of weeks have had three major focuses: Saving, Curses and Bosses. I'll be keeping some things vague because there are a few surprises I want to leave for later, but there's still plenty to talk about.

Saving

The first big task I needed to tackle was saving. As I mentioned last time, we have loadouts as well as an out-of-arena currency set up, but no actual save systems. Unlike Sin Spire, I wanted saves for Lust & Lead to be automatic considering how the game is structured. There aren't any plans for missable content or choice-based outcomes, so autosaves being the main way of saving makes sense, at least to me. The game saves after important events like changing your loadout, completing arenas or receiving new items.

I haven't yet decided if I want separate profiles. Since levels can be revisited individually, including linear ones like the tutorial, they don't feel especially necessary, though things like Saloon conversations might be worth considering.

Curses

Last time I mentioned a system tied to one of the side characters. That character, who shall remain unnamed for now, is our Saloon merchant. Rebby works as the in-arena merchant, while a mysterious and weird girl hangs out at the Saloon selling buffs and curses (more on her in a future post).

Curses are intended to give players who are struggling another option. Even if you die during an arena, you'll still earn some of that out-of-arena currency, and curses are fairly cheap. They work as a simple buff + debuff, so you might get a strong bonus with the downside of, for example, having part of your health taken away.

You can only have one curse at a time and might get a bad roll, but you can always back out without buying anything. If you end up not liking your current curse set, then you'll have to buy a new one. Buffs work similarly but come with no downside. They're just weaker and slightly more expensive.

I promise this won't happen in the actual game, but during testing I've managed to get something like "+10% health" paired with "-50% health". So, yeah, it needs work.

Bosses

And now we're at the big time consumer. Regular enemies are comparatively straightforward for me: visuals, a basic animation set and fairly simple AI. Bosses are a different story. They typically require a lot more animation work due to their (slightly) larger variety of attacks and so on.

In terms of design, the biggest difference from Sin Spire is that, outside of a few story encounters, bosses no longer have dedicated boss arenas. Here, you have the entire wave arena map to run around in, so repositioning, breaking LoS and navigating a much larger space all need to be considered.

Meet the Vampire Queen. She's the game's first boss and one of several "Queens" you can encounter. She's probably the most human-looking one I have planned, but that doesn't mean I let her look entirely pretty. Her look is actually inspired by a certain cult TV show.

I started with a pretty clear idea of the Vampire Queen's moveset, but over time I ended up chipping away at it, removing bits and pieces. Partly because I didn't want to do some of it, and partly because I realized there was a flaw in how I was approaching bosses.

In Sin Spire, dying to a boss wasn't a huge setback because you could retry the fight fairly quickly. In Lust & Lead, however, the fight comes after maybe 20-30 minutes of gameplay. If you die there, good luck, you now have to repeat all of that.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to compensate by making bosses easy, but it definitely changes my approach. I figure the bosses should feel like a duel, rather than an insane challenge, to cap off the match, so I want to avoid an enormous difficulty spike after a long run. Even if a player is under-equipped, they should still have a good fighting chance.

At the moment, though, the Vampire Queen is still pretty relentless, so I'm tuning her and considering some additional ways to punish her. There are plenty of other things to discuss with her and bosses in general, such as presentation, but I want to leave some of that as a surprise.

What's Next?

I've still got more work to do on the Vampire Queen, including her defeat state and animations. Right now she just kind of dies like a regular enemy, but the plan is to give her a unique set of purification animations. That said, I might save those for when I do a broader pass at sex animations across the board.

After she's done, the remaining Alpha work is mostly content: three story NPC models, one or two more enemy models, more weapons, story cutscenes, miscellaneous dialogue and additional purification animations. All that and, of course, polish.

On the subject of purification, there's one thing I've been trying to work out. At the moment, when an animation finishes, the enemy falls to the floor and a pool of "white liquid" appears underneath them before they disappear. It's funny and ridiculous, but the way it's currently handled means the animation needs to fully resolve before the player is free again.

In Sin Spire, enemies disappeared during the purification itself. I've considered doing something similar here and having the climax make them disappear more quickly so the player can get back to the action. The current animations don't interrupt the flow too badly, but they could probably end faster.

A flashier disappearance might also look better during hectic waves, though it would mean losing some of the aftermath. I'm not sure yet. If people have a preference, let me know. If it's hard to picture what I mean, I might put together a poll with some video examples when the time comes.

And with that, I'm going to close off this Dev Log before it gets too long. Thanks for reading and I'll see you all next time!