August 17 Update (Patreon)

Big TLS news to talk about today, but first some quick business. Posting this update a day early both to gather info and to hopefully kickstart my work. This week I posted another art preview, in this case Shard Sipping. This was the biggest and most complex scene we've done, in terms of art!

Now, it's time to talk about the combat system in TLS. The next update will have a bunch of additions and improvements, as previously discussed, but along with that I'm considering a major visual update. I hope to get the opinions of players on this, so read the whole post if you're interested!

Here is Yarra doing an attack in the default battle system:

Again thanks to Rachnera, we have the option of displaying the character busts during combat. This has a major advantage of being ready to go immediately, since the system already works. We'd be limited in how much variation we can have, but we could put up different expressions:

But the code for this allows us to display any image we configure, which leads to an obvious possibility... new art. If we were willing to go to the effort and expense, combat could look more like the video above, or like this:

These are not mock-ups (they were created in the engine) but they're also not final. Details like the height of the characters could of course change, like Yarra being over the damage number there. The point of this is to show what's possible in principle.

Beyond just being visually dynamic, we could have actions that show more character personality, such as Yarra using an item here:

Of course, half of you refuse to use items, but I still think it's a nice touch if the characters all have their own unique way of doing things, even common actions.

The opposite side of the scale is that this method would be very expensive and eat up a ton of Annikath's art time. I consider it, however, because players would see these drawings far more than they'd see any given sex scene, so the effect on the game would be outsized compared to other art.

I'm honestly at a crossroads here, and this would be a major business decision on my end. What I'm looking for from players is how you feel about this and how much it would matter to you, as a TLS experiencer. If people want too much, combinatorial explosion would make this unfeasible: we can't have different images for all weapon types a character can use, different outfits during special sections, battle damage variants, and so on (we'd cover major changes like Aka's transformation, though). This would already be a massive undertaking as seen above.

Regardless of the final decision, players would be able to turn it off in the options menu if they prefer, just like animations. So in essence we're deciding between the busts option (good to go) and the art option (a lot more work), or a hybrid such as more edits to the primary busts.

Sometimes I make these into polls so non-commenters can chime in, but I think this one is too complex given potential variations, so sound off if you have an opinion!