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April 29 Update (Patreon)

Published:
2018-04-29 20:41:08
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Well, I worked hard this month, but it didn't turn out like I wanted. Have a teasing TLS screenshot as proof of some of the content I've finished. Will keep things brief otherwise:

 - TLS 0.34.0 is getting fairly close. It is not huge, but it is more than just an interim/investing update.

 - Going to put out Ouroboros early next month and say screw optional stuff. New Steam developments make me more nervous, though.

 - Crimson Gray 1.5 is not moving forward until the artist becomes available.

 - Anti-Runner is on hold until I finish more other stuff.

For now, going to turn off my internet for a while, focus, and see how much I can get done in an intense burst. I promise you that I don't stop working when things are quiet, but somethings things don't go as planned. Will update again next week, or hopefully you'll hear from me sooner.

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Comments

Handsome Stalin

Oh my, that's one heck of a teaser screenshot

Argenten

Good luck, dont push yourself too far and as always thanks for all the hard work.

Rachnera

That looks like the Anak's hairstyle.

DukeLeto7

(Yes, I knew that...)

DukeLeto7

The last three update teaser pics have all been pretty epic.

aosdh

Even if you’re being ironic using that video these days is still kinda.

DukeLeto7

still kinda what?

Grey Wolf

Xerces!? No way we actually confront him now but a surprise attack on Esthera or something could be a disaster... before any of this I just really want to put Estaven in his place before we finally confront Aram and reform the church. Just let Ghenalon and Rodak split Erosia Poland-style for now, it's probably defunct at this point anyways.

DukeLeto7

I'm guessing this "confrontation" is going to take the form of an Incubus to Incubus chat, perhaps initiated the same way Riala and Robin reached out to Alonon. We know Xestris has been monitoring Simon's progress in Extradimensional Space, so it's a fairly safe assumption that Xerces knows about their trips to the Tower too. If Simon told Lexande his name during their discussions or Lexande learned it from someone else during Simon's Path, either of which is plausible, then Xerces and Xestris could have correlated his appearance with at Esthera's palace after the Doom King's first "manifestation" and the fact that Dargai/Simon seems to call all the shots for the Doom King to conclude that Simon was the real Doom King even before Xestris observed him in the Tower. So Xerces might choose to initiate extradimensional contact to set up a meeting to get the measure of his potential rival. Xerces is enigmatic. Not a madman, but all the more dangerous for that... This is going to be an interesting update.

DuckTogo

I am interested in the trouble you mentioned brewing with Steam and incidentally also the tribulations associated with Patreon. I remember trying to find specifics on what exactly both the explicit policy changes were and whether (and how) they had acted on it for both platforms, but I failed to unearth anything substantial. I am not sure whether talking about this is explicitly permitted by the TOS of the platforms or whether talking about it just reflects back badly on you, but I would very much like to know how exactly both Steam and Patreon are currently handeling NSFW content and creators associated to it.

Rachnera

Plot twist: Xerces is not there to "just talk" but to kill Simon while he can still easily do it (proving he has read the Evil Overlord List, and learned from it). Double twist: He succeeds. Effortlessly. Triple twist: Chapter 4 is actually about the harem trying to keep the plan going on their own, without the tremendous power of an Incubus King to back it up. Quadruple twist: The harem does NOT pull any shenanigan to negate Simon's death, like having a dragon (or a goddess) resurrect him, or going back in time to switch Simon with a perfectly accurate puppet just before the final blow.

Grey Wolf

I don't see the Lustlord and Esthera both just letting this happen. Plus it's not like a permanent split would be clean without Simon Balia, Trin, and Wynne will definitely be going soon and with Wynne possibly going deep back into necromancy.

DukeLeto7

I think the party is probably at the point where "effortlessly killing Simon" is no longer on the table.

sierralee

Quintuple Twist: Kai wakes up to the sound of an alarm, having dreamed the entire game so far. The remainder of TLS is a high school drama.

DukeLeto7

Fun Fact: Sherlock Season Five's Big Twist is going to be that the last four seasons were the hallucinations of John Watson as he lay dying in Afghanistan.

DukeLeto7

I for one am amused at the idea of an Anatidae Golgo 13.

sierralee

I'm not sure how far the ToS extends either, and there's always the concern that talking explicitly about these things might bring down the authorities. -_- But I doubt it hurts to give these answers. Patreon has a Trust and Safety Team that looks into individual projects based on unknown criteria (but it's probably user reports). What they demand a project change and how well they communicate appears to be up to the discretion of the individual team member, and their positions on things seem to vary. To Patreon's credit, it works with creators they judge to be in violation of their NSFW policy instead of simply banning them. Steam is a mess. They explicitly say one thing, then contradict it later. For example, MangaGamer had a direct meeting with Steam in which they were given a policy about patches, but then had one of their games removed that was in compliance. In getting DoW on Steam, I was given a policy that is violated by many games currently on the platform. It is very difficult to interpret anything Steam says. The new development that concerns me is a game that was in compliance with the generally understood rules getting removed without recourse and Steam refusing to communicate with the developer or publisher. I had intended to release Ouroboros with a patch that would be simpler for users, but now I'm concerned the same could happen to it.

DuckTogo

Thank you for the info! I really wonder what exactly they are thinking. Steam, and Patreon especially, are clearly making money from NSFW content, so they have every reason to try and work out policies that would allow them to continue to do so without angering credit card processors too much. Instead they just seem to half-ass the issue, potentially throwing the whole sector under the bus because they can't get their act together.

Rachnera

There's a graphic novel about Sherlock and Watson (in their XIXth incarnation) with pretty much this exact plot: Sherlock is an hallucination Watson created to cope with the stress in Afghanistan, and every investigation was actually solved by Watson alone, talking to himself. It wasn't a very good read.

WaxerRed

Instead of something openly confrontational, I wonder if Anak wants to offer some sort of deal or even alliance with Simon. The goddess of Magic was worried Simon would fall into the wrong crowd exploring the extra -dimensional space, maybe this is it?

sierralee

Haha, that's a fun idea. I don't know how well an unplanned minigame would fit into TLS, but I do think we should have some more appearances by orcs from the HoMS.

aosdh

Since a big part between releases is filling the air with inane lore question, I actually have own about how souls work in TLS. Because unless I'm mistaken it hasn't actually been explained in anywhere how and what a soul actually is. Succubi can suck the soul out of men if they do enough sexy time stuff, but the synergy skills Yarra has with both Aka and Hilstara says that she can "chip" and "sip" a persons soul with their consent without providing harm towards them. Is the soul just like a glass that unless completely emptied just fills itself slowly? What does a succubus actually do in order to drain the soul out of a person?

sierralee

There is a post about magic in TLS... that I forgot was a $10-limited post, sorry. =/ It looks like a fair amount of it is quoted on the wiki, so here's that as well as the original post: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/lore-post-death-8195339">https://www.patreon.com/posts/lore-post-death-8195339</a> <a href="http://thelastsovereign.wikia.com/wiki/Magic" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://thelastsovereign.wikia.com/wiki/Magic</a> Your question goes further, though, and I'm happy to answer it! Souls are somewhere between a field of energy suffusing the body and one of the body's most important organs. They grow and change with someone's experiences - what Aka says after her transformation is relevant to this. Likewise, they can be damaged by magical attacks, including succubus abilities. When succubi talk about sipping a soul, think of creating a small surface cut and drinking a little from it. For people as strong as Aka and Hilstara, this is harmless and it heals right up, but the ritual leaves some positive effects. Succubi who want to kill someone open a wound and drain everything. The most dangerous forms of sexual magic are the equivalent of tearing the soul open. Unlike the heart, though, souls are better at self-healing.

Rachnera

Some extra lore questions, about Unpeople this time. Non-twisted Unpeople seem to take good care of each other. However, we've never encountered any Unpeople in an explicit, if platonic, relationship. Do such couples exist? Likewise, do mixed human/Unpeople couple exist? Can Unpeople legally marry under the light of Ivala?

sierralee

Unpeople do not generally form couples and cannot legally marry - nor were married people with living partners eligible for the transformation. During the height of the war, it was a semi-common option for new widows and widowers. Some felt that was exploiting their grief, but they needed recruits. Instead of forming couples, Unpeople are more likely to develop small groups of close friends. These can include non-Unpeople, particularly in mixed military units or pre-transformation comrades. Otherwise, the Unpeople are kept somewhat separate by societal pressures, as seen in Ardford.

DukeLeto7

Well, if we're all determined to keep SL from getting work on 0.34 done, I have a question in the same vein. What's the connection with/distinction between "Sexual Magic" and "Corruption" and the "Magical Pollution" we tend to see in areas badly affected by the 2nd Arclent War? These are concepts that are alluded to but never really clarified. Does the use of sexual magic cause a certain amount of "fallout" that's unique to its practice, or can all magical forms produce corruption if abused? Is it a natural side effect of the magic of Incubus Kings or a particular scorched earth tactic employed by THE Incubus King in Arclent? The idea of a fixed number of immensely powerful magical beings whose talents are gradually destroying the natural environment reminds me of the old Dark Sun campaign setting, but that's really just showing how old I've gotten...

DukeLeto7

I have a horrible feeling that TLS the Rap Battle is now coming down the pike.

sierralee

There's a conversation slated for the upcoming release that addresses this issue, actually... assuming I finish the sidequest that includes it.

DukeLeto7

Magical ecological science should be interesting. Hopefully not as soul crushingly terrifying as smoke channeling converting soot into "useful energy". My inner physicist reacted to that idea, after doing the math, by screaming and running far, far away. (Roughly speaking, the net energy yield of the Eustrin Guild would be measured in kiloHiroshimas per second. (1 kg of soot per s. C^2 is a very big number.))

sierralee

It's not a direct conversion of mass into energy. I was using it in the sense of how a water mill converts a river's flow into energy - somewhat less explosive. The actual method of converting soot into energy would be much more akin to a chemical process.

DukeLeto7

(Nerd Sniping Warning: Yes, I know it's magic...) Apart from whatever you can recover from the kinetic energy of the hot smoke going up, it wouldn't work on a chemical level. Any chemical process that reverses an exothermic reaction has to be endothermic. Smoke is mostly CO2, H2O and some uncombusted wood fragments which are basically cellulose. Obviously you can distill the water and have some water to drink, and maybe concentrate the CO2 to a subterranean greenhouse (it would only help if you were growing something leafy), and sort out the uncombusted material for secondary burning, but all of that takes energy. Then again, arcane mages must routinely make entropy their bitch with fire and ice spells...

Ferr

They could just petrify it, thas a known magic. Its removing the energy, and make the smoke into rocks.

Decanter

There are a lot of pitfalls in assuming that this high-magic setting works like our world in every sense except where we've specifically seen it doesn't. You've noticed that entropy might not be so inescapable, but have you considered that we also might not be guaranteed conservation of mass/energy, or that the value of c and various other cosmological constants might be quite different?

aosdh

So it’s like a field of invisible hardened geletine?

DukeLeto7

See above: "Yes, I know it's magic..." But once you let the brain eating-zombie plague of science into your thinking about the setting, it'll make itself at home, start prodding at the upholstery and complaining about the food you've provided, until the metaphor in this sentence gets muddled up completely and ends in a lousy self referential joke. More seriously, there's also a lot of pitfalls in assuming that a fantasy setting works differently from our world, in the first place because we won't necessarily be able to understand it, in the second place because small changes in the way the world works can turn out to have massive consequences at the macro level. Less seriously "it's just a game, I should really just relax..." <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ugebzq3juE" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ugebzq3juE</a>

sierralee

Well, I've always felt that magic should not be shoehorned into ordinary physics - for something so different to exist in any kind of logical way, I think it would need to be fundamentally transformative on some level. So there is a different system of magical physics in their world, one that is presumably comprehensible but different from our own. Not being a god, I have not laid out this system in complete detail. =P I did decide before starting that magic is not a type of matter or on the electromagnetic spectrum, though. E=mc^2 may be true in the world of TLS, but it's not a complete formula. Also, the world of TLS is different from ours at the fundamental level in a few plot-relevant ways.

sierralee

Something like that. It's fairly fluid, but imagine a liquid with extremely high surface tension. That's a decent metaphor for the shards, actually. Early on, they're like a hard object within the soul, but as the incubus adapts to it, the shard "dissolves" into the soul. If the user dies, however, the soul evaporates and leaves behind the shard. The Incubus Emperor's shard is floating inside Simon's soul with a protective layer around it to keep it from influencing him. But because it can't interact with his soul, it doesn't grant him the additional strength.

Decanter

Leto: I realize you said "Yes, I know it's magic..." but I feel this does a disservice to the idea of a self-consistent system not consistent with our own, kind of lumping it in with lazy handwaves in the vein of 'A Wizard Did It' and "It's magic; we don't have to explain <i>s--t</i>." That's why I didn't treat it as an adequate disclaimer. Undoubtedly there are consequences at the macro level even though the macro level has things recognizable to us as humans and trees and so on. Presumably, if a "human" from this world where living things are integrally magical were impromptu transported to ours, they would at <i>best</i> die quickly, due to physics not supporting "internal magical cycles" and other elements crucial to their form of life. (I would just as soon not see the hypothetical explored in TLS, though.)

Rachnera

We really need another word than "magic" to define "generating a fireball out of nowhere" in fantasy settings. In our world, "magic" is something which appears to be physically impossible in regard to the current technological level of the people witnessing it. In fantasy words, "magic" is the science of converting something not existing in our world (mana) into something else (fire, light, water etc.). People may not understand everything about it (like we don't understand everything about physics in the real world either) but it's still something well-known, studied, reproducible. Thus, without context, "it's magic" can either mean "I have no idea what just happened" or "it's just a basic spell, nothing special".

DukeLeto7

We're arguing over semantics here, Decanter. The position I'm staking out is a pretty radical one, and it's basically that ALL fantasy and non-super-hard SciFi is implausible at some level, and the difference is how many levels down you start finding the handwaves. Nobody is omniscient, nobody can think out all the consequences of a "rule change", but some authors DO try harder, and that makes all the difference. By that standard, TLS is pretty damned good. You just happen to be looking at it from the top down and seeing the lack of cheap handwaves at the macro level, while I'm looking up from a particular element that doesn't quite work when you know the Physics and Chem of energy production at a more than superficial level. @Arachne: The ghost of Wittgenstein is pleased with that insight.

Decanter

Well, but you don't actually know the relevant physics and chemistry of energy production. You only know them for our universe. For the TLS universe you have assumptions. It's not very scientific to look at how things are and say "Hm, the universe contradicts my theories of how things should go. It must be the universe that is wrong." And yeah, this universe isn't <i>real</i>, but it's coherent so far and I think the benefit of any doubt should go toward it continuing to be that way, not toward assumptions based on another universe's laws.

Desertopa

Even from a real-world standpoint, generating energy from smoke in chemical terms isn't that weird. Smoke doesn't actually consist of components like CO2 or H2O, flame does. Those disperse invisibly into the atmosphere, while smoke consists of solid particulates. Some of those may be noncombustible ash, but in many cases a lot of it is going to be soot, or noncombusted carbon. Soot doesn't burn easily, but it has plenty of stored chemical energy. A magical process catalyzing the combustion of soot doesn't require the setting to depart further from our world's physics than we've already seen.

sierralee

Clearly I need to be working harder so that everyone has 0.34.0 to play. XP

DukeLeto7

@SL: Or I have too much time on my hands in general... @Desertopa: DERP. Clearly I don't know as much about fire as I thought I did. :P If we're talking about a waste disposal system that effectively uses the chemical potential in the waste a bit more efficiently than just throwing it in a magical landfill, that's fine. I read the conversation as saying they were using the waste products of combustion to get net energy comparable to the combustion itself, which is a bit more than was actually written. @Decanter: What I'm arguing for is a philosophical intuition based on the phase spaces involved in biological processes. There are a lot more ways of being a non-viable organism than there are of being a viable one, so there are also a vastly larger number of possible universes where the laws don't produce anything of interest. Basically: 1) Any set of hypothesized laws of nature that produces a universe in which intelligent life can exist are going to be, statistically speaking, a universe where that intelligent life is so different from humanity that we can't imagine it. Or it will just be our universe with the same natural laws but a slightly different history. 2) Because of cosmological "fine tuning", there's no "adjacent possible" to our reality. You can't create a functioning universe by starting from our own and puttering around with swapping out slightly different constants or removing one law and replacing it with a different one without breaking the entire system. There's no "reality with slight variations" that works, because any slight variations break everything. 3) So any fictional universe that is comprehensible to us as humans because it resembles our own is one that won't work if you inquire into it too deeply, OR it's one where the laws of nature are the same but history has played out a bit differently. So there's no such thing as a "plausible" fantasy or soft sci fi universe, for the given definition of plausible as "a world that could actually exist". If you are using the definition of "plausible" as "doesn't have any obvious world building holes or provoke excessive suspension of disbelief", then there are lots of such plausible fantasy or sci-fi universes. I hope that makes some sort of sense.

Decanter

>Any set of hypothesized laws of nature that produces a universe in which intelligent life can exist are going to be, statistically speaking, a universe where that intelligent life is so different from humanity that we can't imagine it. "statistically speaking", yes, but you have to remember there's something of a (Weak) Anthropic Principle in play here - if the universe were one of the many possible universes incapable of supporting the existence of characters we could relate to, we would not be having a story set in that universe. >Because of cosmological "fine tuning", there's no "adjacent possible" to our reality. You can't create a functioning universe by starting from our own and puttering around with swapping out slightly different constants or removing one law and replacing it with a different one without breaking the entire system. There's no "reality with slight variations" that works, because any slight variations break everything. I would think of it not as "adjacent possible" but as convergent evolution (cf. biology). Though there is also no real reason it has to be limited to tweaking constants rather than having a whole different algorithm, even one less mathematically elegant with some epicycles here and there. (These two approaches aren't mutex, either.)

DukeLeto7

I think I said it was a philosophical intuition rather than a rigorous proof, it's something that you can't prove or disprove because it would require actualizing a fictional universe. I was allowing for subbing in alternate algorithms rather than just blindly tweaking constants. But I'm still pretty sure reality is sufficiently complex and dependent on all its rule based details that you simply can't get to a valid standard fantasy world while upholding a reality where science is a meaningful endeavor. (If genuine "magic" is in play, so the same action may have different effects based on who is doing them or what the gods feel like, then experimentation is an invalid means of learning.) OOH, hey 0.34! (Runs off.)

DankPotatoes

So i have a kinda weird question: What is the music that plays in The Demon Realm and who created it? I havent heard it in other games, unlike most of the games remaining soundtrack, but it sounds really haunting in a pretty cool way.

DankPotatoes

Now that i think about it i have the same question for the music during most of the Rodak summit in chapter 2