Long-Term Development Roadmap Update (Patreon)

It's been a while since I did the last post on the long-term development plan. With the recent 1.4 update out, all of SKA's major side characters Arwin, Roland and Hermann handled and Liora being in the second development half, it's time to take a quick look back and then a longer look forward.

Because I also want to talk about corruption content and don't want Patreon to censor my post, it will be paywalled... (Getting flagged for nsfw because of keywords in text needs to stop...)

1 SKA Major Updates from the old Roadmap

Let's start with an update to the previously planned major updates. We finished the work on the previously 1.1 to 1.3 numbered updates dealing with the above mentioned side characters, although we split the Roland update into two parts (one for the bad ending, one for the victory ending variations), so the numberings are off by one.

The two pieces of planned content we only partially managed to was the update to the Brothel and the Underground Bar, where we only added the first event set for the Brothel. So completing those is still on the to-do list and my plan was to schedule a smaller major update for each of them and then we move on to the last planned update which was more content for companion related events.

This gives us the following Major Update Roadmap for the immediate future. As a reminder, in the following I will use the time unit "dev cycle" which corresponds to a two-month SKA-Liora cycle, but with more and more time moving towards the Liora development side.

Major Update 1.5.0 Brothel End

This will be a fairly short update (Probably 1 dev cycle) where we will add 1 more event (+repeat version) to the brothel and then add an extra epilogue end where the brothel will functionally be classified as a cheating partner (this of course doesn't make a lot of sense when written out :'D, but it's just how it will work mechanically) where Aura will end up as a whore if she has worked a bunch at the brothel and doesn't have a different cheating partner (as those will probably have a higher priority).

Major Update 1.6.0 Underground Bar + post Demon-crazy + Cultist (Drug) Ending

This will be a medium long update (Probably 2 dev cycles) for updating the waitress job at the Underground Bar with a couple of events so it lasts a bit longer before it becomes too repetitive. The pool of events is planned to get a refill when you complete Demon-crazy with 1 scene for Fleura / The Twins / Corrupted Liliana each. I expect this to be fairly CG intensive so might need another 2 month beta like we did for the Hermann update to fill out the CGs.

Similarly to the Brothel End, I would also like to add a Cultist/Drug End, where Aura ends up seeking drugs from the remnants of the demon worshippers or something like that. Not sure if I will focus on the demon worshippers or the drug aspect. I think it might be more of the latter if Rose is not corrupted and more of the former if Rose is corrupted and leader of the remnants as I think that could create interesting ending dynamic.

Major Update 1.7.0 Companion Events

Aaaaand then with the backlog cleared out, we can move back to the update which would otherwise have been regularly scheduled, the update for our companions. I already did a John cheating partner event, but there is still a bit more to be done here.

I originally planned this one to be bigger, but I will probably not make this update too big, as I want to move on to closing out the 2.0 development.

2 The Remaining SKA Roadmap to 2.0

There is a lot we could do still. John feminization is something I had in mind for the Companion update, adding more content to the Refugee Camp, more Earth scenes, more Vice content, more ending variations, and and and and but as I mentioned above I am now reaching the point where I feel like I want to be done with SKA.

It's a similar feeling to when I was working on my PhD thesis or many other projects in the past, I have grown a lot in skills, we have grown a lot in resources, and it's been over five years since I started SKA, so I definitely feel like I have reached the point to move on.

I have especially felt a drop in intrinsic motivation once I finished the Hermann ending, I think adding the three endings for those side characters and putting the stories I had in mind for them into action, was a big driver for me post 1.0 release.

In terms of extrinsic motivation, while I know there are many who would like to see more content, I also see from my explorations into different discussion areas of the internet, that a project going on for multiple years is not well received. Players asking for recommendations, hearing about SKA, another then interjecting and warning them about the dev milking the project and then the interested player bouncing off... Seeing that kind of stuff after working a lot on the content and delivering everything on schedule as much as possible, is of course not exactly great.

Now, me moving on will mean that I will after 2.0 no longer be actively working on SKA, there will be no more roadmaps, etc. but if players want Emubi to draw more CGs for existing content, then I will not get into the way for that. People whining about milking and whatever be damned, me not commissioning Emubi for more drawings to increase the game's quality when there are people left who want their money to be used like that, is simply too irrational.

So with all that in mind, I think it's time for me to to think about what would need to be done from my / the development team's side so we can reach the official 2.0 mark.

I think a lot of the ideas I mentioned above are nice to have, but not really that important to call a close on the SKA development. After thinking about it for quite a bit over the past months, I ended up with these two final major updates for the Roadmap.

Major Update 1.8.0 Third Expert Rank Adventurer Quest involving Church

There are various things that are in a bit of a weird state:

The Church after the Reverse Summoning Ritual, having lost their Arch-Cardinal again and not reacting to it.

After I downsized Chapter 3 during the last development phase for SKA, I also reduced the world map size a bit and that also lost us one Expert Rank Adventurer quest. Having only two feels like of weird.

Scaling up magic for Richard's dungeon. Magic, if you aren't going lewd, kind of lacks the last bit of umpf to pull it over the line for the final dungeon.

Gabriel

Verdeaux as a whole is kind of lacking in named characters after the ritual.

Elaine is a named female character but has no corruption content in a h-game :'D

I believe a final expert adventurer quest taking place in Verdeaux Cathedral could nicely pull these things together. I could see potential quest rewards giving you extra Light power. Instead of a dungeon crawling quest, it would probably be more of an infiltration quest where Aura needs to infiltrate the church as a nun together with Elaine (would also give a nice nun costume as a last costume) and do various activities against some named bad guy (or cooperate with him as a Vice 20 decision and sell out Elaine).

It would also be a quest that I think would be nicely suited to our pair Trihan/Absurdity allowing me to focus more on the development of our other projects, e.g. closing our Liora in the likely case it's development is still ongoing.

Major Update 1.9.0 Victory Ending C (Vice Ending)

If Victory Ending B is victory but lewd, then Victory Ending C will be victory but vice. Aura will gain a way to kill RIchard an circumvent the whole "The Hero cannot kill the Demon King" by using her ability to absorb killed demons.

I'm not sure if we will do a full quest for this, if it will happen automatically, most likely this will require James performing a ritual spell on Aura using the Corrupted Humanitas Rune. Aura will then be able to either kill Richard alone in Richard's Domain, or sneak attack kill him in the Corruption Ending (Alicia being safe in the latter variation).

I should note that safe doesn't mean Alicia will suddenly find a good ending here, just not having the fate of the victory ending.

You will probably need 25-30 Vice to do this and in the Corruption Ending you will probably also need to pass a Submissiveness check.

The ending will initially look like Victory Ending A, however, absorbing Richard will come with its consequences and then ending will the branch into Victory Ending C which will feature Aura becoming Demon Queen Aura. What other consequences this will have? I don't know yet.

I think this would make for a good point to close out the story. More details on this update in the future when we get closer to it.

3 SKA Art Commissions

Besides the necessary art for the new content and potentially adding maybe some more extra variations like Earth Aura Twin Drills, I would like to close out 2.0 with more artwork in the Earth storyline, especially for selfies which I want to put on a sort of "Social Timeline" in the Compendium.

The timeline would start out with some screenshots of Aura's game in some obscure gamedev forum or stuff like that, and then later show her selfies on social media. I have an idea on how we could nicely capture Aura's state at selfie time, so in contrast to viewing events in the recollection room, you could see Aura's changes in the timeline in the state that you got them.

I think that should then keep Emubi busy until 2.0 is done. :'D

4 Project B

Now that we have talked a lot about SKA, I think it's time to talk a bit more about our future projects. Project A from the previous roadmap has become Liora, for which I recently posted the Mid-Term Update. Together with the project plan post in November where I will discuss the development plans for Part 4, I would say all the planning work for Liora is covered enough and doesn't need further discussion in this post.

Therefore, I would like to talk a bit more on the project that will be on the horizon after Liora - Project B.

Now before I jump into it, I need to first emphasize something: In contrast to SKA, Liora and Project B are "smaller projects" but they are far from being side projects! They are all real projects, just with smaller scope. And even the "smaller" may not be fitting. Due to our resource increases, the content production for Liora is probably about as fast as the content production of SKA was when it was in its first year of development - despite Liora sharing dev time with current SKA development.

Perhaps I should call them "medium-sized projects" in the future. :'D

Ok, anyways, I don't like talking too much about future projects but my sights are pretty much set on a couple of things and with Liora's 1.0(-beta, full we will need to see...) release already happening next year, I would say it's time to share at least some rough plans in this post.

First of all, before I talk about the content of Project B, there will be one big technical hurdle we will tackle: Moving from RPGMaker to Godot. SKA played nicely with RPGMaker but with Liora, I have been running into more and more issues. The dependencies are all outdated, the IDE is not extensible and we have to make custom tools to edit our custom JSON databases, and and and, so with the next project I want to make the jump.

However, I don't like going from 0 to 100. Making an RPG requires a strong infrastructure or else one just ends up spending time working on infrastructure instead of the game...

To develop the infrastructure, I want to split up Project B into two projects:

Project B-1: This will be a simple Visual Novel. Now I know, a lot of people are here because they like ability to interact with the story and the world through gameplay, which we will return to in the next project, but I want to have a smaller project to lay foundations. It would also probably be faster to make in Ren'Py - but that would be meaningless as the goal here is to develop infrastructure as we go along to build the real project. On the flip side, this will also be a good test bed to try out animated H-Scenes.It will be a simple story of a girl infiltrating a the bad guys and getting corrupted, and then becoming the female corruptor in the main project.

Project B-2: This will be the main project where we will be going back to Aura/Liora-like RPG corruption mechanics. In terms of scope its planned to be about as bit as Liora, probably a bit bigger since hopefully by then we will have expanded our team a bit more and I will be able to better convert our resources into content production.

Content-wise, the plan is still the same as I mentioned in the previous roadmap post: The core theme will be memory manipulation.

In Project B-1 it would just be memory manipulation as a story - I imagine it would be similar to the maid job overall, just as a full story. In Project B-2, I would then try to turn the concept into game mechanics, similar to the contract mechanics of Liora. How that will look like? I have some ideas in my head, but I need to think more about it... You will probably need to wait until development starts for more on the concrete details here.

Setting-wise, here are some bullet points that I have settled on:

The setting will be modern / urban fantasy.

The main heroine will be going up against a corrupt Mayor with a magic cult and memory manipulation abilities.

Magical Girls, our heroine will be able to turn into a magical girl at night.

Her older sister is the female corruptor, she will fall in Project B-1 which will lead to the corrupt Mayor learning about our main heroine's identity and get the story of Project B-2 started.

Most likely the boyfriend of our main heroine will also (unfortunately for him) be able to transform into a magical girl (I think we all what that means for him in a h-game world :D :D) I would probably pair him with the Mayor's son who would be a sub-antagonist.

The goal will be to win an election by doing various activities during the day to win votes and by purifying the city of evil during the night. (This includes lewd activites in case that wasn't clear :'D)

The corruption mechanic as mentioned above will be memories based, as I think there is a lot space to explore here. In terms of effects of the memory manipulation, it will probably be similar to contracts in Liora. If memory X would be recalled, instead altered memory Y will play, and this will then somehow change the action of our main heroine.

I'm not sure if the Mayor will be an ugly bastard or handsome, but he will most definitely be a middle aged man to round out our antagonsit line-up.

I'm a bit scared of making a game with politics focus, but I think it would make for a great corruption setting.

5 Beyond Project B

My original plan was that after Project B I wanted to go back to making another large, flagship RPG like SKA, but right now I am unsure about that... I do have a bit of a story I want to tell, but currently I feel like it would not be the right time to commit to a large multi-year project. Instead I feel like making a smaller --- I mean medium sized --- Project C to further grow our team, infrastructure, skills; basically further boosting our game quality before commiting to a really big game.

There is so much to do... Another Liora-style project but where you can play from either of the three character's perspectives as I was hoping to originally do it (but I lacked the resources back then), the story concept I had in mind for Mountainreach but had to cut for timeloop based corruption...

... Or perhaps none of that because by the time the years have passed and we have reached this far into the future, my mind will have changed drastically and suddenly I'll be making a game about elves or something, idk.

Anyways, that's my update on the long-term on what kind of content I want to develop in the near, medium and longer future.