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Devlog of this week

The final colors of Bronn !

So... Who is Bronn? 🤭

Bronn, one of the two love interests, is the captain of your mission and the most notorious mercenary on the west coast.

Nicknamed the Betrayer of Sauveil, he was born there- then came back to burn it down.

He has little patience for respect and isn't exactly well-adjusted.

Will you be his partner in crime ? Or take him down for the sake of your mission ? It’s up to you ! 😊

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Fields of Asphodel is now on sale!

Descend to the Underworld and live among myths as the deity of spring!

Fields of Asphodel is a 1.3 million-word interactive novel by JJ Laurier. It's entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Forced into an arranged marriage with the God of the Dead, only you can decide what to make of your new life. Befriend misfit deities, repel giant attacks, find the culprit behind the river goddess's mysterious illness, and use your powers to nudge Fate in your favor! Decide what kind of deity you want to be—whether you'll answer prayers, how you'll develop your powers, and what role you'll take in governance.

Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or poly.

Play as neurodivergent or neurotypical.

Take on the powers of spring and life.

Find love and friendship among the gods of the ancient Greek Underworld.

Develop your abilities and hobbies, and choose the kind of life you want to live.

Grow a garden in the Underworld.

Defend the realm, advise the King, and solve a mystery.

Make a new home, or seize the opportunity to return to your old one.

Can you bring light to the darkest of realms?

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I am delighted to announce that the wait is finally over. Fields of Asphodel is now available on Steam, the CoG Website, via the Hosted Games Omnibus app, and anywhere else Hosted Games are sold! For the next week, it's on sale for $7.99 (USD), so get it before the price goes up to $11.99!

Thank you all so much for your support through the game's development; it's what made this possible. A special shout-out to my Patrons, to the Discord server crew, and to @gncrezan, who not only makes regular and amazing art related to the game, but who drew the beautiful cover image as well.

If you enjoyed Fields of Asphodel, please consider leaving a review on the platform of your choice. It really does make a difference!

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Misty Invasion looks really good guys 🥰

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28/07/2024 Devlog

Hallo everyone!  Time for the tumblr update! I have big news! So read on!

Summary:

Finished drafting Yren's ending

Revised Kav, Noel, Raif, and Yren

Formatted/Scripted Kav, Noel, Raif, and Yren's endings

Worked on the play test for Yren

One new BG

Lots of UI stuff

Big Fiddly To Do List

Writing:

I am done with the writing. (Well. As done as one ever really is. I was telling another writer friend of mine just yesterday that we're never really done until the moment we have to ship the project to someone).

BUT. I am done with the rough draft. I am done with the major revision. So from this point onwards, the changes will be more minor as I play test and others play test (eventually. I'm the only one testing right now).

So going forward you probably won't be getting any writing updates because there won't be enough to report. Cause...it's done.

Uncoded word count is 657,000 words.

Coded word count is 616,000 words (this is how much actually ended up in Ren'py).

Huzzah. My 350,000 word story is done. He he. He. LoL

It took so much longer than I thought it would even though I was writing every day - sometimes 3000 words a day!

Timing was just so hard for this project. It was much more difficult to predict a total word count for this game. Because of the structure of this game, word count variations are going to be much more noticeable and I had to focus and work a little harder to keep everyone in much tighter alignment. So when one route (like Asher), increased by 5000 words, I knew immediately I would have to increase all the others by roughly the same amount.. That meant the overall word count goal instantly increased by 25000 words.

Additionally, any time I made a small change in something - whether it was lore or a minor wording or vocabulary change (for instance, changing one thing from "system void" to "gate void" then to "nexus void") - each time, I had to go change that thing in all the other routes.

There was a lot of continuity babysitting.

This was somewhat true for GS but not to the same degree. Not everything mentioned in one route in that game was even mentioned in the other routes. So I might need to only change one other route's references to that thing but not all nine routes. Or maybe no other route would need changes. In WSC, it was all 6 routes every single time.

So even if I was focusing on one particular route, I could never really work on that route in a vacuum. I was constantly having to go check on and edit the other routes for things too.

This not only made it harder and more time consuming to write in general, but also just made it impossible to predict things like how much time it would take.

But that is squared away. Life is good.

Art:

Just some BG stuff. I've been so focused on writing that not much of that focus has been spread around to art so there's not much to report here.

Other Stuff:

UI.

As you know I've been making some visual changes to the UI. Mostly minor stuff involving slight changes to the general aesthetic of the UI. Those fixes are largely complete.

And now the focus has shifted to adding more of the features and functionalities that have been planned but on-hold for the last year.

The new save screen is coded. This save screen, as you can see, divides the characters up by name and lets you add additional save slots when you've filled up all the empty ones. 

For a game like WSC, where people may have multiple playthroughs for different characters going at the same time, I thought it would be useful to have this paged organisation. I always find that even if I try to keep my playthroughs separate and organised, they invariably get messy. This is true in other games, this is true for my personal play tests...

I'm really hoping this structure helps with that.

Another feature I'm adding to WSC is a recap screen.

I know that with episodic games, one of the struggles people have is that they forget some of the story details during the gap between episodes. So people feel like they constantly have to replay and refresh their memory. This is, of course, an attempt to help players maybe not have to do that.

The idea is that I will update this with every episode so that people who want a recap can just click in and refresh their memory.

There are some other features that have been added in. Some other QOL of life things. And there are more features to come. I won't go into everything here.

But those things are slowly coming together as well.

There are a lot of things that have to be done before the first episode can release. Some are major things like completing the CGs or coding the sprite expressions. Some are more minor like adding the in-game achievements. 

And there are also a ton of smaller, more fiddly things. Like double-checking the styling of certain words (my editing programs could never decide if they preferred home world or homeworld and so both get used.)

I want to fix those kinds of things so testers don't have to worry about pointing them out.

I have a massive to-do list filled with all of those big and small things. And now I'm working through it.

I have also been doing a play test of Yren's route. I have to personally do each route one time just to see if there are any significant issues that need to be fixed before anyone else sees the game. So I've been doing that as well.

Upcoming Weeks:

Finishing my own play test of the game. This goes fairly slow because I play test with the self voicing enabled. And that means that I'm playing through it at a much slower pace. I also stop frequently to fix typos, change repetitive wording. Or may slightly more substantial fixes.

I've been testing for like...2 hours a night because I've been focused on writing during the day. But I'm going to be increasing the time I spend play testing so that hopefully I can get through the rest of it a little faster.

Additionally, all the UI and "Fiddly List" stuff will continue to be worked on as well.

So that's where we are.

We have moved past writing and into the next phase of development. I'm really excited to be finally focusing on other stuff.

That is all for now. I will see you next time.

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The new scene has me in a chokehold

Thank you @andengeu for perfectly capturing the momentary shock of Nayeli and Blade being close to each other, and being aware of each other.

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Losing my mind over this gift from @stellorc of Vexx and Nephien having a soft moment together. Thank you so much! This was a surprise I wasn't expecting 💕

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Stupid crush on this man

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How about some art that isn't just shop and comm related? :'>

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OUT NOW: Incubus Chapter 1!

You are a demon hunter. He is an incubus. A fateful meeting, a deal struck, and neither of your lives will ever be the same.

Demonology: Incubus is an episodic interactive fiction series, featuring:

a customizable male/female/non-binary protagonist

a male love interest

explicit, interactive sex scenes

Chapter 1 is 10,000+ words (30 minutes approx) and introduces the protagonist, a private detective by day and demon hunter by night, and their soon-to-be-partner—a capricious, enigmatic, hyper-sexual incubus.

Platform: PC/Mac

Rating: 18+

Price: Free (Future chapters will be $1.00 each)

Content warning for Chapter 1: 

Explicit sexual content | Explicit language | Threat | Violence | Injury | Blood | Death | Sexual harassment | Transactional sex | Public sex

THIS GAME IS FOR ADULTS ONLY

(Note: The sexual content in Incubus is not optional. Player discretion advised.)

DOWNLOAD INCUBUS: CHAPTER 1

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hand studies for the bloomic love interests cuz I wanted to try out adding more variety in drawing the appendages

totally didn’t regret the idea halfway through

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sketch of my hunter and Lea from @northern-passage

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A commission I did of Cove!!! 🥺♥

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i think that– :)🩸 

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been thinking about that one sketch robo did of the lis when they were 21

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You are just like me You are nothing You are everything when everything has gone away

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Fuck it, I need some serotonin. I was going to wait until next month, but my brain is too fried to edit anything anyway so here we are. Today's the day. That's right. Today is...

Fairy Day.

So, put on your tutus and glitter up those cheeks, because it's time for the new and improved:

A Fairy Tale is a 28,000 word visual novel about fairies finding love.

Play as the sole heir to a noble (but somewhat underfunded) fairy estate. You have one night to find a marriage which will secure your family's future... or lead everything to ruin.

Who—if anyone—will win your hand?

Featuring:

Five different romanceable characters.

An immersive experience with music, images, and sound effects.

Ability to choose your own character's name and gender.

A variety of different choices.

Scroll forward and back at any time.

Option to skip already read passages.

A save feature with multiple save slots.

Fairies, pirates, schemes, and whimsy.

Content notice for references to cannibalism.

I hope you check it out. 💙

Character art by the fantastic Gwen Young @gwygle.

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LOVE SHORE IS OUT NOW. 💜

The game that I’ve worked on for 4 years is out today, and it feels surreal. Perfect Garbage grew up as a self-funded, internally driven studio headed by two QPoC writers because of this game, and I became a Narrative Designer because of it. We put a lot of heart into Love Shore, and we hope you feel that in every moment.

Here’s the link.