Malevolent Planet - Direction Retconning & Roadmap

Hey! I hope all of you have had good days ever since my latest public status update.

I haven’t been posting very frequent status updates, because I’m constantly working on finishing the ISA content and to do so in a timely manner I’m going to work on weekends as well.

Here’s why I’m trying to finish the ISA content sooner than I thought I’d have to (Warning, huge wall of text!):

My original vision for Malevolent Planet was an indie NSFW twist on the Mass Effect universe with adult themes, relationship building with crewmates, interstellar exploration and a sense of a deeper story that encompasses a ton of Sci-Fi elements such as interstellar exploration, alien discoveries, and so on.

In the spirit of my original vision, I wanted the text game’s crash sequence to be followed by having your ship as your main base where you could launch missions which would follow a generally linear storytelling plotlines where your choices could affect the outcome of the missions, relationship to your crew, and personality changes.

Essentially, the village wasn’t meant to be a fully explorable open-world map, and my lack of direction made me lose sight of my original goal for a while. Because it became what it became, it got difficult for players to see where I inserted events, content and so on.

What was supposed to be a fully explorable open-world map was the ship and hub areas that’d resemble The Citadel, Omega and others in Mass Effect. So, the game instead closer resembles Lost (the tv show) rather than Mass Effect due to the focus I’ve put into the survival aspect and fitting in into an alien society.

The gameplay loop was supposed to be centered on mission taking from your ship after your ship crashed, once the missions ended assuming a bad ending wasn’t achieved you’d eventually return to your ship, where you could sleep, interact with crewmates, or take another mission.

So, in conclusion, the 2D game will be my opportunity to conceptualize my original vision:

• The ISA storyline will be fast-tracked. Day1 was dedicated to Morris, Day2 is being dedicated to Alberto, Day3 will be dedicated to Ted, and after all that we will head on with the spaceship launch. The ISA allows us to later interact/recruit other humans the ISA will send on missions following yours, allowing us to have a steady flow of human personnel that you could insert into your ship (in addition to friendly aliens you may meet).
• Following the crash, you can walk around your ship, interact with crewmembers and launch missions with the goal of repairing your ship. They’ll be closely related in story to the text game. The open-world areas will be small areas with interactable elements, similar to how mission open-world areas in Mass Effect worked, so no huge cities you can get lost in.
• Non main-story missions will resemble events from the text game, and you’ll be able to launch them from the ship as well. One example would be “The aliens have an issue with kidnappers, I can head to the site where the latest kidnapping happened.” and this will directly put you where you need to be, meaning that you wouldn’t have to go into the village, find that area, arrive at the proper time to trigger content and so on.
• Crewmate relationship system will have a deeper focus. Taking inspiration from Persona 5 and Mass Effect, I’ll build separate missions specific to each crewmate tailored around providing an in-depth look into their personalities, their flaws, and so on (with NSFW elements added of course).
• Interstellar/Interplanetar travel would be available pretty fast, because the first missions I’ll develop will focus on repairing your ship. Non-story missions should be developed once your ship can fly into space.
• Combat will be turn-based, clothes will be a layer of protection and your character would be vulnerable to NSFW attacks once the clothing layers are gone, making it easier to draw mini combat scenes and not require you to read walls of text.

It feels like this is what drew people into the game at first, and it’s also what drew me into building this game. Along the way, due to working alone, I’ve not been focusing enough on the bigger goal and rather I focused on providing consistent content, without making sure that this content is easily reachable and intuitive.

I’m working a lot on finishing Day2 right now so I can get started on Day3 sooner. Thank you for the immense patience required to read that huge wall of text and I hope you’ll be as excited as I am about my plan :D

Huge thanks to Crushstation for taking the time to talk to me and help me realize why I felt like I lost track of something, and to my very dedicated patrons who've helped me with inquiries about clothing choices, content setup and general motivation to keep going.