State of the Game - Feb 2021

Hey everybody! Happy Sunday. It's going to take some figuring out of how regularly I want to do things like this, but I figured with the launch of the Patreon and the Discord, it's a good time to at least get started sharing where I'm at with the game's development.

As I'm sure many of you know, I released the 'Prologue' of Channeler, which contains the introduction cutscene, the first mini-dungeon, the first 3 Partners, and a number of intimate scenes, both one-offs and repeatable.

So what have I been doing since then? Mostly planning and writing, but also adding bits to the game itself when they're ready.

I sketched out a rough outline of my plan for the game's overarching story, so I've got a bit of a roadmap for myself. I'm planning on 5 major 'Acts', and finishing the Prologue puts you into Act 1. As Eliza mentioned in the prologue, we're going to be headed towards the merchant city of Lawrenceburg, which has a University, to try and get some more information. This will be a good opportunity to share some more lore about the game world and also possibly drop in some easter eggs as well =] (there is already one 'secret' in the game that I put in there to help myself test things quickly. Has anyone found it?)

I've built the in-game map of the town and the University as well, and I'm slowly populating it with NPCs and dialog, as well as adding conversation events for the main storyline.

Most recently, I spent a day just doing scripting events and triggers in order to get a proper 'unlock' system for the intimate scenes with the girls. I haven't tested it super thoroughly, but it should work to flag a 'new scene' setup for the girls every 5 levels, which will override the usual scene selection when you rest at the inn/camp, after which the repeatable version of that scene will be available. Writing all of those scenes is going to take quite a while, but now I have the mechanisms in place to support it, so it's nice to have that out of the way.

So things are proceeding, slowly but surely. I'm going back and forth on when I want to do releases, but I want to make sure that what I do have in place is at least somewhat complete and has a basic amount of polish before I consider it "ready" (the Elder's house in your hometown was just an empty box in the first release, so I want to do a bit better than that). But we'll see how that goes.

I hope everyone has an excellent week! As always, feel free to hop in the Discord if you want to chat with other folks about the game or ask questions =] (https://discord.gg/fwsnKdts)