Strange Gift Progress

So, this last week while I've been at work, I've been brainstorming, and yesterday I started working on Strange Gift again in earnest. I put in a 10 hour day on it, actually, which you can safely see as an indication that I've regained my passion for it.

It's going to be a very different game, in many ways. I've changed the backstory. The character that was "Hildy" (who was the Norse goddess Freyja) will now give you the gift of magic, and the character that was "Lori" (Loki) is now more clearly evil, and is spreading darkness across the town. The darkness can be driven back by having sex, so your job is to seduce girls with magical potential into having sex with you. It's a tough job but someone has to do it.

One of the things that was sapping my energy in the game was the many full screen renders I was doing, *and* the need to write multiple story lines following each girl, etc. It made the game have aspects of a visual novel, and that's not really something I'm enthused about. What I *am* enthused about is making erotic games that are actually games. Lesson learned. I'm building a structure around procedurally generated characters, rather than scripted ones, and using it to make a game which you should be able to have fun with even with the first (next) release. I've done it in a way that allows me to add scripted characters later in development.

Going graphically lighter allows me to do much more rapid game development, and I'll be able to improve the graphics later on. It also allows me to test the game I'm making more thoroughly without feeling like I've invested time in the graphics so I need to make them work somehow.

As excited as I am to tell you about it, I'm more eager to work on it, so I'm going to go back to it. I'll be working on that this week, while I wait until I get feedback from the latest release of Damsels, and then I'll go back to working on Damsels, shooting for an October 29 or November 5 release of the next version of that, which will include the conquest goal. I *hope* to release a demo of SG towards the end of the week... it kind of depends on where it's at in terms of fun value. There's a lot to do. :)