SoVR Post-Game Diary #11

Hello everyone,

I know you've been waiting for a long time, and I know many are losing patience, but I think I can give you a proper release interval. The next SoVR update should come out in two weeks (so roughly around the weekend of the 16th/17th November.)

Now that I know how things have been progressing these past months, I have a clearer view on how the development is going to progress. For Yuki, things are a bit tricky because she's the first one, but basically, here's how I envision the future updates after Yuki's.

When the artists are working on an update's content, I can't really work on what they're doing until it's 100% done. As such, with Yuki I'm in the pretty bad position of waiting for a very long time to get the H scenes and having to do them all in one go. Ideally, I prefer balancing my work between H scene writing and game developing but here, it won't be possible.

To avoid that, in the future, the second Yuki update will contain everything scenario-wise but not H-wise (for the simple reason that I'm almost 100% sure not everything will be ready on time.) But that's a good thing actually. For two reasons:

1) It will save crunch periods for the artists. If one or two base images for Yuki aren't finished by the end of her second update, I won't have to whip them so it gets finished in time. If it gets finished a bit after, it'll be fine (I'll explain why after)

2) It will give me content to work on while working on Ayame.

Because here's the thing. Let say I beat the shit out of the artists to have everything Yuki finished for her second update. When they'll start working on Ayame stuff, we'll be back to square one again, they'll have to work on everything from scratch. And once again, I'll be waiting for ages before I can tackle a single scene.

Whereas if I still have a bunch of Yuki scenes left undone, I'll be able to work on them while working on Ayame scenario content. And from there on, the updates would be cut like that:

(A) Yuki H side content/Ayame scenario content/Ayame scenario H content

(B) Ayame scenario content/Ayame scenario H content/Ayame H side content

(C) Ayame H side content/Naomi scenario content/Naomi scenario H content

Etc...

It doesn't change the delay we've accumulated at the beggining but there's two positive sides to it: I can work on H content even when none of the new stuff is ready yet, and you won't need to suffer the same waiting times than before. Hopefully, if everything fits more properly, the updates should be more regular after we've finished implementing everything with Yuki's scenario.

Soooooooooooooooooooooo...

With all that said, let me talk about the game a bit. Unfortunately, like I mentioned in the previous post, the last two elements I want to talk about before the release are elements I can't show pictures of (either because it's not really meant to have pictures or because of the content.)

So I'm going to talk about NPCs. And more precisely, NPCs related to the girl you're playing. If you've read my previous posts, you know that each girl will meet a new female character in their respective scenario. For Yuki, it's Emiri. But they will also interact with already existing characters in some ways. It will be heavily dependant on the scenario, though. As such, there will be a huge difference between how it's handled with Yuki and how it's handled with Ayame, because the context will be completely different.

As I already said, Yuki will have the occasion to see content with Akiko. But you know how she is. It's not always easy to surprise her doing naughty things. That's where a new game mechanics will be introduced with the shards.

Shards are going to be pieces to collect for a very specific purpose: revisit a moment of the past of a character. As you can expect, Yuki will find shards about Emiri and Akiko. There are two types of items: shards that you need to gather to see a single memory, and pearls that allow to see a memory on their own. Collecting shards and using them on a specific location will allow you to see a H-scene from the said character. Pearls, however, will show you a cutscene that doesn't contain a H scene. Yeah, you'll have to work a bit more to get them H scenes :p

Shards and pearls can be found in different ways: on the ground, as quest rewards, as buyable elements... In the case of shards there won't be a notion of Shard A, B and C and you need to find the right combination. No. it's just Find X shard to unlock scene A then X shards to unlock scene B.

Since the girl will see the content of those past scenes, there might be cases where watching them has an impact on the present. In the case of Yuki, she'll learn things about Akiko that will help her finding her more easily. But I won't say more.

It's really just a way to help increasing the lore of some characters because I didn't want to twist the base quests just to forcibly implement H content where it didn't belong. With that system I can implement whatever I want without it impacting the progression of the story.

I already said it, and I'll say it again: Akiko will NOT be implemented in that update. You'll have to wait for the next one. But Emiri will have some content for that gameplay :)

I'll see you next time! o/