The Art & Monsters of Sonderweg

Apologies for the lack of game stuff as of late! However, I have remained in touch with my main artist for the sci-fi game and I'm getting new monster/character designs every week or two from them. Here's the latest one, big thanks to you guys for helping me finance it!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/577880321048182814/915089325358718986/1.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/577880321048182814/915089326117883924/2.png

(I will probably edit the colors etc. myself later so it resembles certain other characters less)

We are still sorting out the details of terms of use for the sprites and I would rather wait until I'm ready to focus on that project before I start posting the arts for it on FA. The other issue is that some of the designs are rather on the monster side (questionably feral), so I will probably use subscribestar instead when I get around to that project. Less risky that way.

Main thing is that the progress on these scifi sprites has been quite slow and I am trying to put together a nice assortment of different monster types before I feel ready to go public. Currently I'm at over a dozen. I anticipate having everything ready for the next game (and Slime Dungeon Parts 2 & 3 100% completed) by next summer.

(To be entirely honest with you, the rate at which the artist has been able to draw the designs has been about 3, maybe 4 or 5 per month)

I will now detail what I have planned for the critters:
So I wanna have a few edits of each monster (say their breast size or appendages, etc) and using these edits along with palette swaps, I can create at least 3 variants of each monster. There will be a common variant, uncommon, and a rare. Of course the rarer ones are encountered in the wild later in the course of the game and each variant has slightly different moves or elemental affinities, so on.

However, I want to make capturing and breeding monsters an integral part of the game. Since your main character will be the feline scientist, there will still be empty slots in the party formation to fill and I feel like it'd be most fun to use monsters you encounter (though I may add some regular party members later). I am thinking whether the ones you can tame will be specific named ones or just generic ones, I'll cook up some ideas for that later.

But, I was thinking something like Final Fantasy Tactics wherein the basic mechanic for monsters was that they lay eggs while in your party and these eggs can hatch into common, uncommon, or rare variants of that monster family. So, thinking the player can roll the dice with selective breeding or later on unlock gene editing for monsters. This gene editing can be used to alter your existing monsters.

As an example, how it would apply to this bat enemy pictured above... I am probably going to lean into the 'teratophilia' for monsters you encounter, so they will generally look exotic like the 4 eared, armless variant you see there. But you can sort of domesticate this bat into evolving arms, or perhaps they are by default 2 eared but you can unlock the recessive four-eared genes for a stat boost.

I would like to make it a 'surprise' for each monster family, but generally you'll be able to breed variants of each monster with bigger cock or tits, or with weird features like snakecocks. Fun stuff like that.

A lot of monsters so far also have uhm, 'big belly' edits so they can either be knocked up or... Soft vore the player >:)

Now of course I want to indulge the whole spectrum of kinks so there will also be conventional TFs and absorbs available. I am contemplating letting the player merge in body or mind with monster allies/enemies for fun results. So yeah uh, sorta-monster-dating-game slash JRPG.

Now, as an aside, I'm probably going to look into assets for music, props (guns, projectiles, etc.), UI, and backgrounds. One of my goals for Sonderweg is completely new/custom UI and I anticipate this being a trilogy with each trilogy being in parts, with a good amount of asset reuse when I can get away with it haha. Not to be ambitious, but I would like for the total sum of content to be like several hours long (even longer with grind/min-max and other toying around). Possibly an app release since it's not hard to package a twine game into an app (mobile at least), doubt Steam would accept it but you know ^.~