Update 2 - Behind The Scenes (The Seven Realms)

Writing

At the start of this update, it was established that a six-month time jump had taken place. I wanted this amount of time to have passed from the start of the game to make it feel more realistic that Leyala was a little more used to living in a world with knowledge of other species, and she wouldn’t have to ask questions or be shocked by new things every other scene. That said, I still wanted to make sure that you as the player had an understanding of what was in this world and that’s one of the reasons that Leyala asked Tasha some questions around topics that Atlas had not yet told her about. Hopefully this allowed you as the player some insight in to the world that the story is set in.

In this update, we also meet a new character, Laureen. She likes to think of herself as Atlas’ girlfriend, but he only sees her as an ex-fuck buddy. She’s the daughter of a powerful family of Canadian Vampires and was completely expected to become Atlas’ linked mate one day… Well, that will never happen now. The confrontation with her served two purposes. One was to highlight Atlas’ frustration around his lack of knowledge around his and Leyala’s bond (and depending on the player’s choice, to see if Atlas could contain that frustration and remain ‘faithful’ to Ley or if he would take things maybe a little too far). The scene was also a catalyst for Leyala to bring up the conversation around the opening of their relationship. I wanted to get this conversation in relatively early in the game to ensure that the player was aware of what the harem could look like (i.e. it’s not just Atlas cheating on Leyala), she is fully on board with it and in the first instance, there is a logical reason for them trying something with someone else to see if it helps them learn more about the bond that they share.

I will stop here on the writing part as I don’t want to bore you too many of the smaller details!

Technical Aspect:

Posing for this update went relatively smoothly. Originally the scene with Leyala when speaking about opening their relationship, was posed from a point of view perspective of Atlas. I’m not usually as much of a fan of POV perspective, but I wanted to play around with the style a bit. After looking at it, I wasn’t happy with the outcome, so pulled an all-nighter re-posing and re-rendering it and I was happy with the result after this, I feel like the images looked much more dynamic. In the final scene in bed, we do have POV perspective images and there will be plenty of these dotted throughout the game, but typically I prefer seeing multiple characters in the shot at once where appropriate.

Something else you may have noticed in this update is that I played with Leyala’s hair for the first half and had her wear it up. I did this, just to add a bit more diversity to her character model and I thought it made her look cute. After rendering the images, however. Her hair came out silver, it was black before rendering but for some reason the lighting had messed up the colour. Rather than re-pose and render everything, Jay managed to play around in Photoshop and recolour the hair, without too much trouble.

We  also offered some slightly bigger variations within this update, to show that we want the player’s choices to have an impact. Depending on how far you go with Laureen, you can get two variations of a lewd scene with Leyala and one path where Leyala will not have a lewd scene at all. There were also small changes to the dialogue in each variation. This was only a small variation and there will be many other moments with small variations like this, however as the game goes on, we are also aiming to give much more significant variation when possible.

Anyway, that’s all for this update. I really hope that you enjoyed and we’ll see you in the next one!

Cheers,

Tae