Devlog - Making a comic to test a more brutal route

So, it's been a while since I properly worked on the project (I have had a lot of other stuff going on), and the current mass censorship on the site and the internet has left me... discouraged to keep working on the game.

But, In recent times, initially unrelated to the project, I have found some inspiration to push and write a more brutal type of comic/story including even more controversial topics, just to try and push my artistic limits. I put it on vote for my followers and the theme that won was 'abuse/mind break' and after some further votes, people wanted me to put the Gal as the main character for this story.

This inspired me to try and reformat the whole game into something similar to Deltarune/Disco Elysium when it comes to presentation (top down, character sprites, only show full screen images when impactful, almost entirely dialog and animation based). I thought of formatting the comic as a bunch of mock screenshots of the game itself. I doodled a sprite for her:

[BUT ITCH.IO WONT LET ME ATTACH THE IMAGE RIGHT NOW]

But after I started working on this, the whole censorship wave hit and I lost my mood to work on it in any capacity. Real life was hitting hard at the time too, so I focused on other things.

Until a few weeks later when I just woke up in a mood to just dive straight into the story as a simple and dirty comic where social media follower votes will decide the choices she makes.

This comic has been going on for the whole month of August and people have voted to extend the run and explore every despicable thing that will happen to her. So far, things have gone very bad for her, and it will only get worse from here.

Do be warned, the story and it's developments are a LOT more explicit and disturbing than what can happen to her in the demo. In general, a lot of my work tends to push the boundaries on what lewd art can be. So, only engage with my Fanbox and the comic if you are of open mind and are confident you can stomach things that I am not even allowed to write here as warnings xD

If you feel  confident you can handle it, you can find the comic compilation posts on my Fanbox starting here: https://www.fanbox.cc/@powerofsin/posts/10348934

In the final game I had plans to make it possible for people to turn off routes they find too disturbing (or even section them off as optional DLC) but in this comic we are trying to poke the limits of how far things can potentially go.

My, takeaways from working on the comic so far are:

• current rate of images of this quality I can make is around 35 per week (if I really focus hard on it). I still plan to go over them and clean them up/shade them once it's all done, but we will see if it pans out. Unlike the demo, these are static and there is no variety from previous choices/equipment, so things are a LOT simpler to draw.
• narration is only required when setting the stage or events are not depicted on screen and need a summary. Images and dialog can carry the story. This beats the overwhelming prose present in the demo, so writing would be simpler in this format
• a lot of the images are just reaction shots or talking heads, so going with the sprite based approach should permit me to minimize drawing all the little interactions and focus on the important stuff.
• there is a constant struggle of deciding how much agency to permit the player/character to not cover all the little choices, but also not to leave the story completely on auto pilot. Choices have recently been sparse since it was a culmination of decisions  made so far and resolution didn't leave much agency for the Gal, but it still feels wrong.

So there we go, an update so you all know I didn't completely abandon this project. There may be some major reworks to even the setting and such with time, but for now, this is where we stand.