Yeah absolutely, I'd be happy to - I'm really excited by the range of lesbian paths I have planned. In terms of major paths (not just one off encounters) there will be lesbian paths in game for Imogen, Sienna, and Joy (Molly's three flatmates), Charnelle and Esme (who you meet briefly on the Northgate/Marchmain paths in the prologue), and three other characters, two of whom you are yet to meet, one of whom you may have met very briefly. For all of these, as major paths, there will be different branches within the romances, at the very least two variances for if you want to play a more wholesome or more corrupt paths. There will also be a bunch of minor paths/encounters as well along the way with more minor characters.
My roadmap for the game as a whole is 6-7 seasons of 10 episodes each - I'm basically plotting this out a bit like a prestige TV series, where there is an overarching story across the whole series, and then each season can have self-contained arcs, and each episode is a meaningful story within that. So some of the lesbian paths will be slower burns, but there will certainly be more possible lesbian encounters for players who want to seek them out within Season One, you won't have to wait too long for more content (and on top of the lesbian encounter in the prologue with Mathilde, whilst it is a solo thing, in the newly released Season One Episode One with the masturbation scene there are three different lesbian oriented paths for players to choose to either watch lesbian porn, fantasise about Mathilde, and/or fantasise about Imogen).
There will indeed also be dom/sub elements at play - this also goes for the female and male relationships, and in fact in next weeks dev diary I'm planning on talking a little more about how I'll be implementing systems like these, as it will form the basis of part of Episode Two next month (although in that context revolving around Josh).
Wow, that is indeed a very ambitious project.
Again, sorry if I may have missed it somewhere, but are each of those path mutually exclusive? Can you be with multiples partners at the same time? Get your own little harem rolling 😉.
And yes, always down with more minor characters sexual interaction, more variety is always nice but I do hope we get some choice in them too and not just one paragraph hook-up text.
Definitely excited for that Dom/Sub system selection especially if it can also be applies into the lesbian path. A bit of lezdom here and there to give it some spice!
But definitely looking forward for more of it. However, without wanting to throw shade on your skills, just want to make sure this project doesn't become overwhelming with all those different factors / branches you mentioned that you have to take into account. The code may be become more and more spaghetti and I don't wish the updates to get bogged down because of it. As in "biting more than one can chew" type of scenario.
Cheers,
Thanks - and yes, it is ambitious, but my view has always been one release at a time, and we'll see where we get to, although always good to have a destination and a rough story mapped out!
In terms of paths being mutually exclusive vs multiple partners, this will vary depending on the character and path taken, but there certainly will be options to take multiple partners at once, sometimes via cheating/secrecy, sometimes in a more open way.
And I don't consider that throwing shade at all, it is a worthwhile question to raise, this space is filled with abandoned games from developers who burn out/bite off more than they can chew. I've gone in with my eyes open, I talk about this a lot in my dev diaries, how I am trying to make the workload sustainable each month. A few other people have asked me about how I plan to keep the branching nature of the game manageable - there's a number of facets to this, but I think the main one to highlight is that I will approach it the same way lots of other RPGs do.
A good example of this I think is Baldur's Gate 3 (I'm not claiming I will quite be able to match BG3 level as a solo dev, but the general approach is a good one). Whilst there is a ton of choice and ways to play the game and numerous outcomes, there are set 'beats' to the story everyone follows. Act 1 is always centred around the Druid's Grove and Camp of the Absolute, and there are numerous ways that can end. But then it converges again on Act 2, where regardless of choices beforehand, you then follow again a new arc in the shadowlands, which again can have multiple outcomes, and so on, and so forth.
Another good example are the KOTOR games where each planet is a set 'act' that you play through, and can make whatever choices you want there, and then you go to the next planet, and whilst certain past choices may influence certain things, by and large the next act is its own self contained thing.
In this way you avoid the unsustainable branching that quickly makes a game impossible to keep up with development wise:
