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Progress Report - December 26, 2023
🕑 Added 2023-12-27 05:01:57 +0000 UTCHello everyone, and welcome to the last Progress Report of the year!
I am very excited to announce that it comes with good news, as well! The news comes in two parts, so let's split this up into two sections, shall we?
Corsair - "Another Day, Another Job"
Last week I noted how I've been struggling with coming up with a minivid, and how I was currently exploring a Corsair video. I've continued working on that over the past week, and I'm definitely vibing with it. I didn't quite get it done - I have one last scene to animate and write - but I should be done with it and ready to start editing it tomorrow.
As of right now, the animatic clocks in at 4:40. You can click here to watch it.
Do keep in mind it's not quite finished, though, and I will likely go back and revise the writing on it. Might just change some dialogue, might end up cutting a few shots. Might even add a few shots, or hell even just rewrite a scene. Whose to say - editing can get crazy.
But I'm very pleased with how it flows right now, and what all it accomplishes. I mentioned last week how a lot of my ideas expand into large 20+ minute ideas, and that if I had more time, I could probably distill them down into a proper 5-minute video. This story is actually a living example of that - it is something I have written five separate times over the past few months, originally starting as a full-length video. Every pass, I distill down the core ideas further and further, until finally getting to this current version.
In the circa-five-minutes of the current iteration, it introduces Artemis and Medusa as characters, their sexual relationship with one another, their romantic relationship with one another, Artemis' role as a bounty-hunter, Medusa's role as a computer expert, Artemis being an absolute slut (and having so much fun with it), Medusa being a cuckquean who loves watching her bae get fucked, Artemis' sassy personality being counterweighted by Medusa's more dry and grounded personality, Medusa's breeding kink - or more specifically, her getting turned on at the idea of Artemis getting knocked up, and the general vibe of their banter together. It additionally hints at Medusa having autism, Artemis being a mother, and hints at a greater galactic community (I want to namedrop the Terran Hegemony if I can manage it, since they're a pretty big player in the Corsair story).
There is even more to Corsair that I need to eventually establish - such as the primary story antagonist Pirate Queen Hebe, the whole botched Ascendant One supersoldier program that Artemis and Medusa were born into, and the connection to the greater Conscious Code tied universe via Medusa's use of a sex Shell - but I think that there is already an exceptional amount of carrying that this five-minute video is establishing. I'm perfectly content waiting for a later video to set the rest of that up.
As a final note, I've been involving the esteemed Inside Incognita in the characterization of Artemis, since she is a spiritual successor to Samus Aran in my Phazon videos (thanks again for that DMCA takedown, Nintendo - love you, ya cunts), and she is every bit as much Innie's character as she is my own. I am hoping to reach out to Milly Stern in the next week or so, to see if she is interested and available in voicing Medusa, and if she'd like to contribute to her characterization. I think this will be the first time that Innie and Milly have been directly co-starring together since Blue Star Episode 1, not counting Innie's brief cameo in the Gaige minivid.
As such, I am hoping to sit down with Innie and do an editing / workshopping pass with her. And ideally, get Milly involved too. So it is possible the video will shift and change in the edit even more than I anticipate, with their provided input.
Innie has already voiced her excitement to voice Artemis, but I cannot confirm that Milly will be the voice of Medusa. That's just an aspiration as of now, but I feel that even if she ends up not being available in the role, it is worth bringing out that Medusa was very much written with Milly in mind - and I am sure, in such an event, that whoever I do end up getting to voice Medusa will fill in the role perfectly, and the original intention can then forever be a secret between just you all and me.
With the minivid news out of the way, let's discuss the other half of this week's news:
Slut Squad - "A Bold New Approach to Policing"
As I'm sure you're all aware, a bit over a month ago, I started experimenting with Unreal Engine 5. The immediate goal was to have the next on-stream project be a game built in UE5, as a natural extension of the fact I've been flirting with lewd game design since 2016 or so (anyone remember that old Liara Cum Dumpster flash game? Good times, good times...)
Well, my offline experiments are just about done. They were intended to get me familiar enough with the UE5 workflow that I can feel comfortable building things in it without having to watch long tutorials on the basics, as well as to build some basic systems and infrastructure that would be common and useful across multiple different genres and game ideas.
Which then left the problem of actually figuring out what to do as an on-stream game. And after a bit of faffing about and exploring various ideas, I think I've finally settled on what I think will be a banger of an idea: Slut Squad!
This is an old idea I first conceived of back in 2020, and is heavily inspired by the District Management system in Xcom Chimera Squad. Over the years I've tinkered with the idea, and over the past few days I've really buckled down on the idea, and I think it holds a lot of potential.
The high-level premise is ̶a̶ ̶b̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶p̶o̶l̶i̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶-̶c̶h̶a̶r̶g̶e̶d̶ ̶d̶e̶c̶o̶n̶s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶e̶r̶n̶ ̶p̶o̶l̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶s̶ that you manage an experimental police unit composed of sex-starved big-tiddy bimbos, and use sex to de-escalate situations before they become crime scenes, and to build positive-reinforcement loops encouraging cooperation and good behavior, in a city that is used to extreme violence and punishment from its police force.
I'm still hammering out details, so I will leave a full game design unload for a later date. For now, I'll just note two major design ideas, outside of the general high-level RTS/RPG genre I'm aiming for.
First up is resource management: I am eyeballing crime rate, public perception, and good-ole cash. Crime rate is pretty self-explanatory, and it is tied to both perception and funding. As crime-rate goes down, perception goes up, and you get a largely monthly stipend from the city. If it gets too high for too long, the program is shut down, and it's game-over.
Public perception is tied to, but is independent of, crime rate. While it does move with crime-rate, it can also be influenced by other things like recruitment campaigns. The higher your public perception, the more likely you are to have successful recruitment campaigns - more on that in a bit. If perception drops too low for too long, the program is shut down, and it's game-over.
And then finally, cold hard cash is your liquid resource that drives much of your moment-to-moment decisions. You have fixed operational costs that increase as you expand the program, your ladies all have salaries that gradually grow as they rack up hours on the clock, and there are spontaneous purchases to manage as well. Income sources include the aforementioned monthly stipend, having your ladies work side-gigs such as stripping and whoring, and through some mechanism directly tied to managing individual sexual encounters - though I haven't figured out exactly what yet. As with perception, if it goes too low for too long, then it's game over.
The second major design idea is recruitment: My original thought on this was you directly hire prostitutes into your program, but after thinking on it more, I decided I much prefer the idea of a passive recruiting system. In a nutshell, every game-week there rolls a chance that a lady will approach you, having interest in joining the program. Recruitment isn't just a simple "click yes" though, because there are two major complications to recruitment: program capacity and bimbofication.
Program capacity is pretty straightforward: in exchange for joining your program, your ladies get pretty much all of their amenities handled by said program. Living space, dining, recreation, all of it is handled by the program - and all of it takes up space. In order to have more ladies recruited at a time, you will need to expand your program's campus, which costs both immediate funds and comes with an increase in operational costs.
Bimbofication is, I think, the more interesting mechanism though. The uniform is an essential part of any job, and for the Slut Squad, huge tits and fat asses are a part of the uniform. Such extension body mods aren't cheap though, and so as part of recruiting, you will have to decide how to handle paying for bimbo'ing up your new recruit, spread across two axes: responsibility split, and finance schedule.
Put another way, how much of the procedure will the program pay for directly, versus how much will the recruit have to pay for it; and over how many weeks (if any - immediate is an option) is it going to be paid off, with increasing interest rates the longer you spread the payments across? Both axes are important, because the more you expect a recruit to pay at any given time, the less likely they will be to accept the offer and walk away. Immediately paying in full for your lady's new tits will guarantee a recruitment, but it's a huge impact on your finances.
I've got a poll running on my Twitter asking if people are interested in this project, and so far, the results are pretty encouraging. Of 500 votes so far, only 36 votes are explicitly disinterested in the project, with a whopping 335 votes being explicitly interested in the project, and most of the remaining votes sitting in the "need to know more before I decide" camp. So I will definitely be putting more time into fleshing out the design, as well as putting together some mock-ups for things like the UI and how the gameplay will flow.
Anyways, that's all for now! I hope you all enjoyed this update, I hope you're as excited for both the Corsair minivid and for the Slut Squad idea as I am, I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on either (or even both!), and I'll see you all on the other side of 2023!
Until next time, everyone!
Comments
Lord Aardvark
DID YOU KNOW: it helps to actually hyperlink the text. Wrote it all out while it uploaded, forgot to actually link it. Oops. Fixed. Thanks for bringing it up.
Chuck Moore
The Corsair WIP Link does not work.
