Due to various reasons, progress in January has been minimal. I kinda got burned out on classes and skills, and while I could push hard to get through them, it's not fun or efficient to do on a phone without a computer so I largely read a book instead. I did make some progress on companions. Mostly the high concept stuff, and therefore reflected in the outline below. Drilling down and doing companion options is the sort of thing where I can buckle down and put my nose to the grindstone, but also the sort where if I do it in notes first then in the image, the amount of total work is increased compared to directly in images.
Between slow progress these last several weeks and a change in my employment situation, the ETA is now updated. While the far end of the range is still possible but seems pessimistic beyond the point of accuracy now, the most optimistic possibility (initial release in March) is no longer credible. There will probably be not much progress until mid-February, and I have yet to discover how much time and energy I'll be able to dedicate to it at that time. In the best case scenario, it could be May before the summer rush, maybe even April but not March. If not, then that probably means I'll be busy in the fall too (being busy in the summer is inevitable) but next winter should be much better to work on projects than this one, meaning that I will almost certainly be ready to release by spring 2026.
Intro: Done!
Cheats: Immortality and Bloodline done. Might add inner world/pocket plane rules here as a third thing.
Aura: Totally done!
Races: Format complete.
Base races: 12/18 done
Superior races: 0/9 done
Hybrid races: 0/? done
Stats: 100% done and pretty damn excellent if I do say so myself
Mutations: Done besides images and final pass. Some are probably a little too derivative.
Curses: Done besides images
Classes and skills: 26 classes complete, or at least complete enough. Final number will probably be 30-40. See the 12/13/24 post for more detail.
Worldbuilding:
Gods: Done.
Realms: Basically done, but could be better. I need like two more regions or plot hooks for the sky islands and that's it. Some blurbs could be fleshed out better.
Kingdoms and countries: Twelve done, which is probably about half
Tribes: Conceptualized and some examples done, should be easy to bust out a bunch later.
Monsters, parasites, and other antagonists: Not started. Could be okay to omit for initial release.
Companions: Section concepts basically done, options within companion types not started
Narrator waifu: Based loosely on Outer Goddess waifu CYOA, you make choices about her personality and how much she can manifest
Goddess Avatar: Without most of their power but still divine in nature. They hang out with you.
Summoner: Brought you into the world and has seals to control you. The more power you give them over you, the more poweful they are.
Lackey: Build-a-companion, in a subservient relationship to you. Will be difficult to balance so please bear with me on initial release.
Living Clothes: Not as orgasm torture as in TR. Probably the closest thing to an item section I'm doing
Weapon Waifu: Based on my weapons in Xuanhuan CYOA as much as the classic Weapon Waifu CYOA though
Political Marriage: So that the sovereigns of the nations can be waifus, but mostly just to add more color to what is otherwise almost pure lore with no choices.
Seals: Tattoo and seal effects that a companion controls to dom you. Mostly used by summoners and lackeys. Maybe also you can put them on a companion to dom them
Ending: Probably quests of some kind, not designed at all
Debilitation Appendix (Wounds, madness, and status effects): So far just listed some things as I needed them for effects in other places, but really should make a significant push on this before powers need more of them
Final pass: Will read through basically everything, do missing images (of which there are already hundreds, probably over a thousand by the end) and check text while doing so. This comes last, of course
ETA: Absolute earliest possible May 2025, most likely time spring 2026 but could still be into 2027
Teaser repository (click)Totem Beasts: Done!
Race:
Tribe: Done
Blood Boons: Done
Lifestyle: Done
Terrain: Not done but designed finally, removing the previous roadblock
Companions (vassals): Not fully designed but should be easy now that I've done more other similar stuff
Policies: Gonna be way reduced compared to as previously designed. Probably just sliders like that one kinda reddit world builder
Stats: I'm cutting that shit. Way too hard to design for. Might still be some; I liked the magic system I designed, but what I had made before wouldn't have been fun for anyone.
Some kind of conquest or other conclusion page
ETA: Really just need like a week or two with some free time and my computer, and I can whip out what's left. Unfortunately, that probably means spring 2025 at the earliest
Teaser repository (click)Well, I underestimated the impact of jet lag and the amount of time I'd be spending with family. I won't be done with the class process by the end of the year. I finished Void Scion (previously Void Mage) but and added some more to Fleshcrafter but that's about it.
I've completed most of the magic classes now. It's a pretty good list, but it's so good that it makes stamina and qi look inadequate next to mana, so I'm going to do another little pass on more martial classes and see what I can come up with. I'll also go through other similar CYOAs to find appropriate powers to use as skills, and write them up as general (non-class) skills and group up any sufficiently large groups of related ones into new clases. Then, I'm going to tally up the key stats used by the different classes and see how imbalanced it is. I already know I'm overusing wisdom and underusing endurance, so I'll either make slight adjustments or come up with new classes to balance it better. That should wrap up the primary pass on classes, and at the rate I'm going that should be more or less the end of the year.
After classes and skills, I'll do companions probably, and tidy up little things. By the time I'm done with that, hopefully I'll be back home and able to put it all together, clean it up, and then go for the final pass. If not then I guess I'll figure out endings and quests first, or do more worldbuilding but that's not a high priority.
The list of clases is currently as follows:
There are also a few which aren't yet confirmed but might go in if I have adequate ideas for it:
I've now completed the Imperator, Knight, Barbarian, Thief, Ninja, Spirit, and Healslut classes, and completed the Gooner and Specter mentioned in the previous update. Most of these are much more bread-and-butter fantasy classes than the last batch, and aside from an element bender or elemental martial artist type class, this should be pretty much all of the martial/physical classes until and unless I come up with a cool idea outside of the usual paradigms. I've also got the basic magical classes to do, and a variety of weirder ones, some of which are already started.
I've been working on the powers section, which is now formatted as classes and skills, a but like in S&S&S. But unlike that, the format is much more open; everything has points costs and classes can have wildly different focuses and power levels as long as everything is balanced with regard to its cost. So far, Analyst, Voyeur, Cultivator, and Dreamweaver are done to an acceptable standard while Gooner, Eromage, Totemist, and Specter are started to a meaningful degree. A lot of these are relatively esoteric because I'm stress testing the design, as it were. I intend to build some more conventional classes by looking at what powers are popular (or just interesting to me) across a variety of CYOAs from biG ones like Divine Trials, Tentacle Realm, and Fixing God's Fuckups and may also take some from class based ones like S&S&S and Brothels and Barmaids. Finally, some highly focused single page (or few page) CYOAs are reference for a single class. I haven't written it yet but once I'm done recording the ideas in my head I may do an Omorashi Curse class for example, since I like that one.
To consider the classes and skills section adequately done, I need to have combed through all the powers of all my selected reference CYOAs and chosen where to adapt their content and where to omit it, and for every class to have at least a minimum number of skills (probably six) or be relegated to a backlog. However, this is an area that has a lot of potential to expand into odd directions and it will probably continue to do so.
In the interests of getting more factions into the game for people who care about that, and so I could write the stuff faster, I developed a new format for tribes, smaller than the one for full-fledged states. Also experimented with a new method of getting images – designing the tribes in Age of Wonders 4 (video game) and screenshotting. Feedback suggested the quality of image resulting is not adequate. Since those illustrations seem inadequate, I'll probably rearrange the format slightly to use vertical (portrait) images as those are typically easier to come by.
I've also made teaser archives and linked them in the devlogs.
I'm implementing this devlog largely as a personal accounting, but also making it available to everyone else in case it is of interest to someone else.