April 2024 Development Update

Hello!

It’s been a little while - it’s a new development update!

Since the last roadmap update, three major targets were worked on:

• Contract & Visual Presets have been implemented and are now easily shareable between players.

• Voice Acting (with the addition of Order Whispers, which seemed to be so well received it increased the scope of our plans for voice acting significantly).

• Mood-specific task tweaking.

We also did significant work on the core tasks of the game with the addition of Mini-Tasks replacing counted tasks, and orders as an alternative to urges. A lot of what we’ve done has been based on the large amount of feedback we received last year when we called for it in August. We think the game has had significant improvements as a result, and we thank all those who participated with constructive and useful feedback at that time.

We’d also like to give you some comments on some of the remaining points of the roadmap, as some of you may be curious about the state of their design or may have further feedback to provide us:

• Body/Genital Renaming: We think this would be a significant feature, but it’s definitely going to be a challenge to match. We are unsure how many people would care about this as we haven’t received much feedback on it.
   

• Reactions / Additional Succubus Communication: This one is now heavily tied in and dependent on additional voice acting, which will be talked about below.
   

• Visual Customization Menu Rework: As much as this is a problem, we genuinely believe the day to day Virtual Succubus experience for existing & veteran players wouldn’t be very affected compared to how much time this would take us to do well. It’s still going to remain on the list, but it’s just not a priority.
   

• Status Rework: This is one of the remaining core major changes to how tasks work that we’d like to do. Fairly high up on the priority list.
   

• Favor Gambling: We’re still unsure how to appropriately reward for this and we’re hoping to eventually develop systems that will support it better.

Many of our current immediate plans relate to further voice acting, after the reception to Orders. We want to create entire task types and session variants surrounding it - but the recording and editing of Order Whispers was kind of an awkward, inefficient process. Since we’re trying to cover both binaural and regular mono audio, our recording setup and process is atypical, leading us to do it in-house.

Considering how challenging order whispers were, we thought long and hard about how to create a process that would allow us to add a lot more without being crippled by the needs of our weird audio recording - i.e., a very silent & sound-treated environment, a lot of set up, etc.

The answer is that we currently don’t have the space to set up a proper recording studio… but we will starting in a couple months, when I move into a house and we can dedicate time to setting up something that will long term allow us to record voice lines for all kinds of virtual succubus interactions.

Once that’s done, we should be able to output a lot more and cover huge parts of the game that I didn’t expect to be able to get voice acted.

Until then, we plan to work on other aspects of the game, awaiting the moment where we can go full throttle on seeing what we can do with VA.


 

This roughly sums up our current plans and situation surrounding VS, but I also want to be transparent and talk a little bit about some challenges.

Unfortunately, both lead developers, me and Vector have had a lot of personal life problems that challenge our ability to work efficiently. With both of us deciding to move to houses, and a lot of unfortunate unlucky circumstances surrounding that, it’s been a challenge to stay on track with a Virtual Succubus that grows ever more complex to work on. 

To be honest, our early 2023 sprint grew the internal scope of the game too big, too fast, and design has gotten more and more challenging by the month.  We’re doing our best to systemize it in a way that can be easily expanded upon, but with customizability and variety comes an exponential increase in time necessary for more additions.

We’re best at working on VS when I can design features that take something that exists and translates it into experiences the game can appropriately provide. After almost four years on this project, as one would expect, I’m slowly running out of new large ideas that fit within the framework. Many of the suggestions we get either aren’t things I would like to add, or are generally already available through our systems.
 

Nowadays, a lot of my ideas stem from personal life, so I’ve tried to experiment more and discover new ways we can add interesting things to VS - both the Conditioning and Lube systems were inspired by personal research and experiences, for example. Both of us lead developers have BDSM-friendly partners, and we try to go to BDSM events to see what people do and enjoy - we want to learn as much as possible about the world to be able to provide you experiences inspired by real BDSM, not just the behind-a-desk idea of it.

I’m also coming to realize my ability to both hyperfocus on the project early on, and inability to focus on the things that don’t interest me as much may stem from something I should look into… and I’ll be doing that over the next couple months.

While this is happening with VS, I’m luckily still capable of thinking of plenty of adjacent things. I’ve done design and code work behind the scenes on an instructions based project with a different structure that supports couples of all kinds - it’s a really big project and I’m confident in its appeal both for solo and duo play, but it will take a while to materialise into a releasable project!

I’ve also learned a good amount of technical things that will allow me to create more web-based projects, and play around with improving some existing JOI structures and turning them into gamified projects - for example, what if your JOI videos were adaptable to your needs, state, and preferences?

The first project in this vein released will be “Virtual” Succubus, a small experimental project making use of VS’s assets and featuring your Succubus’s new VA. It will support various different toggles and be video clip based.

All of this experience is also growing my ability to improve things within VS itself, which I’ll be able to apply over time as we keep restructuring and improving various parts of the game.

We’re also still working behind the scenes on growing past VS - between prototyping and R&Ding unique physical BDSM goods and processes, doing research to be able to create articles that pair well with our BDSM games, and networking with interested creators; we hope to someday be able to leverage VS’s success into a larger BDSM & JOI project studio with creations inspired by our VS development experiences.

Anyway - that’s where we’re at. I hope this was of interest to some of you.

As usual, our Discord is always open to feedback and questions!