Alpha Roadmap

As this post goes live, I've just released a preview for Ero Hunters for subscribers on Patreon/Subscribestar. It's hard to describe a preview, it doesn't contain all content (or very much content) nor does it contain all mechanics. It primarily serves as a foundation, it's playable and saves should be compatible going forward. More importantly, it let's people try out the game and allows for a steady stream of suggestions and bug reports.

A public version of the game will have to wait a bit though, I'd like to have a couple hours of bugfree content for that. In what follows I'll detail what I want to add between this preview version and the public alpha.

Complete Current Content

When playing the preview you may notice that some move upgrades have no effect, some equipment has no upgrades, some resources don't have buildings to make them (or even any way to get them), some things cannot be researched, there are no advanced recipes, and so forth. All of that will be added eventually of course.

New Races

Races are tied closely to mechanic in the game, so only having Ratkin around isn't going to work, even for an alpha version of Ero Hunters. On the other hand, I don't yet feel confident enough in the new Animation Viewer to make them too complex, so I plan on adding some more humanoid races, probably something like ramgirls, bunnygirls, and wolfgirls. Each race comes with unique moves, technologies, recipes, roles, and so on.

Streamline Moves

If, as a solo developer, you want a game with a lot of content, you need to add some structure to your content. For example, in Ero Dungeons all equipment (500 pieces of it) follow a pattern where the amount of script lines depend on the rarity and the effects are balanced in a similar manner.

For moves, the plan is for each role to have access to five specific moves, each having five upgrades. Since upgrades have higher stat requirements, you'll be able to "downcast" moves as a lower upgrade. In practice that means every girl has about 25 moves eventually, though many of them are just strict upgrades.

Additionally, I'm rethinking the choice to make certain moves require certain weapon types, but rather allow girls to carry a weapon of each type instead, which makes more sense with limited moves.

Streamline Roles

The same thing holds for roles. The idea is that each race has some unique variants of roles, like the Ratkin IceMage, Lancer and LoveMage. Again, this simplifies adding content.

Improved Map

The current map is a very simple placeholder, it contains some woods, latex, iron, but no stone and no fun features. Apart from additional habitats and terrain types, I'd like to improve the graphics and make the whole thing larger, though not yet "final map" sized.

Roads (and other building mechanics)

Building mechanics are new to this game, so I don't really know how well they'll work or how engaging they are. At the very least I want to add roads to increase your movement speed (which will be necessary in the larger improved map). But there are other staples of the genre that are possibilities such as proximity effects, sub-buildings, housing, etc...

Curios

In the preview there's only one Curio, the good old wooden chest. The main reason for this is that I need to overhaul the curio creation system. Currently it's all done in-engine while I want to make curios creatable in-game. This would give more versatility and allow it to be modded. Unfortunately, this also takes some time. Not a lot of time, but more time than I was willing to spend before getting this preview out.

I'll also use the same streamlining for the curios as I did for the moves, and allow upgrades for each of them, like wooden chest (1), iron chest (2), latex chest (3)...

Equipment Rework

I fear that equipping and unequipping gear will become tedious and annoying when you get a larger roster of monstergirls. I'm thinking of making equipment assignment permanent. So if you equip a latex muzzle to a girl, she always has access to that and you can no longer take it off. This means you can't - and don't have to - unequip stuff when you're swapping out your active party.

Critical Hits

In the preview there are no critical hits. Rather than having crit tokens or crit chances, I want crits to be conditional. They may require enemy's to have specific tokens, enough lust, or any condition really.

Move Types/Deities

I have some plans to link not only moves, but also techs and roles to deities. It's a bit hard to summarize, so I'll explain in a later devlog once I actually implement it.

Enhanced Technology

The research screen is a bit basic now. Apart from it lacking many technologies (and good icons), I'd also like to integrate it with different monstergirls being necessary for specific researches and different shrines related to the move typess

Modding

In theory, the preview already allows modding as it's built on the same framework as Ero Dungeons. In practice it probably contains a lot of bugs or things that plainly don't work. Additionally, there will be a lot more things that are moddable (puppets, curios), so they'll need to be handled appropriately.

Localization

The localization support for Ero Dungeons was rather scuffed, many parts of the game could not be translated until CannedFox broke open the entire codebase to make it all work. I'm being more careful with static texts this time, but it will still need some handling for localization to truly work. Additionally, I'd like to make it a bit easier to start fan translating, in fact, I'll try making a Dutch translation just to force everything to work.

Tutorial

Making tutorials is always annoying, they tend to interact with all aspects of the game and their implementation is rife with exceptions. I'll keep them for last.

If you want early access to this preview, subscribe to:

PATREON | SUBSCRIBESTAR