General Progress Update

As I'm flying to the Swedish Spelkollektivet, where I'll be spending the next 4-5 months, there won't be an update this week. However, this is a good time to give another large scope development overview.

Ero Slayers:

The game still needs quite some enemies and a new character. I've decided against the original idea for prolonged boss defeat events and will instead turn them into simple CGs, as the former would expand the scope of the game too much. Progress will depend on how well I can work here in Sweden, but the game should be mostly finished by the end of the year (despite it sharing production time with Ero Dungeons these days).

New Hunters/Slayers Puppets:

The Hunters puppet has always been a bit wonky. It is a lot more detailed than the Dungeons one, but has some problems with proportions and perspective. So the artist is creating a new one, to replace it. This doesn't extend to the Ero Dungeons puppet, that one will stay as it is.

This means redrawing all equipment and reworking all animations. However, the equipment is a problem for the artist, and with the way animations are stored it shouldn't be too hard to transfer them to a new character, though for a while the used puppet may change during grapples or for semi-human characters.

Ero Dungeons:

As you've seen from the previous devlogs, I'm currently overhauling Ero Dungeons. The goal is to overhaul the old systems to make them work similar to Ero Hunters/Slayers. This means that they're all moddable, but also easier to expand upon. The game also needs some UI improvements, stuff like the pause panel or right-click to close panels don't exist yet, as well as many other improvements made in the later games.

After the basics, it's time to add a new biome for the bunny cursed class. A beach area with bunnies and some other new enemy types, as well as two more custom dungeons. At the same time I'll also be using the Hunters censorship functionality to try and get a SFW Monstergirl Dungeons on Steam.

It's very hard to predict how long the overhaul will take, so I won't make any predictions but will keep relaying my progress during Ero Slayers devlogs.

Afterwards:

The original goal was for Ero Slayers to be a test project for card mechanics for a longer more traditional RPG. Unfortunately, I've concluded that card games in a longer RPG would be absolute madness. Having to prevent the player from achieving infinite combos would require a tight balancing which would take a lot of the fun out of the card game. So the game would be limited to shorter, more tightly controlled runs, which is already possible in Ero Slayers. Indeed, I would like to make some more linear runs for Ero Slayers, where the paths/events/combats are fixed, and the entirety is more narrative driven.

At the same time, Ero Hunters can also use some updates. Once Ero Dungeons is done, it makes sense to move the rooms/curios to Ero Hunters as well, as well as giving that game some custom dungeons. So after Ero Dungeons, I'll either return to Hunters or Slayers and flesh those out further.

In any case, it's nice that the games now have a robust structure that makes it very easy to expand upon them, even after years of not touching them.