And here we are, another week, another devlog!

Last week I said I would mainly focus on art this week, and it is exactly what I did! It's no secret I think that I've always been an artist first, a writer second, and a game designer/programmer a veeeery distant third, so it's nice to focus on what I enjoy most ^^ That being said, I'm all for varying your hobbies, as it broaden your horizons and helps avoid burnout. Sometimes, a particular hobby, or a particular game will devour my life for a couple weeks, and then I won't touch it again for a year, but drawing and writing have been constants throughout my life, a nice place to be myself, if you will.

But I'm getting all sappy! Back to the art. Like I said last week, I wanted to finish-up designing the characters I was still missing for this chapter. So far, so good, I think! There are a few minor characters here or there that I might add, but there is a lot less work on one-off throwaway characters than there is on the ones that will appear in multiple scenes (and especially in spanking scenes ^^). 

The thing with designing characters is that it's very easy to make them very ornate, with multiple layers of clothing, lots of patters and intricate things. But then, when you have to draw them ten times, you very quickly regret all that detail that you need to keep track of and reproduce! In that, working with 3d models is, I imagine, much easier (although, of course, it comes with numerous other challengers). That being said, I like details and little things that build up  a feel and look for the world Elven Kingdom. A lot of armour have similar little decorations, for instance, and in designing the Dwarves I wanted to have some little things like that to tie them together. I'll be pretentious here for a second and call it the design language for them ;)

So here coem the Dwarves! And of course, you've gotta start with the big man himself. Well, big is all relative :D

Of course, he's missing his throne for now, and I might make his armour more ornate, but I'll refer back to my point earlier about adding too much detail and regretting it later... I think the image reflets his personality quite well, though. Grumpy AF. 

Next, no King is without a wise counsel and holder of many grudges. I won't even try to hide the nod to Merlin here! 

The staff was fun to design, as you can imagine. The nice thing about staves, swords and weapons in general is that it's easy enough to draw them on a separate layer and then just rotate them into position. For that reason, I think it should be easy enough to make an inventory system in which you could change the main character's weapon and have it be wielded in battle accordingly. It could be just an aesthetic change, or it could bring stat changes (but I'm not sure the latter would be worth the balancing effort). Similarly, having variations of spanking scenes with different implements is easy enough to do (and with the Halloween game, I am now quite confident in how to make that work).

And of course, we need some dwarven warriors too... Big axe go brrrr. I don't have a name for him, but he looks like quite the veteran...

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how they've turned out. Pretty classical in appearance, I suppose, with more angular designs, but I hope that what you'll discover of Dwarven society will make them interesting and unique. There are a few ideas that I'm developing that should be pretty fun to explore. Maybe I'll do a devlog just on that, but I think it'll be more fun for you to just play the game and see for yourselves ^^

But Dwarves are not the only focus of this chapter! We'll also get to meet a few human faces (such as the bard that we've seen a few weeks past), some of which are not happy to simply sit beyond walls, but would rather take the fight to the Darkness directly!

I had a lot of fun designing this one in particular. What can I say, I like a woman in armour. Well, a little armour. But she's got a big sword, and she won't hesitate to use it :p

Speaking of women in armour...

My advice would be not to mess with that one... She means business, and she is not a nice lady. Which brings me to consider a point about spankings and punishments. It's very hard to cater to everybody's taste in matters of discipline, as some people really enjoy mean disciplinarian and very unjust situations, while others much prefer all punishments to be fair and deserved. I tend to skew towards the latter, but I'll admit it's sometimes fun to have a character that's a bit more on the evil side of things, if you know what I mean! We'll see how much you as a player can influence that (or how you can get back to them)... I liked having Lady Carhen being mean to Thatch and getting her comeuppance later, for instance, I feel like it was a well-earned one which would not have worked if she had been a "just" spanker.

In an ideal world, there would be so many branching paths and so many possible situations that it wouldn't be a problem, per se, but for now, I'm trying my best to keep most situations light. I'm also committed to having a path for the main character not to be spanked at all during a playthrough, as some kind of challenge, and sometimes it forces me to get pretty inventive! It's all good fun, really. With the introduction of the dom/sub alignment, it's much easier for me to be comfortable in forcing certain scenes, as the alignment should denote a certain tendency to choose one way or the other in general. That's not to say that there won't be choice anymore as we get to the later parts of the story, but maybe the consequences of some of them won't be as immediate. 

More characters? Yes, one more.

Listen, her skin's already purple, I might as well make her hair green as well... I don't know if the hair colour will stay, though; I'm worried it might clash with the rest of the characters, but if it works , I'd be open to having more characters with different hair colours. Synd in Stonehold had red hair, and it was rather nice, so I know it's possible! Let me know what you think ^^

And with that, that's another devlog done! See you next week for more updates. If all goes to plan, next week is going to be a writing-heavy one. Lots of stories to tie up and hash through. Then I'll have a good idea of how many spanking scenes are to be drawn, and that should give us a good estimate for the time left to wait! Woohoo! I'm excited; are you excited? :D