It’s been a while since we’ve posted any progress. The good news is that the game’s production hasn’t been on hiatus. All this time we’ve been polishing, improving and rewriting a lot. The goal was to create a game that we ourselves would have fun with while playing. That’s the bad news- it turns out that it’s much harder than we’ve anticipated.

The key to success seems to be player agency and appropriate reaction. Everything in the world needs to be reactive to your decisions. That’s why we’ve massively overhauled all the dialogues in the game- giving players more choices when it comes to interacting with characters.

“Good” and neutral routes

Originally we’ve envisioned Viastopia as “an RPG where you do an evil playthrough”. That concept didn’t resonate with a big chunk of the playerbase. After some consideration we’ve also decided that just choosing different flavors of evil isn’t too great for replayability in consequent playthroughs. That’s why we’ve written some more options. So while it’s still not possible to play as a goody two-shoes, players will gain more options to express themselves.

They can try acting as reasonable people in an unreasonable world. That nonlinearity carries over to the way quests can be completed now. It was core to us that every dilemma had at least two possible outcomes.

Interface and visual upgrades

Personally, as an art guy, I’m VERY passionate about UI. It’s my goal to make it as cohesive, easy to traverse with mouse, keyboard, gamepad and mobile devices and visually distinctive as possible. I want it to feel snappy and unobtrusive while fun to traverse.

Here’s a mockup approximating how it might look.

We’ve been also playing with the idea of a 3D camera for many of the ui elements- adding perspective and “flair” to specific elements. Speaking of 3D…

Incorporating 3D elements Our graphic designer has picked up some simple 3D modeling skills so we’ve decided to put that to good use.

This is an example of a 3D model for Lucah, that’s going to be used during loading screens.

We’re also floating an idea- replacing current pregnancy inspection animations with (admittedly higher poly than the model show up there) 3D models. That would mean a faster workload, as now we’d be able to show damage that occurred during “training” segments as decals. Imagine seeing the whip marks on the girl just after you’re done “training” her- that’s the sort of immersion we’re going for. Of course, that means that decals could stock up one on top of another. It is satisfying to witness the results of your “work” after all.

Improved shops

We’ve drastically changed how the player interacts with the shopkeepers. Now they also serve as a hub for rumors and allow you to upgrade weapons (more about that later). You can also choose to fight them to get their stuff for free or depending on the shopkeeper- for other reasons. Every shopkeeper will also have a “Reputation” meter. The more you sell, buy, do quests for them or upgrade weapons at their station- the more reputation you’ll gain. Reputation unlocks more of their merchandise, offers better prices and in case of female shopkeepers- added benefits.

Here’s some mockups.

And here’s what we have so far.

Upgrading weapons

In order to make progress more satisfying we’ve introduced weapon upgrades. You upgrade weapons with a separate resource “Weapon memories”. They’re hidden across the map, in order to reward exploration. Some may also be given as quest rewards. Upgrading weapons unlocks new combat skills for currently equipped weapons. Each weapon has 3 of them. Since diversification plays a big role in combat, naturally going into a fight with an upgraded weapon means more options

Story changes

Many players felt dissatisfied with the intro, so now it’s been completely revamped. We’ve attached the new intro cg set with the document. This time it’ll be much darker to better fit the tone of the world.

New characters concept art

We’ve finished concept art for some characters that’ll appear later on in the story.

Combat visuals overhaul

A lot of players praised the way enemy sprites changed during battle. We’ve decided to take this aspect a bit further- we’re redrawing all the combat sprites in higher resolution to make use of the 3D camera. While we’re at it we’ve increased the number of battle scars- from 3 per enemy to 10.

Here’s some before and after com

Expanded “Bad Ends” As per player requests we’ll be adding an option to extend “bad  ends” with new cgs, animations and more. This will be entirely optional, so players who do not enjoy being taken advantage of can just disable it. Difficulty options

We’ve implemented three difficulty options:

Casual, Balanced and Unfair 

Casual turns the game into more of an “adventure game” where you can pick any option from the start and are basically unkillable unless you will it.

 Balanced is the default RPG experience, where your choice of skills and build matter. It features similar enemies to the ones from the RPGM ver.

 Unfair was designed in response to people wanting this game to become more hardcore. Later enemy types will appear earlier and overall it’s designed to make playing it as miserable as possible. Improved starting screen

We’ve implemented some visual flair to the starting screen. Shown below.

Release date Well… as much as we’d want to just say “when it’s done” we know that this answer is not going to make players happy. We really want to incorporate the entire first dungeon in the demo once that’s done and the combat’s balanced- it’ll be time to release it. It’s going to provide at least 4h of content. This time around we really don’t want to rush anything. The first 0.1 release of rpgm ver could’ve stayed a bit more in the oven- it’s something we regret till this day. January 2025 It seems like a long time but with all the new features we’ve added it might be a completely different game at this point- one that’s way more focused on delivering an immersive RPG experience.