Dungeon of Lewdity - Development Roadmap!

First, $5+ patrons, don't forget that the follow up poll for this month's story reward is still running. 

Having gotten that out of the way, as promised, I'm going to lay out what future development is going to look like. I decided, for the sake of keeping the length of the information vaguely readable, I'd split this into two posts, one for DoL and one of Cosplay Cafe (which I'll do in a few days). Having said that, let's dive right in...

My original goal with The Dungeon of Lewdity was to create a simpler game that I could actually finish in a semi-reasonable timeframe. You know, instead of development spanning multiple years like Eros Academy and Cosplay Cafe -_-. Now, admittedly, DoL's unexpected (but very much appreciated) popularity, has caused me to radically expand the amount of content I put in each individual room. I mean, just look at how much is in something like the Pokemon Parody room vs the super-limited starting rooms! However, despite that expansion in content-per-room, the basic structure I mapped out from the beginning has remained unchanged. The original plan was to create thus:

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6 Paths/Sub-Paths through The Dungeon

10 Rooms on Each Path

Safeword or Village endings between all or most room transitions

6 FULL endings, one at the end of each aforementioned path. 

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Now, the total number of rooms is actually a bit less than the 60 that seems to be indicated here, due to there being a few shared rooms at the start of the dungeon. In point of fact, if I've done my math right, there should be a total of 51 UNIQUE rooms. As a quick reference, lets take a look at where we stand with that right now. These are the room totals for each Sub-Path thus far:

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 Bondage -  Public/Free Use: 9 Rooms

 Bondage - Pet: 8 Rooms

Mental Path (Sub): 6 Rooms 

Mental Path (Dom): 7 Rooms 

Physical -Racial: 6 Rooms 

Physical - Other: 7 Rooms 

Sub-Total: 43

Total(Accounting for shared rooms):  34

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Touching for just a moment on the totals, the second listing is to give an accurate accounting for the total number of UNIQUE rooms. That is to say,  we are at 34 total unique rooms out of 51 planned. Which is roughly 2/3rds, as it happens. A big chunk of the reason I felt we needed a new roadmap post, is that (as you can easily see) some of these paths are actually nearing their endings. As such, I wanted to both address how that's going to work AND make people aware that I'm already planning for what happens after DoL's initial run finishes. As it happens, I want to take those two points in reverse order.

First, then, is the answer to the question: What happens when DoL begins wrapping up? I can answer that! More or less! The less is because I'm fully intending to get you, the patrons, in on the end decision. There are THREE possible routes to take once DoL starts winding down (in a few more updates). 

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Route 1: This route was my original plan. I intended to make The Dungeon of Lewdity only one of several TWINE games that I would produce one after another. I have fairly solid notes on a number of additional game ideas, including two that actually originated as extensions on rooms I've done for DoL. Specifically, the Pokemon Parody room and the Drow room. You'll get more details on game ideas closer to the end of DoL, I'm not going to extend  this post even farther by listing even basics of them here. In short form, with this route, I would try and time things so that the first build of a new TWINE game (as selected by ALL patrons voting) would come out in the same month as the last build of DoL. Doubling up on that month for a smooth transition. Admittedly, that would likely come at the cost of getting no work done on Cosplay Cafe that month, in order to handle both releases.

Route 2: Given the popularity of DoL, I've also considered two additional routes! Route 2 is, essentially, The Dungeon of Lewdity 2. This route would amount to me creating a new game with the same basic premise but with an entirely new protagonist and a whole new set of routes and situations. Allowing me to refresh what art assets I can use as well as tackle new fetishes/kinks. 

Route 3: In this route, instead of a new game, I would introduce additional paths to the existing game. A big chunk of the reason I chose to stick to just 10 rooms per path is that, frankly, I knew from the beginning that I'd run out of either creativity or art assets to produce new rooms on the same general themes. Indeed, I'm actually running into that problem already on the Pet Play route. Essentially, in this route, I'd extend the current game by creating new splits to the paths (via additional solutions to certain rooms) that would then offer completely new themed-paths for the existing protagonist to explore. I would likely add two new paths at a time, allowing voting to determine which one would be the focus for each build, similar to how things are now.  

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As you can see, there will be follow-up content. It's just a matter of what YOU, the patrons, decide you want more. In future months, as the end of DoL development gets closer, I'll run polls and open a discussion thread, allowing me to get a good feel for which of these routes my ever-so-awesome supporters would most like to see. For now, it's just something to be aware will EVENTUALLY be happening. We've probably got another couple of updates to go before we have to worry about it...

Which, brings us back to what will happen when DoL paths begin ending! Which, thankfully, is a simpler question to answer. What I think I've mentioned before, is that the actual Path Endings are intended to be pretty involved. As much so as I can make them. As such, once a path 'maxes out' on it's rooms, the Build after that happens will likely have 'only' 3 regular rooms, all going to that month's Focus Path (unless that would extend said path past it's own limit). The time normally spent doing the two rooms for non-focus paths will instead be used to create the Ending for whichever sub-path just ended. Yes, I'm hoping for them to be THAT content-heavy! Hopefully. 

Now, at this point, that could only happen in the next build if the voting gives us the Bondage Path as the Focus Path again for September. However, since it COULD, theoretically, happen, I wanted to make everyone AWARE of what the procedure will be :-). Now, even with only covering DoL in this post...it's gotten really long! Sorry about that! Feel free to ask (either in comments or PM)  any questions you have about all this!