Currently, I'm finishing up Reign's unique flavor text and making sure that the system to have her appear repeatedly in campaign mode is balanced well and doesn't have any bugs.  Reign has more special corruption text variants than other boss Chosen, so this is taking awhile, but it's balanced out by the fact that beating Reign will normally only happen at the end of campaign mode, so there's no need to give her any Forsaken content yet.

In the coming release, Reign will be beatable just like any other Chosen, although the bonuses she gets after every Vulnerability Break will mean that it'll only be feasible to do so in the later loops.  Once the ending of campaign mode is implemented, Reign will be changed to normally flee at 0% Resolve instead of being defeated.  Beating her early will still be possible, but it'll have additional challenges involved, and it'll be part of the variable "ending route" system.  That will be the phase of development in which she properly gets a set of unique Forsaken abilities.

In the meantime, I'm also testing out the various bonuses she'll give for being put on one of the Distortion paths.  These bonuses can generally only be gained starting in Loop 14 or Loop 21, and the player can only choose one of them per campaign run (unless they switch Reign from one Distortion to another, which is just as possible for her as it is for regular Chosen), so it seems fair to make them quite strong.  I'm looking forward to seeing what players are able to do with them.

Because Reign is a recurring boss, a lot of gameplay mechanics work differently for her than for the other boss enemies.  Some of these differences are just code reworks I need to figure out (like being able to add a partially-corrupted Chosen back to the boss pool).  Others are game balance problems that need to be dealt with in order to have a boss who's meant to be beaten over the course of multiple loops instead of just one.

Reign's central feature that makes her into a "multi-loop" boss is her Demonic Resonance ability which triggers whenever she suffers any Vulnerability Break.  It grants her a short-term burst of power which frees her from surrounds and captures, clears all her damage, and resolves all her trauma.  In other words, after every Vulnerability Break, you're pretty much starting from square one in order to inflict the next one.  On top of this, whenever the ability activates, it cuts all damage against her for the rest of the loop by a compounding factor of 10.

This will make it impractical to get more than 2 or 3 Vulnerability Breaks against her every time she shows up.  But there are significant rewards for getting as many Breaks as you can.  Reign possesses a mysterious connection to the Chosen as a whole, and every Break against her grants the player a large permanent bonus to damage of the associated types (e.g. FEAR and HATE for Morality Breaks) for the entire remainder of the campaign run.  Furthermore, achieving a Distortion against her grants a similar unique permanent passive buff.  These bonuses are meant to serve as a sort of replacement for the usual bonuses that bosses grant when converted to the Forsaken, since Reign can't be beaten until the end of the run.  Whichever playstyle you prefer, there will be a way to corrupt Reign which gives you a bonus to that playstyle.

Here's a preview of Reign's portrait for the default pack.  As always, I've included a full body version here as well.  I'm still planning on going back and doing the same for Victory and Splendor, once I'm more confident that I'll be able to do them justice.

This phase of the game's development has been focused on adding a new round of bosses, and the third and final of those bosses is named Reign.  Unlike Judgment and Love, Reign is not one of the species-based bosses who show up every 5 loops.  Instead, she can be thought of as the boss of the "human Chosen."  Initially, she has no resistance to damage and none of the special abilities associated with the advanced Chosen species.  However, she'll quickly show off what makes her unique as a boss enemy.

Reign's role as one of the Chosen is to act as the scout of the Council of Ten, seeking out unusual Demon Lords and determining how dangerous they are.  But rather than being good at exterminating Demons, Reign's real talent is her ability to survive at all costs.  If a Demon Lord is too strong for her to beat, then she escapes and reports back to her twin sister, Crown, who will then dispatch Victory or Splendor to deal with them.  This is exactly what's meant to happen during the campaign mode of Corrupted Saviors, but because Reign hadn't been added to the game yet, Victory and Splendor have just been showing up without any explanation.

Starting in the next release, Reign will be the very first boss that is encountered in all playthroughs.  The reason that it's taken so long to add her to the game is that her gameplay function is to act as a recurring boss.  She first appears in Loop 7, and then appears again every 7 loops after that.  It wouldn't have made sense to implement her before campaign mode had enough content to justify deep runs into later loops.

Because Reign is based on regular human Chosen, her abilities aren't themed around an amplification of species traits like the other bosses.  Instead, they're based around her role as a survivor.  But I'll go into more detail on that subject next week.

This is another flavor-focused update, with the main addition being the ability to take the custom bodies you use for sex scenes with Chosen and Forsaken, and use those bodies in battle as a substitute for the usual monstrous Demon Commander forms.  This works by adapting the flavor text that was previously just used for sending Forsaken to fight the Chosen.  On a cheatless playthrough, the option only changes the flavor text, but when the toggle for body traits to affect damage is turned on, the traits of the body you send out will be properly reflected in the bonuses you gain.  Overall, my hope is that this option will ensure that players who dislike some of the fetishes associated with the different Commander upgrades will still be able to take advantage of the gameplay opportunities they provide.

Reworking the Commander Capture code to use an entirely different set of flavor text has been a major overhaul, and the feature is definitely still a bit rough around the edges.  Deployed humanoid bodies are given a "combat style" based on which damage types the body deals, and this normally works out pretty well.  When circumstance damage levels reach the point that Defilers start taking effect, the damage increase text also properly reflects the Defiler (for penetration, orgasming, etc.).  But it didn't make sense to use the same Demon Commander capture dialogue, and most of the Forsaken-Chosen banter also wouldn't make sense for talking to the Demon Lord, so there aren't any spoken Chosen lines associated with humanoid Demon Commanders at the moment.  Total Vulnerability Breaks triggered by humanoid Demon Commanders also don't yet have any unique flavor.  This feature is still very much a work in progress, and the main goal for now is to make sure that it doesn't have any crashes or text bugs.

Alongside the main feature, this release also had an unusually large amount of time spent working on adding custom sex scene actions.  It was originally going to be focused on friendly actions that might give low-Deviancy Chosen more to do with each other, but a couple of rougher activities made their way into it in the end.  As always, there's also the usual small collection of bugfixes and balance tweaks.

Next month will be another gameplay-focused release, with the addition of yet another boss.  But this next boss, Reign, will be unusual for a few reasons, most notably the fact that she'll reappear multiple times throughout campaign mode.

Click here to download.  Mirror.

The new custom sex scene actions are finished, and I'm currently working on the update's other main feature: the ability to deploy a humanoid Commander body, which is functionally identical but uses flavor text different from that of the usual monstrous Demonic form.  This is a feature that's been requested multiple times, and it's a prerequisite for some commissioned content that I'm eager to start writing, but it's also a pretty hefty addition that will involve rewriting a lot of code to do things it wasn't originally intended to do.  I was worried about whether there would really be room to add something like this into an update which is focused on something else, but so far, it's looking like I'll be able to manage it.

At its most basic level, this toggle will simply allow you to use Forsaken combat flavor in place of the tentacles and such normally used by Demon Commanders.  The anatomical traits of the body will be based on one of the bodies you create to approach the Chosen and visit the Forsaken for custom sex scenes.  This means that, as more capture variants are added that reference asset sizes or nonhuman traits like wings and tails, you'll be able to see those variants even while using a Demon Commander.  There are also some plans for special "Demon Vessel only" customization options.  The toggle for allowing body traits to have gameplay effects will apply here as well, so that players who enjoy a more casual experience will be able to have fun collecting more bonuses to reach even higher damage amounts against the Chosen.

This introductory release will be mostly a test run to ensure that the code overhaul to let Demon Commanders use Forsaken flavor text is successful.  Much of the Demon Commander code was written very early in the game's development, so the gameplay effects and flavor text are interwoven together, and separating them isn't trivial.  Once that's stable, a later release will be dedicated to adding more unique flavor text and customization options to the system.

I'm now about halfway through the set of new custom sex scene actions which will constitute the main feature of the coming update.  Up until this point, new actions have just been trickling in one at a time alongside other major features, but this group of actions has a couple of unifying mechanics, so it makes sense to do them as a group and use the opportunity to check off a few other smaller tweaks and features in the same release.

After adding the concept of blocked eyes to custom sex scenes a couple of months back, this release will introduce the concept of having a blocked mouth.  The existing oral sex actions will leave the mouth "free" for talking, because the one performing the action is in control of the pace, so it's reasonable for her to pull back for a moment to talk before continuing.  But these new actions will muffle the subject's voice.  They'll still try to talk, and most of the punctuation will remain intact (in order to get across the tone of whatever they're trying to say), but the text itself will be reduced to noises like "mff" and such.

Players might recognize this as basically the same system that Animalistic Chosen use when under the effect of Surrender to Instincts, which replaces their usual speech with animal noises.  Eventually, I want to expand this system further so that it can be more selective about which text gets blocked and which gets let through.  This will allow for stuff like characters with accents, characters with speech impediments like lisps and stuttering, and having characters speak differently while experiencing intense pleasure, pain, and/or tickling.  Some of the above are already hard-written into the speech lines for specific actions, but being able to apply it as a "filter" to other speech lines would add more consistency to the game, so that characters don't go straight from orgasmic incoherence to calmly enunciating in a single turn.