First up, the release of Horny Mage Academy's Combat demo's demo! (The demo of a demo, demo-ception?)

Lily's Erotic Potion Delivery Service is now available to all magi-tier subscribers for early access!

As I don't quite want to spoil everything that's been included in the demo (and also that so, so much of it was bugfixes/smoothing out of the core systems), I think instead I'll talk about future plans for development for HMA. Just some musings on how I'm going to use Lily's little adventure to direct and focus development on HMA mostly.

This will mostly be a text post, as it's more a musings/development thoughts rather than showing off new stuff at the moment. Apologies in advance for the wall of text.

As I mentioned previously, Horny Mage Academy's development needs a few main things complete before I can truly start digging into it. At minimum, Horny Mage Academy needs Imps, Nekomatas, slimes, and tentacle plants in terms of enemy design to have the proper variety I think it needs.

As for skills, there's roughly 60 of them needed for a base release that doesn't involve tearing apart the class system, and I have completed.... 6 or so! So still a bit off there.

More than just those disconnected parts though, I need a coherent design goal and strategy for its combat system. I like the core of HMA's gameplay, where your advancements in combat come from attending classes and jobs, making friends, etc, but in terms of design it was certainly lacking in the combat department.

Lily's game, meanwhile, isn't constrained by the requirements there. I was free to use it to test and stretch the design of the combat system's new plugins. As a result, don't expect Horny Mage Academy out of her adventure! It's much more a straightforward action-rpg (set in the same universe with the same characters).

Instead, look into the separate elements that are, and will be, implemented into it.

The resistance/in-battle sex system (this might carry over rather well if it's working!)

The spirits system (will not carry over as it's basically a replacement for your classes to learn magic)

The stat-growth upon being hit, casting spells, engaging in erotic battle, losing hp, and gathering. (This may? carry over? It's hard to tell how this would effect the balance of Horny Mage Academy's classes and clubs, many of which were primarily for stat-boosting.

The expanded pregnancy system that allows pregnancies to progress faster while in combat zones, and giving birth on the field (likely also returning! Just likely limited by area and type (ex)-humans stay the same? but slimes in a waterway grow faster?)

The (future) companion system, which I have only dipped my toes into so far, allowing you to adventure with one of your friends.

And overall the many animation, UI, pixel art, field animations, and more that have been tweaked and added.

At it's core, Lily's Erotic Potion Delivery was built upon the same game files that Horny Mage Academy was. A copy of Horny Mage Academy's last build was used, and then slowly stripped down until only the necessary elements were running for the combat system to work.

The goal with this was to remove bugs that were related to the current systems of HMA and allow me to focus development on the new combat system. Systems like the pregnancy processing systems, time-day controller, COMM systems, and more were all heavily tied to the game logic and prone to breaking when stuff was removed/added. I needed a clean slate, but at the same time didn't want to open a completely new project and risk incompatibilities rising from the differing architecture and potential plugin/load order configuration.

While I was working on Lily's adventure, I also wanted to look ahead at not just what needed to be 1-1 replaced in Horny Mage Academy, but what needed to be better. In particular, UI, spritework, animations, and better tutorials and communication came to the front of the development goals. Certain areas of the demo like the mana crafting system were held back from this release in part because the UI elements were proving difficult or time-consuming to make.

In terms of broader content that will be developed with LEPD that's not currently part of HMA, I looked at what was missing and tried to make it a goal to develop on those areas. In particular the corrupt church has always been lacking in terms of content and ascetics, so that's one area that will be a heavy focus in Lily's Adventure.

Along that note, humanoid enemies in general are the next stop on the development train. Cultists and Hoolagins in particular, as they fit into the corrupt church and the village areas of HMA fairly well, and could have interesting events surrounding them.

I'm rambling a bit at this point, but I'm excited to see where all of this will go. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the demo!

~HGameArtMan

A shorter devlog today, as much of the last month was spent packing, driving (6 days cross country!) and unpacking, and as a result work has been somewhat slow.

I do still have a few things to show off though in terms of progress!

First and most flashily.... I made Lily wear a new outfit!

It's not attached to her animation sets yet, so for now it's just a still image in a small scene, nothing erotic yet, but still fun!

And secondly... Spirits are undergoing yet another revamp.

Instead of summoning the spirit to fight with it to gain exp for leveling it, all enemies now drop "Spirit Energy" which adds to a stat that will be tracked on the status screen and used to level up spirits at rest point (currently just Anya's Shop and the Inn in the village).

It doesn't look that bad either from the tests I ran!

As for general progress, the start of the storyline is mostly fleshed out now, there's 3 scene-based erotic fully-animated scenes, 2 ish in-battle events (slimes and shadow crawlers, though only slimes are really showy about it), and the scene gallery is currently 50% complete, only needing standing animation replays for Anya and Lily, as well as slime in battle scenes.

I still have a bit more to do in terms of everything (slime births need a doctor's scene, human pregnancies are being delayed because there's no repeatable prostitution or enemies yet to enable them, spirits are still a massive mess) but other than that and a million bugs everything's coming together!

As for what this means for Horny Mage Academy... Not a ton yet unfortunately. I need to really get into the meat of this combat demo, in particular fully fleshing out the spirits system, before I can really start developing all of the spells and skills and start digging into HMA's systems, and I kind of want to hold off on a lot of the more grindy, time-consuming work on the 60+ skills I need to make until public feedback comes in from Lily's demo of how things are looking, including enemy and boss design, dungeon design for the first dungeon I created, feedback on the knockdown system and in-combat erotic scenes, and so much more.

Progress on Lily's Erotic Potion Delivery (The HMA combat demo) is coming along!

First, we start where all adventures start, with a cute preggo catgirl popping out slime babies!

Er, perhaps not all adventures, but this one can with the power of slime friends!

Now, the animations are still not 100% complete, unfortunately. There's still motion work I need to do the tails, ears, hair motions, eyes, etc etc, not to mention that at base she's actually going to be clothed, but art is 90% done for the most part, and is implementing rather nicely.

I've been spending some time refining the systems for knockdown and slime-playtime, as well as starting on the slime pregnancy and birth processing.

I'm taking a lot more time with these sorts of things because I'm trying to incorporate more extensive testing and cleaner development so that things just run generally smoother, but it all seems to be coming along pretty well!

Now that we've seen some of the art, let's see... more art!

Casting Animations

This time we have 2 different animations for it here! One that's a general casting animation for neutral attacks, and a water-specific variant that creates a bubble and releases it into the ground for stuff like splash wave!

Again, these still need to be refined; the water one I'm not entirely happy with (and only have the frontal animation for it), and the neutral one still has some timing issues on shorter cast times, but I particularly like how the lightning effects give it a bit of a pop.

It even inspired me to start sketching out a sort of "cut in" that could be used for big spells like magic laser!

Not entirely sure this will pan out to work, and as it's not on the direct list of "things needed for the combat update" I'm hesitant to do more than just a few sketches for it at the moment, but I'll see if I have time to sneak it in later, it might make for a cool flourish for nice big spells.

Speaking of nice, big spells...

NEW COMBAT MECHANICS

I've been working on new combat mechanics!

Telegraphed aoes!

 And telegraphed aoes that really don't like you standing where you're standing!

These sorts of mechanics I feel can be used to create interesting combat design. Imagine having to kill an enemy fire magic before they complete a meteor cast, or taking out a slime that's lobbing watery bombs at you from across the dungeon, making other rooms even have dangerous areas that can damage you!

To properly get a feel for developing mechanics, I've been creating a small, optional dungeon in the demo. I realised that you can't really get a feel for combat design with just two maps and a single enemy, so I'm giving a small dungeon a shot!

In short, progress is coming along pretty well! I'm focusing on trying to make things run well, squash bugs, and fit together these last bits of things that are still not quite working (like the spirits system, it's still a bit of a mess!) but with any luck I'll have a proper release soon enough!