Hello everyone! Hoh boy, am I tired. For good reasons, but still. Development has been progressing along, though I don't know if I can say it's been smooth or not. Not a sign of anything bad, but I've been so busy the past two weeks that I'm kind of in that tunnel-vision state where even I'm not sure how everything's going.

All that said, what have I been doing? Well, a bit of everything! A new weapon, a new enemy, cutscenes and... more cutscenes. Well, let's talk about that new weapon first.

Revolver

Finally, a revolver has been added to the game. You'd have thought this would've been the first port of call, and in a way it was. I made this gun quite a while ago, as you might be able to tell from the fact that it's appeared in quite a few renders. Last week, I finally rigged and animated it, properly setting it up in-game as a purchasable weapon. I'm honestly very happy with how the animations turned out.

I've always wanted to animate a proper Single Action Army-type revolver. I've had a few chances to animate something similar, quite a while ago now, but I could never quite wrap my head around it and usually opted to just take the gun off-screen during the reload. This time, I decided to actively show the whole thing and... it's slow. But that's good, that's intentional. Reload speeds can be upgraded after all.

In terms of use, it's like the regular pistol but hits harder, fires slower and needs to be reloaded more often. It fits quite nicely into the current weapon roster and just generally feels good to use. At least, that's how I feel now. Come a couple of months and I might despise it, but that's a problem for future me.

The Warrior

Today's poster girl is the Warrior. This is probably one of the first enemies I had in mind when I started Lust & Lead, but I kept procrastinating due to the relative complexity of the design and my own indecisiveness. My main goal was to create an enemy that would be a direct contrast to the shambling zombies, something more aggressive and purposeful. Sharp teeth, sharp armor, sharp blades and a sharp tongue (figuratively).

She giggles, laughs and actively taunts the player while closing distance fast and not allowing much breathing room. When you purify her, she also sounds like she's enjoying it a little too much.

She can jump higher than the average enemy as well, so sheer drops that enemies can't typically climb are no longer safe havens for you to make your last stand on. If you don't pay attention, you're likely to get two arm blades in the back while being made fun of.

There is a slight issue with her that I need to keep an eye on, however. Because the Warrior is faster than the other enemies, she tends to reach the player first and, as a result, ends up becoming one of the enemies I purify most often.

The intention behind purification in Lust & Lead is that the player shouldn't keep purifying the same enemy over and over unless they're actively trying to. Zombies/Shamblers are there partly as a reliable fallback that's easy to knock into a staggered state, but because of how often you'll be shooting at Warriors right in front of you, you're likely going to ignore the fodder enemies in favor of the immediate cackling psycho.

Calling this an issue might be an overstatement. It could just be how I play and might solve itself as more enemies get added to the game, but it's still something I noticed during testing.

Cutscenes

Now, the real meat of what's been going on the past couple of weeks. I've been working on the game's cutscenes!

It might seem a bit premature since there's plenty of other things to be getting on with, but with the enemy roster complete for the Alpha and all the underlying systems in place, I felt this was one area with too many mysteries involved.

Overall, Lust & Lead has 38 planned cutscenes. For where I want the story to end in the Alpha, we're looking at 10 for the first release. As of writing, I've worked on three of them, amounting to around five minutes' worth of animation. Granted, some of this was already started months ago.

Also, these aren't three polished cutscenes. I've split my workflow into passes. The first pass is a shot blockout with basic animation and voice lines playing. The second is more polished animation, lip sync and better shot timings, maybe with some sound effects, while the third is more of the above but closer to completion with a focus on finer details such as character expressions. Audio, lighting and music are their own passes.

For the Alpha, I want to get those 10 cutscenes to at least their first-pass state, with maybe a second pass for better presentation. I wouldn't expect anything too amazing, and that does highlight something I've realized.

I intend to release an Alpha of the game. That means an unfinished version of it. I probably shouldn't obsess over polish or making things look amazing. Leaving things unfinished is perfectly acceptable and I need to repeat that to myself because otherwise I might spend the next month polishing one or two cutscenes. The goal for now is to just get everything presentable and have the story make narrative sense.

The way I've structured the story also means the cutscenes are front-loaded, middle-loaded and end-loaded, if that makes sense. Essentially, there are three points in the game that are meant to be cutscene-heavy with relatively little overlap with the core gameplay loop. Most of the narrative will be delivered much like in Sin Spire: through dialogue boxes. So ultimately, these first cutscenes in the Alpha might be the only cutscenes you'll be seeing for a while.

What's Next?

So, my task list is looking pretty straightforward right now. In no particular order:

So, with the above in mind, how's that November release looking? Well, if I keep at it at my current pace, it's very possible to have the Alpha ready by late November. But I'm also acutely aware of burnout.

I want to get the Alpha out because I'm very excited to finally share what I've been cooking up, as well as what all the talented people involved have contributed, but I also don't want to phone it in. As I've said numerous times, I want that first impression to be good, but I also don't want to burn myself out getting there.

It's a tricky balance and the past few weeks have involved quite a few 3AM nights and a lot of coffee. I have been taking breaks, but rarely a whole day. Fridays are usually my hangout days, but that's generally only Friday night, and I do sometimes take more time off on Sundays when I'm not writing Dev Logs.

As always, there's other stuff I could talk about, but this Dev Log is already getting pretty long, so for now I'm gonna get back to those cutscenes.

See you all next time!

Hello everyone! A nice and by-the-numbers Dev Log today. I'm happy to say that progress has been going pretty steadily and the past couple of weeks have had three major focuses: Saving, Curses and Bosses. I'll be keeping some things vague because there are a few surprises I want to leave for later, but there's still plenty to talk about.

The first big task I needed to tackle was saving. As I mentioned last time, we have loadouts as well as an out-of-arena currency set up, but no actual save systems. Unlike Sin Spire, I wanted saves for Lust & Lead to be automatic considering how the game is structured. There aren't any plans for missable content or choice-based outcomes, so autosaves being the main way of saving makes sense, at least to me. The game saves after important events like changing your loadout, completing arenas or receiving new items.

I haven't yet decided if I want separate profiles. Since levels can be revisited individually, including linear ones like the tutorial, they don't feel especially necessary, though things like Saloon conversations might be worth considering.

Last time I mentioned a system tied to one of the side characters. That character, who shall remain unnamed for now, is our Saloon merchant. Rebby works as the in-arena merchant, while a mysterious and weird girl hangs out at the Saloon selling buffs and curses (more on her in a future post).

Curses are intended to give players who are struggling another option. Even if you die during an arena, you'll still earn some of that out-of-arena currency, and curses are fairly cheap. They work as a simple buff + debuff, so you might get a strong bonus with the downside of, for example, having part of your health taken away.

You can only have one curse at a time and might get a bad roll, but you can always back out without buying anything. If you end up not liking your current curse set, then you'll have to buy a new one. Buffs work similarly but come with no downside. They're just weaker and slightly more expensive.

I promise this won't happen in the actual game, but during testing I've managed to get something like "+10% health" paired with "-50% health". So, yeah, it needs work.

And now we're at the big time consumer. Regular enemies are comparatively straightforward for me: visuals, a basic animation set and fairly simple AI. Bosses are a different story. They typically require a lot more animation work due to their (slightly) larger variety of attacks and so on.

In terms of design, the biggest difference from Sin Spire is that, outside of a few story encounters, bosses no longer have dedicated boss arenas. Here, you have the entire wave arena map to run around in, so repositioning, breaking LoS and navigating a much larger space all need to be considered.

Meet the Vampire Queen. She's the game's first boss and one of several "Queens" you can encounter. She's probably the most human-looking one I have planned, but that doesn't mean I let her look entirely pretty. Her look is actually inspired by a certain cult TV show.

I started with a pretty clear idea of the Vampire Queen's moveset, but over time I ended up chipping away at it, removing bits and pieces. Partly because I didn't want to do some of it, and partly because I realized there was a flaw in how I was approaching bosses.

In Sin Spire, dying to a boss wasn't a huge setback because you could retry the fight fairly quickly. In Lust & Lead, however, the fight comes after maybe 20-30 minutes of gameplay. If you die there, good luck, you now have to repeat all of that.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to compensate by making bosses easy, but it definitely changes my approach. I figure the bosses should feel like a duel, rather than an insane challenge, to cap off the match, so I want to avoid an enormous difficulty spike after a long run. Even if a player is under-equipped, they should still have a good fighting chance.

At the moment, though, the Vampire Queen is still pretty relentless, so I'm tuning her and considering some additional ways to punish her. There are plenty of other things to discuss with her and bosses in general, such as presentation, but I want to leave some of that as a surprise.

What's Next?

I've still got more work to do on the Vampire Queen, including her defeat state and animations. Right now she just kind of dies like a regular enemy, but the plan is to give her a unique set of purification animations. That said, I might save those for when I do a broader pass at sex animations across the board.

After she's done, the remaining Alpha work is mostly content: three story NPC models, one or two more enemy models, more weapons, story cutscenes, miscellaneous dialogue and additional purification animations. All that and, of course, polish.

On the subject of purification, there's one thing I've been trying to work out. At the moment, when an animation finishes, the enemy falls to the floor and a pool of "white liquid" appears underneath them before they disappear. It's funny and ridiculous, but the way it's currently handled means the animation needs to fully resolve before the player is free again.

In Sin Spire, enemies disappeared during the purification itself. I've considered doing something similar here and having the climax make them disappear more quickly so the player can get back to the action. The current animations don't interrupt the flow too badly, but they could probably end faster.

A flashier disappearance might also look better during hectic waves, though it would mean losing some of the aftermath. I'm not sure yet. If people have a preference, let me know. If it's hard to picture what I mean, I might put together a poll with some video examples when the time comes.

And with that, I'm going to close off this Dev Log before it gets too long. Thanks for reading and I'll see you all next time!

Hello everyone! Light on images again today, but a lot of work has gotten done the past couple of weeks. After finally getting casting sorted and managing to recast the roles that opened back up, I’ve been able to separate myself from that whole process and focus almost entirely on gameplay and the first real map: The Graveyard.

I’ve been very happy with the progress over the last two weeks and feel like I’ve managed to finally get back on track. There’s actually quite a lot to cover this time, so I can’t guarantee everything I’ve worked on will make it into the Dev Log, but I’ll do my best.

Voice acting for the game’s Alpha is now mostly complete. All of the cutscene work has been recorded and around 30% of the initial enemy roster has also been voiced. Two enemies have an actress who is currently busy but should hopefully get to them soon, while the rest haven’t been sent lines yet.

Rebby’s voice acting is essentially finished outside of miscellaneous conversations and any NSFW content, which none of the non-monster cast have been given yet. Both Rebby and Richard’s voices have also provided a lot of gameplay dialogue that has been great fun to work with. I won’t showcase any of that here, but I’ve been very happy with what the cast have done so far. The performances have been great and the voices fit the characters really nicely.

One of the bigger systems I worked on over the last couple of weeks was a gameplay dialogue system for Richard and Rebby. The main goals were to avoid characters talking over one another and give me a much easier way of triggering dialogue and displaying subtitles. Sin Spire’s approach to this was fairly convoluted, whereas this one is much more dynamic, handles priorities and uses tags. This means I don’t have to rigidly define every possible thing a character can react to without room for expansion.

To test it, I spent quite a bit of time with Rebby and made her react to a bunch of things the player can do. If you recall, Savina in Sin Spire would react to you attacking her or climbing on objects. Rebby, by comparison, will now react to you attacking her, aiming at her, staring at her, staring at her breasts, standing on her head and various other things. She’ll also greet you when you approach and congratulate you after completing an arena.

It’s been really cool seeing her come to life, especially with her VA doing such a good job. It makes me want to keep adding more interactions, but there are already hundreds of lines in the game and I probably shouldn’t go completely insane with it just yet.

Richard can also talk, though I am going to implement a toggle for his gameplay barks. Most of the time you’ll just hear vocalizations when he jumps, takes damage or climbs, but he does have some proper gameplay lines as well. Right now, every now and then, he’ll voice his frustration while reloading. With the music blaring, guns firing and enemies making noise, those lines tend to blend naturally into everything else rather than constantly demand your attention. I’ll experiment more with his side of the system later, but for now I’ve moved onto other things.

I’ve mentioned a few times that the loadout is going to be important to the game’s progression. You’ll unlock Artifacts throughout the game and be able to equip them before heading into an arena. The loadout is tied directly into the travel system, so when you speak to the character responsible for taking you between locations, you’ll be able to choose your destination and manage what you’re bringing with you.

That includes your starting weapon, which is actually a fairly recent addition. I came up with it while designing the game’s out-of-arena currency because I wanted players to have more meaningful things to spend it on. Being able to purchase weapons and choosing one to start with made sense to me.

Another idea I’d had floating around for a while was Special Artifacts, and those are now in and working too. Unlike regular Artifacts which give you passive bounses, these give you an active ability that can be charged during an arena. I haven’t fully decided how the charging will work yet. I’m currently leaning toward either a simple time-based recharge or tying it into purification. The first Special Artifact I’m testing with lets you trigger bullet time and slow everything down for a while with a sepia overlay. It’s pretty cool.

At this point, almost all of the gameplay systems needed for the Alpha are ready. There are still a handful left, but most of those are now tied directly to actual content rather than pure gameplay systems.

One of the big ones is boss battles. Waves can already progress into a boss stage, but right now that stage simply ends after a timer because there isn’t actually a boss there yet. Getting that working properly means designing the boss, making the model and animations, and writing dialogue, so that’ll be a decent chunk of work.

There’s another remaining system tied to one of the side characters, but after that I should mostly be moving into pure content production: more enemies, more weapons, more animations, characters and everything else needed to fill out the Alpha.

I’m skipping over quite a lot from the last two weeks because this Dev Log would become enormous if I gave everything its own section. I haven’t even properly talked about The Graveyard despite it being one of the main things I’ve been working on, so I’ll probably save some of that for next time.

I also want to narrow the Alpha timeframe slightly. Previously I was aiming for October or November, but at this point I’m just going to say November. There’s still quite a lot to do and, while it would have been nice to have something ready for spooky season, I’d rather spend the time making sure everything is actually working and reasonably polished before putting it in people’s hands.

Anyway, that’s all for today. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next time!

Hello everyone! Yep, it’s time for one of these. No pictures today, unfortunately. Plans fell through a bit and I was met with a few setbacks, so there isn’t much to discuss regarding the game itself. No new enemies, characters, gameplay systems or maps have really been worked on since the last Dev Log.

Not to say nothing has been done at all, but most of the last two weeks have been filled with correspondence, writing and chasing people up. I also had a small internet outage and some unfortunate crashes resulting in lost work... Anyway.

So, I mentioned last time that I was hopefully on the penultimate draft of the game’s story script. Well, I can thankfully say that it’s now completely finished! There’s still plenty to write in terms of miscellaneous dialogue, side characters and other optional material, but the main story itself is done and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

I also wrote up recording documents for the game’s initial set of monsters, outlining their sounds, dialogue and purification vocalizations. Alongside that, I finished full gameplay dialogue documents for both Richard and Rebby. I wanted to get all of this prepared because it would be some of the first material recorded once casting was sorted.

I want the game’s Alpha to basically double up as a sort of demo that introduces the game and its characters. The intention is to have the tutorial and intro cutscenes alongside one playable map, so the voice acting for those sections is going to be quite important.

And this is where things get messy. The casting call closed at the beginning of the month with over 1700 audition submissions. Thankfully, I’d been keeping notes and paying attention to auditions throughout the process. In hindsight, constantly checking submissions was probably a distraction in itself, but I also wanted to get voices and monster sounds into the game fairly quickly so I could better judge how everything actually feels.

The next step was contacting people. I didn’t specifically seek out NSFW voice actors, so before properly shortlisting anyone I wanted to make sure they understood what kind of project Lust & Lead is and were comfortable being associated with it.

Thankfully, people can read, and most already knew what they had auditioned for. Some did decline once I asked, so it was still worth asking.

Now, I’m not great at messaging people or writing anything for someone else to read. It’s part of the reason these Dev Logs take so long. So writing messages covering what the role involved, payment, availability and everything else across a cast this large took quite a while. But eventually, after all that, I finally got the game completely cast... Or at least I had.

After casting everyone, I started sending scripts and payments to people who had material in the intro section of the game. Most recordings are still trickling in, but about a week after receiving their scripts and payment and agreeing to the terms, one cast member came back wanting to introduce a new condition before continuing.

I politely declined because this was something being introduced after everything had already been discussed and agreed upon, with payment already sent. They subsequently pulled out of the project. Unfortunately, that person was also voicing four characters.

Yeah, I’m a bit bitter about this, not gonna lie. I felt pretty blindsided considering how far along everything already was, especially as they’d previously been enthusiastic about the project and had even expressed interest in taking on more work. They’ve promised to refund me, but honestly, I care considerably less about the money than I do about the wasted time and the fact that I now need to cast four characters... again.

I’ve dealt with people disappearing or becoming unavailable before, so I know these things can happen. This one was just particularly frustrating because I thought everything had already been settled. Everyone else has been cool so far, though, and hopefully it stays that way.

On the considerably sunnier side, the game does officially have a composer. I mentioned this briefly last time, but I wanted to give it a bit more attention here.

I had a lot of great composers submit their work, but the person I ultimately chose was someone whose test tracks and previous work kept sticking out in my mind. He’s relatively inexperienced with this kind of project, but based on what he’s worked on so far, I think he’s a really good fit for Lust & Lead’s style.

I’m being vague about names because I haven’t confirmed whether he wants to use his real name, an existing username or a separate pseudonym. Either way, it’s nice having another collaborator on the project and I look forward to when you guys get to hear his work.

I’m not going to go too heavily into what comes next because timeframes, especially when it comes to things like casting, aren’t so straightforward. The immediate priority is sorting out the four reopened roles and getting the remaining recordings underway.

Once the main character dialogue starts coming in, I can move onto planning cutscenes and putting more work into the actual game again.

Hopefully by the next Dev Log I’ll have addressed the casting issue and will be back to working on the project itself rather than spending another two weeks talking to people.

Anyway, that’s all for today. See you guys next time.

Hello everyone! First off, sorry for delaying last week’s Dev Log. The previous couple of weeks were quite chaotic and filled with distractions outside of the game's development. As I was quite exhausted by the time I needed to write up the last post, I decided to give myself another week.

Thankfully, that also means I have a bit more to talk about now. There still isn’t a huge amount of finished character art to show, but that’s mostly because a lot of my attention this month has gone towards writing, casting and getting some of the game’s more foundational content into place.

One thing I realized I needed was a male basemesh. Most of the characters in Lust & Lead are female, but there are still enough male characters that I realized having a rigged, reusable base would make things a lot quicker to set up. Nothing too exciting but it'll definitely help down the line.

I’ve also done some work on a new enemy. I actually started work on her a few weeks ago but due to the aforementioned distractions, I ended up shelving the model for a while. I wanted to get her finished this week and have her be the poster-girl for today's post but my focus ended up elsewhere.

Riding in Style

In the story, there is a third main character who drives Richard and Rebby between locations. I wrote those scenes without having much of a visual in mind, but eventually I had to decide what vehicle was used.

Vehicle modelling is completely outside of my comfort zone, but after digging through references I settled on a fancy, ill-fitting car for the wild (dead) west and spent a few days putting it together with a basic interior and working doors. Considering I very rarely model vehicles, I’m pretty happy with it.

For the paint I went with the same matcap approach I used in Sin Spire for certain materials. It’s a pretty old-school way of faking shiny surfaces but fits the game’s visual style considerably better than going with more conventional PBR materials.

The car is also one of the first fairly obvious hints, beyond Richard’s fifty-year stint as a corpse, that Lust & Lead doesn’t actually take place in the 1800s. I still don’t intend to outright state the year, but there will be little clues dotted around here and there.

I’ve also been mapping out the area immediately outside the Saloon. Bellemort itself won’t be an open town, but I want the small amount you can explore to tell you something about the place.

The Saloon is surrounded by boarded-up buildings and sits between two guarded gates. On one side, the town seems a bit more lively with chatter and the lights of vehicles and on the other things start looking a lot more desolate. Those guards also gave me an excuse to write more miscellaneous dialogue. 

Tutorial

The tutorial/intro is where most of my focus has gone when it comes to the gameplay side of things. As the tutorial is not part of the wave-based combat, it's designed a lot more like a linear game level rather than a small arena. In terms of the layout and general progression, I'd say the tutorial is pretty close to being done.

At the moment there aren't any tutorial popups or notifications, and a couple of gameplay systems used in the tutorial aren't finished either. That said, I’m trying to rely less on written tutorials and more on level design when teaching the player new mechanics. 

There will still likely be some tutorializing but ultimately, I want to avoid having loads of notes to read just to figure out what to do. Overall, though, I'd say the tutorial is in a fairly good state, it's just missing the cinematics that help weave certain parts of it together. On that note...

The main script is on what will hopefully be its penultimate draft. There have been some fairly substantial rewrites, particularly towards the ending. At this point, most of what remains is polishing dialogue and making sure individual scenes read well.

The casting call also closes on the 31st. I already have favorites for most of the roles, so once submissions are finished I’ll start making the final decisions and preparing recording scripts. That doesn’t necessarily mean the cast is forever locked in, though. I want Lust & Lead to be relatively easy to add content to, and part of that means leaving myself room to come up with new characters and ideas later rather than rigidly deciding that everything has to exist on day one.

I’ve also officially selected a composer for the game. We’ve been discussing the soundtrack and while there are still plenty of decisions to be made regarding exactly how music will be used, I’m very happy to have someone else properly collaborating on that side of the project.

Once the cast is finalized and the script is ready, I want to get roughly the first twenty pages recorded. That covers most of what I need for the initial Alpha slice, after which I can start properly animating the relevant cutscenes and getting everything into the game.

I’m also fully aware that I’ve spent a lot of this month focusing on characters and story rather than enemies, weapons and gameplay. I think I got a little over-excited after I started the casting call and focused on trying to get as much written content done as possible in preparation for tomorrow.

So, once the casting side of things is settled, I’m going to shift my attention back towards gameplay and finishing the initial enemy roster.

The October/November Alpha window I mentioned previously is still my target. There’s plenty left to do, but hopefully the next few weeks will involve considerably less writing and considerably more developing.

Anyway, that’s all for today. I’ll see you all next time!

Hello everyone! You’ll probably notice that this post is looking quite sparse in regards to images showing off the latest developments. The last couple of weeks have been a bit… unconventional, at least for me.

Shortly after the last Dev Log, I started working on audition documents for the game’s voice cast. Preparing everything was a somewhat time-consuming process as I had to write character descriptions that weren’t too spoiler-y, select appropriate lines or write some specifically for the auditions and work on a few character sculpts to provide visuals for certain roles.

Once the documents were done, I submitted the casting call in a few different places and figured my job was mostly done until the deadline at the end of the month. Curiosity is a powerful thing, though, and before I knew it I had over 800 audition submissions to go through, across platforms.

Rather than leave all of that until the deadline, I decided to start reviewing them early. Since then, I’ve spent a good portion of my time sorting, categorizing and scoring auditions, as well as going back through some of the stronger submissions multiple times.

I’ve also been following up with prospective actors and have had discussions with some I’ve previously worked with. Nobody has officially been cast yet, but I’ve started shortlisting some of the roles and there are already quite a few people I’m interested in working with.

For some of the stronger auditions, I’ve also been animating the dialogue to the characters to get a better idea of how well the voices actually fit. It’s admittedly a fairly time-consuming thing to do for an audition, but there’s a noticeable difference between simply listening to a voice and actually seeing it paired with the character.

At the same time, I’ve also been looking for a composer, so there’s been quite a lot of listening lately. It’s all been very exciting, but strangely exhausting as well. There have been entire days where most of my time has disappeared into auditions, messages and following up with people.

Of course, if I’m planning to start sending scripts out once casting is finished, that means I need scripts. For that reason, the first draft of the main script I mentioned in the previous Dev Log has now become a second draft, and I’ve also been writing more gameplay dialogue and optional conversations.

I've had a lot of fun writing the main cast and figuring out how they interact with each other Lust & Lead’s world is generally a lot more alive than Sin Spire’s, and there are quite a few side characters who exist just to add some personality or provide more information about the world. I’ll probably talk more about them in the future.

All of this has made it increasingly apparent that Lust & Lead probably isn’t quite as simple of a project as I initially imagined. The actual gameplay is more straightforward than Sin Spire, but in terms of characters, dialogue and cinematics, the game is gradually becoming comparable in complexity.

I have still managed to work on the game itself in-between all of this. The dialogue system is now back in after being rewritten and cleaned up from the version used in Sin Spire, and I’ve worked on another set of sex animations alongside several character models and enemies.

Unfortunately, most of those characters currently exist as sculpts and I’m not really in the habit of showing off extremely unfinished work. There has technically been quite a bit of art done over the past couple of weeks, but most of it is stuck in that awkward phase where it isn’t that interesting to look at yet.

With the gameplay itself not actively being my priority at the moment, I imagine some of you are wondering about the playable Alpha build that I’ve mentioned a couple of times. For those unaware, Sin Spire had a playable Alpha that lasted until the game was essentially complete.

There will be an Alpha build for Lust & Lead, but I want it to have all of the foundational systems in place as well as enough of the story to properly establish the premise. Story and dialogue might not seem especially important for an initial Alpha, but this will be everyone’s first real impression of the game and I want that impression to be as strong as possible.

So, when will it be available? Well, there’s still quite a bit to do. I need to finish off the initial enemy roster, add more weapons and animations, get enough of the script recorded, finish the tutorial and actually make a proper level.

Taking all of that into account, we’re probably still looking at a few months of work. I’d like to aim for either the end of October or sometime in November, although that isn’t a hard deadline.

Until then, I’ll keep you guys in the loop the way I usually do through these Dev Logs. Hopefully by the next one I’ll have a bit more to actually put on the page.

Anyway, that’s enough for today. I’ll see you all next time!