[Unity]Price For Freedom: Avarice

[Valaska]

Long time since my last post but its good to stop lurking! Howdy LOK forums and happy new years!

Avarice is set in the world of the webcomic Price For Freedom by ArbuzBudesh. Set in the same region Avarice will share locations but primarily will be set in the neighbouring Kaldea several decades in the past. But this will be a great place to learn quite a bit more on the lore of comic! A top down RPG inspired by classic games such as Baldurs Gate, we will have quite a lot in the way of writing, quests, choices, and a deep overacting narrative which will kick off in the second chapter.


The game will feature three planned companions that you will be able to build relationships with and instead of fading to black like in DA/ME/BD and others we will get... Lewd. Current planned companions are;

1. Samara: An energetic, plucky island Elf with a past marked with scraping by and eking out a living with hear spear. She's in a tight spot and could use an accomplice, and a friend.
2. Hiho: A travelling Naga priestess devoted to the Lizard Folk religion of Halmech. Timid, a tad shy hides an exceptionally brilliant and indomitable will. She lacks the initiative and decisiveness which you can bring for her.
3. Osh'To: A massive scarred Ogre woman with a calm and relaxed demeanor. She is light hearted, kind in nature. Once an experienced and hardened mercenary, she looks to you for adventure and distraction from her past.

If multiple romantic dalliances with these ladies doesn't seem enough fear not! A myriad of dalliances and trysts, one night stands, with Humans, Elves, Ogrish, Lizard Folk, and possibly depending on interest BeastFolk in the future! Some of these will be quest bound or simply based on a long standing built relationship with the character. Others can be bought with the simple flip of the coin.

Current Public Release: PD1.
If you consider this project promising, consider supporting us on our Patreon.
If you would like to join the discussion and give feedback feel free to drop by ourDiscord!

Thank you for taking the time to read out announcement! Or thank you for ignoring all my babbling and going straight for the link, either way we here ad TDD wish you a happy new year!

Some particulars just for you LOK folks!

The game is being built in Unity with a Mac version, which at the moment is a little broken due to the fact we had no testers to test run it. We'll love to hear some feedback and such on our discord if you guys are around. Currently the dialogue formatting is not fully finished so you are going to be seeing some text that isn't meant to pop up and we experimented with a couple deliveries. I'll be watching this thread and we are at our discord server so if you have any critique or such please do throw it my, or our wat!

The typo's in their entirety have been sorted out for the world dialogue. Samara is going to be undergoing a full rewrite to make her have less multiple personalities compared to the world dialogue and the lewd scene dialogue haha. I am currently on second draft for the bulk of the text and we are working on the next companions as we speak! I've written up quite a bit of Hiho our snake ladies parts . We will be looking at adding in more patreon levels and rewards once we get a little spare time here.

You guys are some of the best lewd game makers and have extremely creative and interesting idea's so I am looking forward to hearing from you guys. Glad to be back! Oh also we pushed this tech demo out in a few weeks. The combat is just placeholder to show what it will more or less be like and several mechanics are going to be put in. This is all more appropriately a Tech Demo.

[Valaska]

A little on our mechanics for you LOK peeps! Our maps are all fully hand painted which are up to 8,000 x 12,000 pixels! We then rig and put bounding boxes into the game! We hope this gives the game a really interesting quality that's not done anymore since most games have moved onto 3D for their maps. Its a TON of hard work and here is a small bit of the results!

[Valaska]

We've been making quite a bit of progress in this project so far and I'm happy bring it to you guys and gals here.

Patreon Release No.1!

We managed to, on time, bring out patrons their first Patron build and introduce our second companion character and the framework for her first quest! This introduced two new locations to the game, the Old Docks and Slag Den. We managed to work a Step Based Quest Progression blockout system for quests that may have multiple objects, NPC's, or locations to visit in either a set or random order, plenty of new random NPC sprites (not animated yet though). A few things will need to be tweaked and added at a later date but other than art we have all the assets ready.

And with that, I bring you our second companion! Hiho!

Hiho, priestess of Halmech.



By popular vote Hiho won our patron based poll as the next companion to be added. The fourth companion is now in a locked in as a brawling ogre gal. But more on Hiho, she can be found at the steps of the Church of Halmech just by the obelisk. She's lost a very sentimental and dear object and hasn't had much luck in finding it herself, which is where you come in. We're making the framework of the relationship system with Hiho and tracking for choices that will impact and change the way the companions and supporting characters in the world, will react to your decisions in the game.



We are introducing a couple more enemy types and doing pioneer work on the rigging of Naga's tails and movement which will be fairly important as they're fairly popular to the region of Atlathka and the Kaldean gulf. Oh and before I forget a sneak peak. These are fully animated scenes of course, we're not pulling any any Visual Novel stuff here and as planned every lewd scene (even minors) will have a fully animated component to it.



Future Updates/Development Updates

And speaking of minor lewd scenes, Aya won the patron poll for one of two minor characters added to the project.

Aya, Professional monster slayer.



Professional monster slayer, crossbreed, and soon to be an NPC with her own related quest! Though not a companion she will be well fleshed out and an interesting bit of the game. She will be joined by the second minor character in the next patron update, have this sneak peak to the scenes.



And I'd be remiss not to mention a few of the things our programmer and the team in general has been doing to build and improve our development process. As mentioned before we have created a block system which allows us to quickly and rapidly develop quests that have steps of either random, or set order with multiple talking points for each step. This can come in handy in "read the book" kind of quests you may be familiar with other projects where you need to read X amount of books in a library and it doesn't matter which order. But this allows us a bit more flexibility when tackling these quests.

Our programmer (Deck) has also finished creating a bespoke dialogue node editor for us writers to use. Its very front end easy to read and is an exceptionally powerful tool which will allow us writers to quickly implement, flesh out, alter, or edit dialogue and even set up quests. This will also allow us to quickly react to suggestions/critique from our community members. Pop on discord if you'd like to, as we would love to have you guys around!

Node based Dialogue:

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Animated Props

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Last Round of girls voted on (Aya, Margo, Tiss, Ko'Moon)

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

New Locations

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

We look forward to bringing you all more in the future.

[Valaska]

Public Test Build 1: https://www.patreon.com/posts/public-tech-demo-15996183 (No updates just yet! Sorry)
Patron Build 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/17302034 (Aya & Verona)

Patron Build 2

(forgive Paint.net's magic tool, leaves some of the white on for some reason! But ONE of these girl's don't mind)

Monster Slayer and Bar Maiden! What a pair, also Aya is pretty good too.

It's a tinge light of an update, unless what you were looking for was two brand new lewd scenes! Veron's Saucy Cook and Aya's Monster Gambit dialogue & quest are currently available. These two gals were shown above and can be accessed through a quest where you need to wager and kill more monster than the other, or by being sneaky enough to get back into the kitchen after you've made a name for yourself in Kaldea! (Aka, complete a companions quest)

What we have done which was pretty large was prep and begin utilizing our brand new node based dialogue editor I imaged above! It took the girth of our programming resources and should increase the quality of our writing from this point on by quite a bit! Give it a whirl with Aya and Verona and see if we've improved.


Patron Build 3 Roadmap

We have a bunch in store for whats coming in Patron Build 3, we'll be adding in the brothel and you can vote right now which girl will be featured first! Our next lewd scene with be with one of these lovely ladies,

Nailah the exotic nubian jackal girl from deep in the Redlands. Her oratory skill is only matched by her oral skills otherwise, women mastered in the pleasure arts such as her come rarely... and at high cost.
Terri, formerly a farmers daughter who got well sick of the farmlife, though finds herself unfortunately running the bulk of the Brothels errands and such as the new girl. Oh, and tan lines.
Katie, a plucky little scrapper who takes a measure of joy in her work. She's a veteran of the house and has served jovially for quite sometime.

Vote for your favorite!

If you'd like to vote on your favorite you'll need our $5 and up patron, or just shout at me here. It might not do much for this vote of course but we'll take into consideration if we should consider the others as well. Programming wise we have a little work to do so we writers can generate JSON's on our own for the node editor rather than creating a JSON and then adding it too the tree.

Combat will be a big part of our focus for Patron 3, its a lot of work to get it right so hopefully we'll be able to get it in for said update as well but it may delay into Patron 4 to get our combat system to what we want it to be. A big thing with this combat will be getting the UI to be very presentable and polished, and of course make it fun & challenging. Here's an early concept from way back in development, much has changed from it but it gets a feel for some of what we're doing.

Silly and old combat mock-up

The enemy AI are the ones who use the card deck, there's bee A LOT of confusing about haha. They will get a deck at the beginning of combat which we are thinking will flash briefly for about 3-5 seconds so you can see what the first AI hand will be like, this will allow you to see and briefly prepare for the upcoming onslaught by the AI. Several monsters and enemies will have their own unique special attack cards... While bosses will have radically unique cards.

It's an interesting bit to work into an AI for a game but we think it has a lot of potential. In general these are some points we want to touch on in our near future. Note the majority of these probably aren't in the next update of course, and I have generally written in the jist of mechanics we want in priority order.

Node Dialogue 2.0
Combat Mechanics
Combat AI Decks
Inventory System
Fully Animated NPC Sprites
Relationship Tracking
Tarot Reader (Tells you stats etc)
Game Introduction (With CG)

On our "Maybe?" list we have these.

Environment Hazards
Multiple Outfits
Stealth/Sneak options

Not too sure if we want to actually work on these just yet. We've bounced the idea around for these options and even have a little gimmick in to show us if we want to work on a detection/sneak mechanic. These are all very theoretical. Nothing too crazy yet but we'll see where we get with this list. Also expect more music to come!

[Kroash]

Hey Valaska !

I've made an account to tell you that your game look really appealing so far and i'm looking forward to it's dev' !
I would gladly be a patreon later but for now i think that paying 5 dollars for that much content is little bit too much :/ anyway keep up your great work and i'll be glad to become a patreon someday

ps: sorry if i sound rude but i'm not use to speak in english :/

[Valaska]

Hey Valaska !

I've made an account to tell you that your game look really appealing so far and i'm looking forward to it's dev' !
I would gladly be a patreon later but for now i think that paying 5 dollars for that much content is little bit too much :/ anyway keep up your great work and i'll be glad to become a patreon someday

ps: sorry if i sound rude but i'm not use to speak in english :/

Thanks a ton! We understand and more content is definitely on the way, the combat mechanics are something we want done in the next couple updates for certain, and as with every update we are aiming for at least one full animated CG sex scene. We're up to 4 right now and we already have at least one planned for our next update. The brothel will open up a lot of possibilities with potentially an all new pledge tier and special specific reward for it... Still hammering the irons on that.

We look forward to having you apart of the project in the future, every little bit helps us deliver the content people want.

[Kroash]

Just so you know you've got a new patron, i was feeling unfair about what i said earlier, art is amazing, game look amazing you need support and i can provide it so take it glad to be on your side now

[Valaska]

Just so you know you've got a new patron, i was feeling unfair about what i said earlier, art is amazing, game look amazing you need support and i can provide it so take it glad to be on your side now

That's awesome! Thank you a ton . My MotherBoard died so I had to scavenge one of my old builds for an AM3+ socket haha, waiting until the 19th to upgrade to the new Ryzen. I had no idea I had an appropriate motherboard in my closet... Figured it was just AM3 and not AM3+! So I am back in the swing of thing atm.

We're bringing another girl and a bordello location to the scene with abit of writing, it will be lighter on writing due to my parts malfunction, rather it will have less characters this update around to idly chat too. But that'll all change soon due to some programming work Deck has done recently which is going to shoot our productivity waaaay up for dialogue!

[Valaska]

Something very big on our end is coming soon! In the meantime here's a teaser!

[Kroash]

can't wait to see what will happen '-'

[Valaska]

Well wait no further Kroash!

Patron Build 3 has just hit our Patrons with a public update to follow in a week or so!

Header

Narrative/Events:


We are introducing our the first brothel of Avarice, the high class and sophisticated Velvet Oasis! Esther has given the name Velvet Oasis based on the particular "qualities" of the girls she likes to keep in stock, which are almost completely Aeylmen, Aeylvish, or Aeylgre!


"In the hell is an Aeyl, Valaska?" Glad you didn't ask but I pretended you did! An Aeyl is the prefix added to the myriad of mysterious hybrid species in the world of Price For Freedom. The origins of the Aeyl aren't understood by the vast majority of people in this world but there may be a few scraps of knowledge to be found on them in the future. Suffice it to say, the velvet soft featured they tend to have paired with the fact this is a respite in the hustle and bustle of Kaldea aptly name the Velvet Oasis. It will be in a temporary location until the trade district is finished.


The Velvet Oasis will have a NPC's you can speak with but the only two with any depth right now are Esther, the buxom dark madame and propriety of the Velvet Oasis. The other being Katie! Who will have a couple CG's with lewd scenes. She's a girl for hire though so expect to pay!

Yipper

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Features/Mechanics:

Abilities

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This build marks our very first combat pass. This essentially means we are now beginning to build the proper mechanics, balance, and improve the user experience with the UI etc. Sound effects are definitely a part of the user experience that will be coming in the future as well.


We've included:


Initial Balancing

Abilities now work

Card Interactions (Remove, view)

Card Removal (Only AI use Cards btw!)

UI Overhaul

Our most visible is definitely our UI updates so I'll give you a view of our new tooltips window with a beautiful dissolve effect!

Combat UI

Combat UI.gif (6.35 MiB) Viewed 5255 times

This is a massive overhaul in letting our players understand the mechancis and all the hard work that Deck has put into the backend. You will be able to see what attacks do which and for how much and really get a feel for what we are moving this game towards in terms of combat!



Public Edition News


Soon these changes will all be hitting the public edition along with some tweaks and tuning to the text and dialogue. Samara has gone through re-writes to more unify her personality as it was kinda discombobulated before. The Patron Edition will get a hotfix for the dialogue too! This is coming up very soon too, we want to have a better degree of polish on a few things for you guys and I will be posting you all a direct link. It will have essentially everything the Patreon version does but with a few of the sidequest girls not included.


General News:


Our Knight tier is current available! Have your character in the game world with a massively high details 3/4th dialogue post with a few facial expressions and an in world animated sprite! An example of the 3/4th quality is;

That's it for now! I look forward to bring you guys the public edition, sorry its taken awhile but we all at the team want to have a good showing for you guys.

[Kroash]

OK that was way better than i expected, i don't really follow you on Patreon since i prefer the ergonomy of LoK. Anyway this build looks amazing and you can be sure i'll will write a review of it as soon as possible ! Keep it up valaska your work is awesome

[Valaska]

That's just fine, I'll keep you and others posted around here. We're going to have a new public build soon which will have the vast majority of content minus two girls is all.

[Valaska]

Patreon Build 2

We just put out our second public build if you guys and gals are interested in that! We do very much intend to support both sides of the community so there are all but two scenes in this build. Pick it up here;

https://www.patreon.com/posts/public-build-2-18196579

I will be assembling a picture guide for our combat, and you can see some of our easter egg plans upcoming for the game!

I will be assembling a picture guide for our combat, and you can see some of our easter egg plans upcoming for the game! Also, the Public build includes many Quality-Of-Life changes to Samara's writing! She flows far better now and will be much more consistent for those that noticed a disconnect between mine and SomeKindofWizards writing styles, which is partly my bad! I never actually had a chance to read her lewd scene's writing.

[Valaska]

Nailah vs Terri; Winner Winner chicken don't sue me bluehole!

Nailah vs Terri wrapped up! Nailah was the clear winner this time around, she was almost in the last update too but lost out by about three votes. This time we are mixing it up a bit, we in the dev's couldn't honestly decide which of these foreplays were our favourite so right now if you're a patron you get to vote and for the first time affect the scene you'll get to see in the game.

Feets is bouncing.

Thigh job was my favourite due to the transition in the scene that will come up. But can't deny Nailah's freaky feets are interesting!

[Valaska]

Nailah and Dee join the cast.

Our 4th Patreon Build is live! This comes with several content additions and QOL changes.

NPCs & Writing:
Nailah:

Her lewd encounter is added, and serves as an experiment in multiple ending CGs!
Her first pass dialogue has been implemented, there will be a lot more to come with the Jackal girl.

Dee:

Our first Patreon Knight pledge thanks to 'LegoJohn!"

Background NPCs:

• Slave Master Kalid
• Slaver Guard
• Pesh the produce merchant
• Quips from Guards
• Many more to come.

Animated Sprites:

• Hiho's tail is more responsive with accurate shadows
• Dee front&back animated sprite
• Vaehill front&back animated sprite (you can also push her to make her walk)
• Rodwin Tillbert animated sprite
• City Guard front&back animated sprite
• Slave girls
• The main characters now have back facing sprites!

Back End & Features

• WebGL Build
• Interact Key (E to interact with nearest NPC/Object)
• Custom character name
• Difficulty Settings
• Ironman Perma Death

Dialogue Editor

• ALT+E allows you to bring the games dialogue editor up!
• Context Menu
• Portrait Builder
• Cross Dialogue References
• Quest Objectives

This is an extremely powerful tool which may allow people to make their own mods and content for Avarice post-launch. We will be exploring the possibility of more tools and assets.

UI

• New main menu
• Framework for the HUD ((quests, money, inventory, bestiary, abilities) this is extremely WIP)

Our studio has also finalized our public face, allow me to show you all the Team Dead Deer logo! It may not seem like the biggest deal but this really is part of legitimatizing and making our team a formal entity.

New studio logo.

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As always, we'll be bringing much more for you all to see in the future. The next one should have a heaping pile more of dialogue for our NPC's, and another dialogue quality pass on much of our first bits of writing, possibly the entire writing will get a dialogue sweep soon.

[Valaska]

It has been very busy so I am just going to copy paste our general patch notes.

BuildCover

Characters are now traveling the city. Although this is still primitive, more advanced behaviours will be added soon to bring life to the city. We implemented the money, inventory, quests, experience/level/abilities systems. Even if their interfaces is still in a placeholder state. Another notable change is the new cheats options menu, which allow to access some game breaking settings (obviously not recommended).

Changelog:

Hera 2 part quest, portrait, animated sprite and smutting.
New AI system allowing NPC crowd to walk around town and do tasks, chat, buy, move objects, patrol, travel...
New Alchemy shop location in the trade district.
New Order shrine location in the old docks. World map (WiP).
Add Order priest sprite and dialogue.
Add Dee's master dialogue.
Add Lin portrait, animated sprite (front + back), and dialogue.
Animated sprites with modular parts for random NPC (front + back).
Pesh animated sprites. Improve the chatter system, allowing
NPC to talk to each-other, using the dialogue editor.
Add the items and inventory system, take and drop items from containers.
Implement levels and experience system: gain exp, unlock/manage party abilities and slots (temporary UI).
Add cheats to the options menu: Set player money and level, quests states, unlock portrait, smut settings, player location, companions in the party, possess any character.
Implement the money system, taking the game difficulty level into account.
Zoom key shortcuts: +/- and page up/down.
Implement the new quest objectives and hints system in all the quests.
Allow to disable quest hints in the new game window.


Dialogue editor:

New properties: skip, fallback, break, singleChild, never, random response direct reference, or condition.
Properties value auto completion, characters history, max width.
Add money related features: addMoney, isMoney, <$money> Add experience related features:
AddExperience.
Allow to add comments to nodes.
Metadata properties (key/value pairs).
Fix response properties copy/paste, add copy/paste properties shortcuts (Alt+C Alt+V).
Allow to edit the smut scenes settings via the setStage method.

I'll have a more in depth post about some of our cool stuff and videos of new features, formation walking, crowd and desnity, other bitties too! So keep your eyes peeled for that noise.

Logo

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[Valaska]

We are having a vote between two new characters over at our Patreon right now, and at the same time introducing a new race to the universe!

Patreon Vote

Kobolds! Kobolds are their own subgenus of LizardFolk and aren't simply the diminutive "orphaned" lizardfolk. They have a history of being nocturnal pack hunters and have evolved along those lines, which gives a kobold an extraordinarily quick wit and a high degree of situational awareness. The vote is between Isiki or Katrina and you can check it out over at our patreon right now.

Crepuscular and clever, they'll be in our game soon!

[Valaska]

Hello everyone, our team has been hard at work making the next update which we hope you all will be playing soon.

In the meantime, I would like to show you all some of the work we've done!

Our programmer, deck, has been hard at work creating our intelligent lighting and shadows system. This fog of war will be used to occlude far off rooms and area's to create a feeling of tension and allow you to actually explore the map instead of just click to the area that most likely looks like your objective.

The system is dynamic so we can use it for contextual situations for fading consciousness, debilitation, blindfolds, nighttime... not stroking my own ego here but I want to get across how amazing of a job deck does, without you man, this isn't possible. Seriously, I bought the guy Stellaris as a surprise thank you gift but that wasn't enough, the man deserves an entire steam library for the stuff he does.

Anywho I hope you guys and gals enjoyed this little tech example. You all take care out there, there's a lot of forest fires and air quality is poor on the west coast! Keep it in mind when you are doing physical activity, I myself had a minor asthma attack because the smoke suddenly got so thick.

[Valaska]

Today we celebrate two milestones, the 20th anniversary of Baldurs Gate which has gone on to inspire developers and writers for years, and our one year anniversary of development! Here’s to many more years, and tribute those who laid the groundwork for this all to be possible!


We had no idea we shared our beginning development date with one of our biggest inspirations! Here's to another year, and hopefully delivering something that we can be proud of and you all will love. Thank you so much for being a part of this on our journey. We the whole team want to thank you all for sharing this journey with us. Our deepest thanks from;


Arbuz_Budesh

deck

Hurfy

SomeKindOfWizard

Valaska


And a special shout-out and thank you to all those who have helped us along the way with support, a helping hand, funding, or just plain old interest in the project and enjoying what we've done! We could not do this without you all backing us up. Named like August, Aoiichi, Psypup that we've contracted and worked with directly... thank you all so much too. Here's hoping we can create a legacy of our own!