Hey everyone!

It's been a while! Let's get down to it, where is the end of the Lilith Device?

Firstly, it's still on its way. Development's slow because well, life gets in the way sometimes. You run into a difficult to resolve issue, get distracted with life, come back and just find you don't have the energy to work on that issue. I won't make excuses beyond that. 

So yeah, the last chapter of TLD is still in progress. I know that's hard to trust since there's been so little posted so here's some more info to tide you over. I'll go over the basic structure of the final chapter and point out some major moments or mechanics. I'll also give you a progress report to set expectations. 

If you just want a teaser and progress report without getting spoiled you can check out my Trello which is where I track what I'm working on.

Part 1: Conquest

The player decides to get off her ass and conquer Guidance City completely, meanwhile Holo tries to track down the rival mind controller that's been pulling the strings in town. 

This part was designed first and redesigned four times. I wanted to do an interesting war mechanic here where the Device was under constant attack while the player is trying to allocate resources to tackle a series of locations each with their own defensive quirks. It was complicated, rarely fun, and often just broke RAGS. Each iteration I made it simpler and still never found the fun. Ultimately the mechanic was scrapped and now capturing the city is a series of four puzzles, one for each location (The Campus, The Science Center, The Police Station, and The Escort Service) They'll have some bad ends of their own, mostly recycled from the scrapped war mechanic. 

Of particular note are the Escort Service and Science Center. The science center part is basically the culmination of any weird hobbies the player character had. Did you make all your slaves Mitsuko Girls? There's an ending for you. Right now I have three special endings here done, one for if you made most of your slaves into Mitsuko Girls, one for if you made most your slaves into clones of yourself, and one if you got all of the robot parts and made good robot decisions. They're all a sort of distant future "here's how you fucked the world" sort of thing. I hope to add more but it's low on the priority list until I get the rest of the game done. 

The Escort Service is one of the old war mechanic minigames I got way too ambitious on. Basically the bad ending is the owner of the Guidance City Escort Service takes you and controls the Device. You play as a happily converted escort slave and have a minigame where you change your memories to suit your client's needs. Gameplay's 80% done and it has four endings depending on your performance, 3 of which are fully done. 

Anyway after the player finishes the conquest Holo will find the rival mind controller's headquarters and head on in for a showdown.

Part 2: <Spoiler>

There's a puzzle and some scenes here. I won't spoil this part. It's 100% finished. 

Part 3: Digitized

This was something in the works a very long time ago, the extremely talented Dollmistress was so kind to collaborate and make these images for me. All of the images for this chapter were made by her and she did such a wonderful job. (I'm sorry it's taking so long DM, I can't wait for this part to come out.)

The player gets digitized, her mind trapped inside the computer run by your rival's very own (Evil) Holo. There's a puzzle here I'm really proud of as you try and get your body back. This entire section is 100% done, finished tested debugged.

Part 4: Rescue

Meanwhile the player missing, Holo sends the one person cut out to rescue her. Well one of three people. This section has you play as either Clara, Elaine, or Nadine to rescue the player. The rescuer depends on a couple of factors and a little secret relationship mechanic I threw in there. 

This section took forever because I was dumbly dedicated to making sure all three routes were pretty different. Each rescuer goes to the same location and then has to circumvent a series of obstacles. But each rescuer solves the obstacle differently. Which means they each have a different puzzle. This part was a nightmare to design and took forever. It's just about done and ready for testing but its had so many puzzles added to it and removed that I'm sure it's going to be buggy as hell. I think there's like six or seven bad endings in this section? Some are unique to the rescuer some are shared completely and some are shared with fun differences.

Part 5: The Empusa Device

After some stuff happened the Empusa Device has you. And as is your wont you barely manage to evade complete obliteration into a slave.  For this part, you are a slave on the Empusa Device and must formulate a plan to escape while also racing against the clock on your dwindling willpower. This is similar to the Mitsuko session but taken up to 11. 

Each day you must complete three tasks (broken up into a social job, security job, or research job like your own slaves). When you start you only have access to 1 task of each category. But some of these jobs are risky or dangerous so you want to find a way to get more options. 

And then each night you gain a new permission in the device at the cost of something precious from your mind. There's a bunch of options for each. You might trade away your name to gain a new security duty. You might give up the ability to speak so that you can open the doors to the Device's inner workings. 

And during all of that, you're trying to find a way out of the Device. And even if you find a way out can you find a way to get all of your slaves too? What about Elaine or Clara? Or can you find a way to take the Empusa Device down for good. 

As an example to give you an idea of how it all works, when you first begin your only available job for the scientists is converting newly captured women into latex drones. But you notice Clara and Nadine in the lineup of women to be converted, can you find a new research job soon so you aren't forced to convert one of your friends? But meanwhile the security chief doesn't like how you've been performing on that job and each night you risk her losing her patience and erasing your mind. You can only get one new permission each night and you always have to lose something in return. What if you forget what your friends look like, then you won't know which ones they are in the lineup. What if you make your mind too weak and the Security Chief decides you're no longer fit for duty? 

Alternatively, what if you decide you like it better as a slave? How about instead of going through all that trouble and adventure game bullshit you instead focused on being the best slave you can be. Maybe you happily convert your former friends. Instead of asking for useful permissions that may help you escape, you request the ability to be Mistress's personal footstool? If that sounds like your jam then great because there's a big playable ending for that where you become Mistress's personal slave and do your utmost to serve her through a handful of events and scenarios.

The Empusa Device part is just about done, right now you could play through it all to a couple of endings. There are some choices I don't feel are quite as exciting as others so I'm auditing all the choices to make sure they're cool or sexy or give you something useful. This part's going to be a pain to test and when it comes time for that I'll probably reach out to some external testers. 

Then there's a few ways things can go, a final boss depending on your actions then you get to the endings. 

For the endings there's some cutscenes, results of your choices. Right now there aren't a huge number of ending permutations, there's what I call the "good" ending, an average ending, and a bad ending. Then there's a special Elaine ending and the GOLDEN ENDING. Of course the golden ending has a lot of requirements. I kind of want to add more. About half the endings are done. Elaine and Golden aren't finished yet and they're the big ones. For the record I consider the good ending the canon one. 

Wrapping Up

Well I hope that was enough to tide you over. Something major that lit a fire under my ass was the discovery that the RAGS website is kaput.  Which means if I need to replace my computer I would need to get a new RAGS license key, which would be impossible. Don't worry, if that happened I'd just post the game online unfinished. But something I'm definitely aware of. 

As for what's next after the Lilith Device I want to make another game. It obviously won't be in RAGS, in fact TLD is probably the last RAGS game. But I've been learning engines and I'm running through ideas. 

Anyway, feel free to ask questions in the comments or find me on twitter.