(NOTE: These devlogs usually lag behind our official updates. The latest up-to-date information about the game can be found on our team's Patreon page!)

Hi everyone, and welcome to another ToLLA development blog! :)

For today's entry, we wanted to talk about the game's playable zones - mainly their interior/exterior area art, and future World Map functionality... We often get e-mails from our players, asking how the game will behave past the intro content, and whether it'll be possible to enter/exit buildings like in a traditional RPG (and how we plan to handle overworld movement).

So to start answering those questions, here's a picture...

(you can right-click and open in new tab for a closer view!)

The above image is a concept of a sample room our artist painted for an in-game dungeon. This was done a while ago, while we were still in the pre-production phase of development. We wanted ToLLA to have unique, hand-painted rooms for every interior the Player could access. The one above was actually from a steampunk-themed dungeon you'd visit after leaving Fort Ninevus!

We think it came out pretty good, but the main issue is how long it takes to visually design, sketch, line-art, and finally paint one of these. The original idea was to connect multiple such rooms via corridors into entire complexes your party could explore, each with its own theme and art. However, after doing some simple math, we realized it was going to be impossible to pull off in any normal time frame without having an army of artists on the team. Especially since many locations you'll visit hold not only dungeons and ruins, but also buildings with their own interiors (houses, taverns, churches, basements, etc.).

So instead of having to spend months painting literally dozens of interior cells (which would drastically impact the quantity of erotic art), or cutting the content altogether, we made a temporary decision to move the events, characters, and containers onto exterior maps, and have everything become accessible via specialized interaction icons. This layer of abstraction allows us to retain the core functionality we originally wanted, while at the same time drastically reducing development time. The exteriors themselves are likewise massive 2D hand-painted images, and will serve as backdrops for your interactions with the game's content!

You can see the final result below, from these two in-game screenshots...

Once a couple of these outdoor areas have been completed, we'll link them all together via travel triggers, and allow your party to exit to the World Map where you'll be able to roam from one location to the next in the spirit of old-school RPGs... This World Map will have its own set of events, challenges, combat encounters, and free-roam functionality that will let you explore the content at your leisure. To give you an idea of what this'll all look like once finished, and exactly what kind of approach we're gunning for, below are a couple of pics from the excellent game Battle Chasers: Night War...

Battle Chasers is an amazing game (definitely check it out if you haven't played it!), and it served as the main inspiration for how we'll be handling your party's movement and interaction across ToLLA's own World Map... And those of you old enough might remember the Heroes of Might and Magic series, which had a similar approach to hand-painted exterior maps! It's a great way of solving the aforementioned problem, because it merges beautiful 2D art with a casual playstyle, while still allowing us to produce assets at a reasonable pace (and do so without cutting into the amount of lewds per quest hub).

As mentioned above, every single exterior location in ToLLA will get its own unique 2D area art, and will be linked by a stylized World Map (which will come with its own events and encounters). The best thing about this approach is how modular it is, and how easily we can plug new content into an existing build! And once we expand the core dev team, we'll start adding interior cells as well (like that huge steampunk dungeon showcased up top). We haven't given up on the idea of interior dungeons, but it's currently on the back-burner until we deliver on some of the more primary content (storyline, lewds, quests, and characters).

So there you have it, hopefully that makes things a bit clearer about our plans for zoned content. We hope you had fun reading, and enjoyed this peek behind the dev curtain!

If you did, then join us again next time for more! ;)

'Till then...

~ Crimson Delight Games

P.S.

If you'd like to help support our work on the game, consider purchasing our Lewds Library & Bonus Art Pack during checkout. This is an additional purchase you can pick up when getting the game, and holds much of the concept art for ToLLA, with holiday wallpapers in their full resolution, a bunch of pre-production sketches, and over 150 gorgeous hand-painted 2D lewds!

We're also selling an NPC portraits pack that you can pick up for your own game-making needs if you're a developer!