Hello and once again welcome to my ramblings about my little passion project… enjoy the inevitable Great Wall of text I will throw at you!

Preview

As I have already mentioned in the latest devlog, this here is going to be a "main-quest" update. Therefore, I didn't even try to give equal attention to all LIs, but rather just followed the needs of the main story.

Of course, this means that Zoela as the commanding officer and historic main story magnet has an increased share. Second, since this update will also be quite combat-focused, Lin and Pirlia will be more dominant. Additionally, Sabrina has a larger arc with a longer flashback sequence, which gives her the largest share in this update.

Also, this arc is effectively already done and is contained inside the latest beta version, which I already finished: https://www.patreon.com/posts/119407107

Furthermore, I also threatened in the last devlog, that there will only be a single scene next update. Well, I squeezed in an event with Rachel making her second in lines after Sabrina.

In the end, this means, that Ladira, Sarlé, Saefia, and Annica will take a back seat in the next update…

Maybe you have noticed, that all the LIs have only about 1000 lines combined, which is rather low for my standards. In this update, I have not only shifted focus from side stories to the main quest but also shifted focus from the main LIs to side characters. Therefore it is necessary this time to talk a little bit about side characters:

Here you can clearly see, that the focus of the next update will rest on Sara (measured across all 4 possible incarnations), who easily eclipses the main line LIs. Also Judy in second place outweighs even Sabrina and Rachel.

At the moment, about 60% of the whole update is done, including of course the first beta. Although I made great progress during the holidays, I won’t have much time to work on the game during the next two months and therefore I can’t really give you a real prediction…

It could be anything between February and April… Sorry for the frustratingly vague time frame… I’m sure I will be able to be more concrete as betas roll out…

Ass

Thank you all for participating in this very serious analysis:

First of all, I’m sure nobody is surprised, that Sabrina took the cake in this one – she simply has the highest ass-to-body ratio among the LIs. But on the other hand, seeing Saefia with the smallest butt in second place shows a funny duality of men…

I’m also a little bit surprised, that Annica made last place – I expected an Illab there... I’m assuming, that the result of the poll is a combination of the (objective) quality of ass and the voter’s general affection for the girls. Therefore Annica as the late joiner is at a disadvantage… at least, that’s the one explanation, that immediately pops into my head…

But in the end, there’s not much information I can draw from this poll… It was rather obvious, that Sabrina would win and I already planned her to be into butt-stuff… this was just a fun little survey and the next one will be more important…

Animations

I’m not sure how obvious it is, but basically since V0.4 my animation style hasn’t improved. Basically, my animations consist just of a back-and-forth of two poses with no variations – camera movement usually tries to hide/soften this.

If you remember/realize, there were a few instances in V0.6, where I tried to break out from my modus operandi mentioned above and the outcome was most definitely worse than my usual style, hence I regressed in the following updates.

Also around that time, I decided to expand the scope of sex scenes to contain on average 5 instead of 2 animations, which further constrained my time and limited my opportunity/will to become more creative.

Since the next update will contain only 2 sex scenes and since I’m good on time, I’m planning to take some extra time to invest in some try’n’error to maybe teach myself to make better animations. After all, popping Rachel’s cherry should be of good quality...   

Generally, when talking about animations, there are three metrics, on which you should focus: Quality, Quantity, and Production Speed. Ideally, you want all three, but realistically, you can only pick two… At the moment, I’m operating on quantity + speed, but maybe that could change in the future…

To summarize this chapter: I always get a flair-up of impostor syndrome every time a new Eternum update drops…

Focus

In the past, I usually tried to give equal attention to every one of the 8 LIs. But now we have Annica as number 9 as well as Sara who’s probably (for a while) going to inherit Zoela’s monopoly on main story. Now I basically have 10 stunning girls, who are also mostly frustrated because their own stories got paused for the main story of V0.8.

Therefore my draft/roadmap for V0.9 is quite bloated… I’m currently sitting at 35 events with 5 sex scenes giving every main character (at least) a two-step arc in addition to some main quest stuff and some love for a side character. Needlessly to say, but if I follow my draft, it’s going to be a long-ass update…

Additionally, you may have noticed, that at the bottom of my usual pie charts, there are 2 names you’re not quite familiar with yet and which at best get a handful of lines. In other words, I have plans to extend the main line LI roster, which will probably happen in V0.11 and V0.13 respectively.

As a consequence, the equal attention approach is probably going to collapse under the coming LI bloat, hence I will probably have to change something:

I could try to keep my modus operandi with equal attention, but that would probably simply lead to a situation, where every LI’s story just inches forward a little bit each update.  I guess in the long run this won’t please everyone and my game has already been called a collection of dead ends…

Additionally, sometimes I will simply have to give a girl a larger arc in an update. For example, in V0.11/0.12 we will finally have to return to New Kassiopeia, which I have been using as a carrot on a stick for all the cyberpunk fans since the start of the game. Naturally, this means, Sabrina will again have a large share of lines in those updates.

The second solution would be mega-updates – like V0.9 probably is going to be… large-scale updates that feature every LI and are big enough for some long/medium-sized arcs. But on the other hand, nobody likes long waiting periods and I won’t be able to keep my release rhythm of approx. 3 months per update.

Lastly, I could make my updates more focused – meaning I pick like 5 LIs and will develop their stories, while the others are only somewhere in the background or play second fiddle for the purpose of developing another LI’s quest. This will keep the updates at a manageable size as well as allow me to do more in-depth stories per update.

I’m of course aware, that the lovers of the sidelined LIs will initially be against that, but your turn will come… All in all, I think the last approach would be for the best in the long run, but in the end, that’s yours to decide.

Reworks

Most of you probably haven’t noticed it, but I’ve reworked some very old scenes in the gym (right: old; left new):

Overall it looks better and the lighting is way more uniformly applied. The only “downside” I can see is, that Lin’s hair looks a little bit too fiery. Therefore, future events in the gym will look like this and maybe I will spend my future time reworking the other gym scenes as well…

But on the other hand, I have two other scenes which at the moment grind my gears…

From the promotional material for the already mentioned beta version, you can easily deduct, that there will be a flashback showing us teenage Sabrina on her home world of Kassiopeia. In my original draft, this flashback was supposed to be a 20-ish line-long voiceover by Sabrina with 4 or 5 slides in between. Well, 10 lines into it, I decided to make it a full-blown scene and make it fill approximately a third of the beta.

If that rings a bell for you, there’s another sequence in the game that fits this description… The first time, you’re face to face with Funkelregen’s core at basically the conclusion of “the first act”, there’s a slide show with some voice-over from Funkelregen, who hit you with the AVN equivalent of “Somehow Palpetine has returned…”  

I’m still surprised, that nobody has ever mentioned this to me… I would have taken out my pitchfork already… Anyway, it would be a worthy investment to turn this into a real flashback and flesh out what should have been Act III of a book I should have written earlier…

The second scene, which probably a lot of you disliked as well, is ladira_medbay_01, where she just rambles for ages about Veludran politics, which barely becomes important in the following story. Additionally, I bet almost nobody has found the affection point hidden in this exchange.  

But in the end, I’m of course always all ears, if you have other proposals for reworks.

Features / Minigames

Now it’s time to talk about the minigame at the end of the last update. One of the very few receptions I got from the first installment was, that it was (too) easy. Well seemingly, I took that too personally and overcorrected too much. As you’ve probably seen, I’ve got many questions about how to possibly beat this encounter:

Now for all, how to beat this fight: As you’ve probably guessed, you’re not supposed to win phase 1 directly – the actual win condition is to survive until the beginning of round 8, after which the cavalry arrives. To get there, three ways exist:

First, there’s the risky approach: Funkelregen’s Deconstruction ability has been a little bit reworked: It no longer stuns Funkelregen and her target. Instead, it applies a DoT and suppresses enemy regeneration. Additionally, Funkelregen regains the drained damage as energy. I guess, due to bad wording, this wasn’t obvious to everybody…

Anyway, in the second round, apply Deconstruction to one of the smaller ships. This will inevitably cause you to lose the station and to Funkelregen tanking some hits. But after rebuilding the station, you just need to spam Repair + Hypermissiles – if timed well, you even can get a blueprint and once it’s just a 2v2, the fight is basically won.

Needlessly to say, with this tactic, you’ll have a larger period of time, where you can’t effort a stray hit targeting Funkelregen.

Second, you can just turtle. Spam Repair on Funkelregen and let the Station do whatever… The only problem with this strategy is that, when over the whole fight none or only 1 hit is targeted at Funkelregen, you’ll run out of energy in the last turn.

And lastly, as you’ve probably found out, the minigame will skip itself after failing 3 times.

Of course, I’ve heard your complaints and I’ll make adjustments. Mainly I’ll nerf the damage of the torsion cannons from 150 to 125. This will reduce the influence of bad RNG and make the edge case in route 2 impossible.

Generally, I want to use these combat minigames as a tool for storytelling. In the first one, I wanted to give a demonstration of Funkelregen’s chatter about being the most advanced/powerful ship in the Milky Way. But in the second one, we first witness the navel might of our adversary, against whom Funkelregen is next to powerless at the moment… (yes, I overdid it a bit…)

Furthermore, this fight is also for characterizing Cathy and Hera. Although to put it lightly, her numbers are bonkers… If I were to employ Hera again in a fight that resembles rather a puzzle than a power fantasy, I’d have to seriously overhaul Hera’s numbers – at least cut everything in half.

Generally, there are two types of (A)VN players: Those who see the game literally as a novel and usually dislike everything, that detracts from the experience of a standard novel. Then at the other end of the spectrum, the players see a (A)VN still as a game and want at least some kind of interaction from the medium.

Obviously, I’m in the second team. That’s also why Funkelregen is a sandbox AVN, because free roam/sandbox elements give you (at least the illusion of) more choices/freedom. But as you know, I also went out of my way to make the sandbox as lenient as possible – no farmable stats, day-cycles, almost no events, that are meant to be seen more than once…

Furthermore, this also means, that minigames (combat or otherwise) will make returns in future updates – I know that at least one of you really likes this one... The next story-bound space combat will probably come about in V0.11 or V0.12 and will feature Squids vs. Kitties.

As I’ve mentioned in previous devlogs, I’m planning to add a new feature/programming challenge for myself every update. One idea for the next one is adding an optional space combat. After saving Sara and unlocking all features for the combat, the Meran homeworld of Merax would become an active hotspot on the galaxy map. Flying there would result in being greeted by a fleet of randomly assembled Meran ships to fight.

This whole ordeal would be just for fun/training and maybe collecting the remaining Meran roster. And as I’ve said, it would be completely optional...  

The second alternative would be a gallery – let’s be serious… that one is long overdue…

Additionally, I maybe would like to implement some repeatable/optional/random events, that make the ship feel more alive, but I have no ideas for that at the moment – would be helpful if you could help me out.

NTR

Ok, let’s make it quick…

The polls from last time were unambiguous:

Adrian will be (gruesomely) removed from the crew at the end of the next update. Meaning the only NTR-ish content, that will be added to this game is going to be (former) lovers of some LIs, who will try and spectacularly fail to steal a girl from you (think Jerry from Eternum), as well as (optional) intra-harem relationships… [cough] Saefia [cough]…

In the end, I wouldn’t have had many ideas for him anyway – just a few isolated bits apart from possible NTR-ish action. On the contrary, his demise could even be more beneficial to the overall story. It could fuel a “survivors-guilt” for Lin and I already have ideas for the Veludran doctor nourishing him back to health. And of course, the MC will have to “completely selflessly” comfort Annica.

I can only think about one drawback to this… As you’ve seen in the current update, Annica and Adrian have gotten a fourth table during breakfast. Upon Adrian’s departure, Annica would be sitting alone for eternity…

Thematically, she would fit into the techs, but their table is already overflowing, so that is most certainly not going to happen…

The next idea is, that I could pair Annica with her god-daughter, who at the moment is paired with Zoela and Lin:

But on the other hand, I’m planning not to make Sara a permanent resident of the ship. First, due to Patreon’s anti-incest policy, Sara will be hands-off for the MC and will only have her fun with (external) side characters.

Additionally, Sara is simply overstated. She has an insane holistic knowledge of the setting and knows way more about the LIs than the MC and at times the LIs themselves. Her gear is overpowered and she’s usually followed around by a reality-distorting vortex and a psionic dust cloud.

Dragging her into every major encounter would result in story and power-scaling problems. Hence Sara will in future updates periodically pop onto the ship and leave again – this will probably be determined by the main quest status…

But back to Annica: I probably will send Sara over to her as long as she resides on the ship. Then I will (more or less) sync Sara’s first major department with the arrival of Nina, who will keep Annica company, while Minerva and her various incarnations get a table of their own.    

Sabrina’s leg

If you’re here reading this, you most certainly know, that Sabrina has a rather hostile relationship with her right leg. In fact, she’d prefer it, that nobody knew about it and dislikes seeing it herself.

Apart from her in-universe state, in promotional/noncanonical material, I almost exclusively show her with two fully intact organic legs – the Christmas artwork from last month is a good example of that. I did this, because I assumed, that the vast majority of you wouldn’t find the cybernetic leg attractive and would prefer an organic one.

But during the last two weeks, I repeatedly used teenager Sabrina with half-grown-out blue hair for promotions/previews. This version of Sabrina is from the one or two weeks long goldilock-timeframe, where she’s actually proud of her augment. I delightedly noticed that this made a lot of heads turn.

Therefore I now want to ask directly: Which one do you prefer especially in a sexual context – organic vs cybernetic leg? Or maybe you have a more unique taste and even prefer Sabrina to crawl around from time to time as a truly one-legged amputee?

Keywords

Congratulation! You have survived my wall of text. Probably you’ve already forgotten the start of it. Therefore here are again the most important keywords on which I need your input. Of course, you’re also allowed to comment on everything else, but please remain constructive.

• Animations (Quality ↔ Quantity ↔ Speed)
• Scale of updates (Equal attention ↔ Mega updates ↔ Focused updates)
• Scenes in need of a rework
• Next feature (Combat ↔ Gallery)
• Small banter events
• Sabrina’s leg (Organic ↔ Cybernetic)