Games That Could Be: Virus - The Opponent

Hey folks, I'm gonna be talking more about my game concept nicknamed "Virus" today! As I've explained in previous posts, it's about playing a sex god/virus that slowly infects some kind of remote outpost over the course of an isolated winter. It's going to be kind of a strategic roguelike where you have to use the qualities of each character you infect to your advantage to infect still more and rebuild your powers.

Today, we're gonna be taking a closer look at your opponent, or nemesis. This is a powerful figure that can travel freely to the outpost-- because it suspects you may have woken up after all this time. Depending on how you look at your own character, the nemesis could be a holy guardian trying to hunt down a rogue demon, or a rival god looking to stop its ancient adversary from returning to power, or simply a powerful safeguard figure trying to prevent the spread of a known, excessively infectious virus. Your nemesis takes the form of a human, probably a foreign authority figure that the workers of the outpost are obligated to respect and obey.

That doesn't mean that they will cooperate with him, of course. The people of the outpost are suspicious of people that might try to shut down or disrupt their operations, and it doesn't help that he won't come out and explain what he's here for-- at first. And when he does explain, he risks outright ridicule, if he cannot offer proof. This is your only advantage: your own existence is so unlikely in the eyes of these people, that they will not readily turn themselves in for examination.

If your nemesis can find one of your followers, he can easily purify them, and you will lose control of that person. Worse, you must mark your followers to upgrade your powers, and if he can find and reveal this mark to the town, he will have visible proof of your presence, and everyone will grow more suspicious. Strange markings aren't definitive proof to the people of the town since they know little about you, but it will certainly make things more difficult. Further, if any of your followers are caught doing something outrageous or highly suspicious, the people will start to believe your nemesis more and more, growing more worried that there really is something trying to infect and take control of them. If the people grow too worried, they will all start to submit to cleansing, and your days will be numbered. If your last follower is cleansed, the game will end with your slipping into the void, your grasp on this world lost forever.

You have many tools at your disposal, however. Your nemesis can be fooled, for example-- he will assess each villager he meets and decide how trustworthy they are, and if you can convince him to trust one of your followers, you can feed him false information. Similarly, you can unlock ways to make other people seem more worthy of suspicion. If he accuses the wrong person and cannot show any change after a cleansing, his credibility with the town will fall. If the town grows too distrusting of him, he will be barred from homes and establishments, and eventually driven from the town altogether.

Alternative ways of dealing with the nemesis can vary. I'm considering having him arrive with one or two bodyguards, beings of power but weaker will. If you can manage to separate them from their charge and lure them into sexual congress, it's possible to infect the both of them-- and together, they can overpower your nemesis. Forcing your nemesis to orgasm and convert under your power would be a massive achievement, maybe even an instant victory!

Short of that, you will find yourself in a delicate game of cat and mouse with your nemesis. You must infect as many as you can while conserving your power and avoiding notice from the people and especially the nemesis. If your touch is subtle enough, you may even fool him into thinking it's a false alarm, and he may leave of his own will. This will buy you extra time, but of course, if you slip up or get too aggressive, he may well return again.

Your final success depends on how many people you have infected when spring finally comes, and the people of the outpost go out into the world again. Technically, you win the game so long as you survive the entire winter with at least one follower. But the proportion of people you've infected, the methods you've used, and the powers you've unlocked determine your "ending"--  perhaps you will simply spread to a few small communities and be forced to conserve your energy in a world of battling powers larger than yourself; perhaps you will claim vast swaths of the population and new, peaceful, orgiastic cultures will erupt gleefully across nations; or perhaps you will spread in a global apocalypse of senseless rape, until only small, heavily fortified clusters of survivors clutch still at their sanity, falling under the lusty hordes one by one. It is all within your power.

This just about covers the last of the main concepts I've developed in my head for this potential game. There are plenty of little details I've glazed over, but even the things I've described so far could change radically before this game reaches any state of playability, if it ever sees even a single line of code. With that in mind, next time on GTCB I'll summarize the whole thing and go over the main pro's and con's of the game concept, both for the players and for the developers. This should give us an easy way to compare game ideas once I've gone on to explain the other concepts. I hope the others pique you guys' interest as much as this one seems to have! :3 Thanks for reading!

A Story and a Clarification

Hey, folks! I've been trying to keep myself writing every opportunity I get, even if I can't bring myself to work on the game. A lot of it is complete garbage or just me talking to myself, but it's important to keep in the habit of sitting down and trying. On the bright side, this has yielded at least some small fruit in the form of a peculiar story about a man and a creature that he is trying to figure out. It's pretty light on the sex, for reasons I mentioned in the last blog post, but if you guys are interested in seeing what's coming out of my head lately, I'd welcome you to have a look!

SoFurry
FurAffinity

With that said, I'd like to take a moment to respond at large to a common sentiment my last blog post prompted. I've received several suggestions and even offers for taking on hands as writers for MVOL, and it's great to see support from my fans. But the fact remains that I hold this game to certain standards even stricter than those of my normal work.

It's not just a matter of quality. There are many writers out there that have more skill and talent than I, but in my estimation, nobody understands Lith as thoroughly as I do, largely because he is, in a way, a small part of me. You can read more about a lot of this in the FAQ section, by the way. My Very Own Lith is a game about Lith as a person, and every scene is an expression of some part of him, a derivation of his personality, his flaws, and his conflicts. Just writing a sex scene isn't enough-- it has to have some significance, it has to "mean something," and of course, it's essential that it portrays Lith accurately in his actions and reactions every step of the way.

What this means is that I could never put a scene in this game that isn't set in the foundation of Lith's character from the very start, and to my knowledge, nobody could write such a scene but myself. It's a pretty stupid place to put myself in knowing how inconsistent I can be, but I hope dearly that the end result will be worth all the punishment on my end and the endless waiting on yours.

Actually, thinking about this has brought me to realize what part of my trouble with the new content may be-- in an attempt to generate content to answer many of my fans' requests, I've wandered further than ever from the "main goal" of the story, in a way. So I've been working over how to thread it back into Lith's identity, and I think I have a glimmer of how it might work. As ever, I'll keep working at it, and I hope you will all enjoy the final result enough for the wait to be worth it.

My thanks to everyone for your patience, and for taking the time to catch up with the project. I hope I'll have more news for you soon!