We are very excited to give you a sneak peak of our goregous Head Mistress. A disciplined, well-groomed, and intellectually superior creature, our Head Mistress has been entrusted with the care and discipline of each new ‘plaything’ in the Goddess’s home.
In order to shape players to be well-disciplined, respectful, and elegant slaves, she takes pride in breaking and rebuilding submissives through the means of corporal punishment and public humiliation.
Drawn from the lore of dark elves, our Head Mistress is a demi-Goddess in her own right, though never as powerful as our Goddess.
In our upcoming release, you'll get to experience a punishment from her. We look forward to your feedback!
We're excited to bring more content to you in just a couple weeks! On Dec 15, patrons will get early access to the “Learning the Ropes” content we've been working on the last couple of months.
Patrons will get a special code phrase in a patrons-only post to unlock content for the first 30 days. It will then be free for everyone on Jan 15, 2019.
As our sincerest appreciation for all that our patrons have done for us and the game, patrons will always get new content first, but do keep in mind this means early access content that has some parts with placeholder assets or missing interactions.
New Mistresses and Rooms
We're introducing the concepts for three new Mistresses with this release: the Headmistress (more on her in the next post), Yuki-Onna, and Nega-Yuki. The Headmistress is a complete, custom model paid for by Patreon funds. Yuki and Nega are placeholder models for now, but will also be replaced with custom models you’ve funded as well.
Each Mistress has her own room that she plays with you in. These rooms are placeholders for now. We've commissioned two of these rooms to be custom for our game, but they aren't ready yet.
Introductory Scenes
Every time we put a new Mistress in the game, you'll get to play through a special 'introductory' scene with her. These are story and character-driven scenes separate from the submission scenes that make up normal gameplay. You'll play through three of these: one for each of our new Mistresses.
Punishments and Rewards
In addition to meeting each of our three new Mistresses via their intro scene, you'll be introduced to our punishment and reward gameplay system. Depending on how you perform tasks (coming in the next release), you will be given punishments or rewards for your performance.
For this release, we guide you through this process the first time, but in the future, you will be able to choose the Mistress you want to pay off a punishment or earn a reward through.
Early Access Content vs. Polished Content
Early Access Content includes: - placeholder models - placeholder rooms - subtitles - placeholder game mechanics via the in-game menu - some player poses (but many will require the in-game book-menu, at first) - static character poses with transitions (smooth animations come later) - some sound effects - placeholder music
Because it takes time to build this much content and polish it, as we continue to do with the introduction to our Goddess, please rest assured we will be working towards polished content over the next month.
Polished Content includes: - Voice over - Animations - Full pose support - New game mechanics - Full sound effects
Being Part of Game Development
One of the major reasons we have taken this approach to release early access content is because we are still learning what fans and players like. We could spend a year building content and polishing the hell out of it, but if it's no fun to play, then we've just wasted all that time and money!!
So, we are releasing content as we create it so we can get YOUR feedback about what actually works and what doesn't. We need to know if the characters are sexy, the story is compelling, the scenes turn you on, and whatever else you think makes or breaks this game!
We hope you will all welcome this approach as a chance to shape a new kind of gameplay. We couldn't do this without you!!
Our early development Roadmap is here!! Let us know what you think!
And if you like what we're doing, please consider supporting us on Patreon! All of the funding goes directly to commissioning art assets for the game and Patrons will always get the new content one month before we make it publically available for free.
Several weeks ago, we sat down and planned out some short term content goals for the game. We set a target date of Dec 15 to release a number of new things, including enhancing existing content. More on our short term goals and a formal announcement of what we are releasing will come in the next few days!
One of the user stories we set up was this:
As a player, I want the characters to be more lifelike So they feel like they are really in the room with me.
Acceptance Criteria: When I interact with the Goddess, her eyes meet mine and they move realistically.
When the Goddess speaks with me, her lips move in sync with what she is saying.
In fact, we’ve actually had this goal all along, but as mentioned in our last post, we are slowly adding layers of improvements over time. This particular improvement jumped our list of features in large part from the consistent feedback from fans and reviewers checking out the game.
Deviant did a bunch of research on different programs and decided to go with LipSync Pro by Rogo Digital. He chose this tool because it supports both blend shapes and bone animations, and has a lot of extra support for gestures and emotions.
Eventually, we’d like to investigate Oculus Lipsync for Unity, because it provides real-time lip sync, which will make it easy for players to use when we release moddable tools, but not as much customization. We decided to go for the more robust tool for our own content, but will be looking to make it easy for you to mod in the future, should you want to create your own custom fantasies!
We are hard at work on our next module, Dominatrix Simulator: Learning the Ropes, and on making improvements to Dominatrix Simulator: Threshold!
Two things worth saying a little about right now is how we are iterating the game’s development and what we have been doing to accelerate content development.
Iterating Game Development - Our Approach
We are building the game in modules so that we can roll out self-contained scenes faster than would normally happen in the game development life cycle. Each module is conceived of in its entirety but is not released in its fully polished final form. This means we can get raw content out quickly while still doing polishing on the back end - like a spiraling wave of lewd perfection.
Raw content for a module has several core elements: a Mistress (or two), a script with subtitles, the game mechanics that support the script, and an environment.
At the most basic level, with those things in place, players can play through the game and enjoy some delicious submission while being able to give us feedback on what will make the game even better. Because we are ambitious and want this game to be more than playable, but in fact gorgeous and immersive, we will be adding layers of improvement over these core elements as we continue to evolve the game. In fact, think of our approach as a way for you to watch game development unfold in real-time.
Let me give you an example. We chose to release Dominatrix Simulator: Threshold as a more fully complete module than just raw content in order to showcase what the game would ultimately be. The initial layers we added to the core content included voice-over, music, ambient sounds, and ambient poses. Later, we added more layers by putting in post-production lighting, a pose assistant, and a way for you to know if your “yes” or “no” response was being recognized. We will continue adding layers such as lip sync, animations, and a custom environment.
Building and releasing the game in this way may make it feel like it will never be finished, but there is a method to our madness! Our goal is to keep producing content as long as we are being funded to do so and we don’t want to be unable to deliver something after you have supported us! So, we will always focus on the core content first, get that out, then polish and improve it over time. If we can do both before releasing content, we will, but we won’t hold core content back if it’s ready to go!
More on upcoming content and a RELEASE DATE when I post again in a few days!
Faster Content Creation
And on the subject of Patron funding!
Support for the project has risen dramatically in the last couple of months thanks to visibility on Steam and the broad range of places people can find us online (eg, Reddit, Milovana, VRPorn, GameVirt, etc),
Thanks to the backing of our amazing Patrons and the willingness of so many fans to get involved, we now have a small team of people helping us produce content, providing feedback, or volunteering their time on the game’s development. We are grateful for each and every one of them! This means we are moving through our content production pipeline so much faster! We are still getting into a rhythm as a group, but you can expect to see a lot more content in the near future!
OUR TEAM
Deviant Dev - Lead programmer, lead designer Devilish Domina - Producer, writer, voice actor, game designer Sacb0y - Concept art, character modeling, custom shaders Just Jeff - Concept art, character modeling, rigging, animation Maxxiiee - Environment art Fervid - Environment art ACEmat - Writing JP - Production assistant, quality assurance Grizzly - In-game fan art
If you want to volunteer to help, we welcome fan involvement! Message us here or on Discord to see what you can do!
We have re-engineered the way the game recognizes your "yes" and "no" head movements to reduce accidental answers and improve responsiveness. Not only will the head nods and shakes be more reliable now, but we've included visual feedback when an answer is about to be given, and confirmation after it's made. Just like the audio feedback, you can toggle this visual feedback on and off in the menu.
We hope this will help those where were having trouble with the game tricking them into answering "No" when they very much wanted to say "Yes".
So say "Yes" to us and give the game another go! And please let us know if you still run into yes / no gameplay issues!
In response to player feedback, we've implemented an options menu that will allow you to customize your play experiences and get past poses when you get stuck:
toggle on / off - subtitles
toggle on / off - player voice
toggle on / off - yes/no gesture
recenter view
restart game
adjust graphics quality
choose response to dialogue
The additional benefit of this is that they game will be much more keyboard / mouse friendly for those wanting to play through a desktop simulator! We will eventually optimize for desktop, but we want to get more content in first!
In addition to the menu, we've implemented some visual effects post processing and an improved shader.
Finally - the pose recognition should be much more user-friendly! We've modified one of the poses so you won't lose controller tracking anymore.
Let us know what you think of these changes and know that more content is coming soon!
Dominatrix Simulator is not just a game with a single Mistress or a single experience. This game is designed to bring you a house full of Mistresses, all with their own style, flare, and kinky preferences for you to submit to!
Dominatrix Simulator: Threshold introduces you to the first, and ultimate Mistress, the Goddess. But you aren't worthy of her, so you must be sent on to be instructred, trained, and groomed by the women filling her house.
The next release will be Dominatrix Simulator: Learning the Ropes. The content will be rolled out in stages, rather than waiting for one big release at the end. This way, we can show you progress, use feedback to improve the game, and get content out as fast as we can create it. So, when we say 'release' we mean that we already have the characters, the story, and the game mechanics fleshed out for Dominatrix Simulator: Learning the Ropes, so when all of those ideas are full realized, the release will be complete.
Then we will move on to the next release phase with new content, characters, scenes, story, and features.
We hope you enjoy going on this journey with us as we flesh out this world of immersive submission and look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas as we do!