This week, I finally made some hearty progress on my next game, HOTEL EMBRAXU: SHRINK HEIST, so I can offer a proper introduction/update about it – including some idea of an actual schedule to get people playing it.

The tl;dr is: the complete game is a way off, but I’ve got the fundamental mechanics down, so I’m planning to upload a playable test section for my subscribers by the end of next week.

In the meantime, I can tell you all about where I’ve got to and where I’m going with it, along with a few screenshots from the tutorial section. There are also lots more screenshots and some preview videos already on Patreon and Subscribestar, and I’ve now created a page for the game on itch which you can follow.

What is Hotel Embraxu: Shrink Heist?

The game itself is the next logical progression from my interactive stories, taking the talking/story element and giving it a live, 3D puzzler setting. The result is a first person puzzle adventure in a 3D environment, mixed with plenty of dialogue and a developing story. You can move about freely, interact with objects, pick up items and jump/climb to get higher.

As a shrunken employee of Hotel Embraxu, you have been kidnapped by your handler Olga, with the purpose of sneaking into guests’ rooms and stealing things (with perhaps other tasks to come…). This will take place over a series of missions within the hotel rooms, where you’ll have different guests and obstacles to avoid. All while trying not to upset Olga in the meantime.

The Initial Offering

To get this into a playable, testable state, I’ve been focusing on completing two main rooms for a public release: (1) the simpler tutorial section of Olga’s office, where you are introduced to the controls and talk to Olga and (2) the first guest’s bedroom, which I’m intending to ship in stages with three separate missions/set-ups in the same environment but different puzzles/unlockable areas.

The tutorial section is all but complete, at least in terms of coding and layout (to the point that I have my obligatory book covers on the walls), so that’s what I’m planning to share next week. I now need to get some feedback on major bugs and how well it runs on different systems. My computer’s pretty hefty so I’m not sure how it’ll perform elsewhere, or if it’ll need tweaking to run more smoothly.

Next, I need to polish up the models and textures to get it looking a lot nicer. You can see in the screenshots that it’s fairly basic in appearance, but I do think it looks better in play, the recording/screenshots not quite capturing the crispness. The character models will take my main focus, as it’ll take quite a bit of work on the modelling, texturing and animation to get them looking good.

What I’ve Got Done

If you’ve seen the earlier footage, there’s not much difference in appearance right now but I’ve done a lot of work in the background, getting over some big hurdles that were holding me back. Some of the biggest elements I’ve all but nailed (I hope!) are:

A complete working dialogue system, considerably more flexible than RenPy
Accurate Blender to Unity animation porting (tiny settings were making this a nightmare)
A working giant-interaction system (the parenting and scaling was doing my head in)
An inventory system so items can be picked up and dropped
Climbing and environment interaction functions
Quest-style progression triggers
Two base environments and base giantess characters
Our very own Hotel Embraxu logo!

What’s Still to Do

I can now mostly work on the models, animations, environment design and story. The main things I want to get done in the near-future are:

Improved giantess character designs and animations
Player character models
Enemy movement systems
A complete first-stage mission layout with story interaction
Sound effects

On the back of all this, there’s continual work on texturing and general appearances to be done, but also perpetual bug fixes.

The Upcoming Schedule

These things always take a lot longer than expected but I’ve made enough big strides that I can lay out a few plans for the coming months:

1. Share the test tutorial section with subscribers on Patreon/Subscribestar over the next three weeks
2. Complete the first mission layout/system within the next month
3. Share the test version of the initial 2-level release, including the tutorial and first mission, early September, with subscribers
4. Build on feedback from these tests to get towards a potential public release of the first section around November (probably sharing other builds here in the meantime)

With luck, I should be able to quickly expand to have a full 2-level/3-mission set up ahead of a public release, and my ultimate hope with it is that I can then put out these first couple of environments quite cheaply to introduce the game, with expansions to follow including more rooms and characters. I could either do this in a modular fashion or in story bundles, but that’s for later down the road.

Either way I’ll have lots of updates to come, and the very last there’ll be plenty of screenshots and video clips on Patreon and Subscribestar.

So there we have it – Hotel Embraxu is imminent!