Genital/Body Renaming
Considering how much can be customized in the game, this is long overdue and we’re aware of it.
At some point we will sit down and go through every instance of appropriate body part naming in the game, and implement something that allows her to call your __ whatever you want it to be called. We also think it would be interesting to include mood-based adjectives to make it more dynamic, a little bit like how sub names work.
Reactions & Communication
Personality was added in part to allow us to create more immersive systems.
Praise & Degradation was an example of this, but we want to go further with Reactions, a system that will allow her to react to various states in the game. You’ve been at max arousal for a long time? We want to be able to create various personality-dependent ways for her to comment on that.
Of course, following our design principle of ‘’not everyone enjoys the same thing’’, all of this would be optional.
Mood-specific Interactions
The next layer of customizability we’ll add to interactions is likely to be mood-dependent interactions.
The idea is that you could set it to only give you the harshest tasks when she’s furious - or tasks you’re not a big fan of when she’s mischievous, etc.
Reintroducing Presets & Reworking Export/Import
A little while ago, we removed presets due to all the major changes we were undertaking.
We want to reintroduce them and make them better than ever. Separately exportable/importable presets for various categories, default ‘’archetypes’’, and presets for more things than were previously available.
We also hope to incentivize community preset creation at this point, allowing us to implement some in the game that will act as possible defaults for players to use.
Visual Customization
We know. We’ve been saying for a long time now that the Visuals/Shapeshifting menu will be reworked.
The honest truth is that this is a huge undertaking with how the game was built, and we’ll need to dedicate ourselves to it fully for a significant length of time.
Once we start this, we also want to widely expand available options. We want to allow you to randomize within categories too, to allow you similar behavior to how hairstyles work.
Shoes are a long-requested item that we’re currently investigating.
Status Rework
Statuses feel like an outdated simple system at this point that’s limiting us from adding more.
We someday hope to expand it to a system similar to an ‘’equipment’’ system, with slots and possible ‘’layers’’ on each slot.
An example would be Ring Gag + dild* in Mouth both being in the ‘’Mouth’’ slot but being compatible as a layered status due to how they function.
More Roleplays
Roleplays were added a few years ago as an expandable system for unusual sessions involving more ‘’pretend’’ play.
We want to expand upon this with things like Nurse, Police, etc - but it’s definitely something that feels like we’ll be able to do more once we’re taking a break from making major changes.
XToys Review
We know this is complicated to set up, and Toy-only sessions are not great.
While we have no regrets in trying to add something more complex than just ‘’the vibrator/stroker/dild* matches what’s going on on-screen’’, we still want to revisit this some day and clean up what hasn’t been ideal while finding new ways for toys to interact with the game.
Favor Gambling
Long-requested, we want to find a way to implement this that will not be overlooked after 2 weeks.
This is fairly difficult as it doesn’t feel very justified to gamble in a game where meaningful rewards are very hard to find. We’re thinking about it.
Storyline Sessions
Many have brought up the idea of an ‘’introduction’’ to the game.
We usually do not like to prioritize new players, because any new player that likes the game enough will eventually become experienced enough to have that not matter.
But a way for us to do this while allowing experienced players to benefit is to add a system that allows for pre-made ‘’storylines’’ throughout a session. These sessions would involve special pre-entered ‘’events’’ that happen every X tasks completed, with pre-entered text/prompts.
Voice Acting
This has long been a topic of discussion.
Our general stance on it is that it’s unfeasible with procedurally generated text, would come across as ‘’cringe’’ to a part of the playerbase (because anything and everything is subjective - especially sex stuff requires a lot of figuring out what you do and don’t like).
It’s also something that’s a challenge on the creation front - it’s really not easy to refine and implement our vision for a specific line, and in the past, this would consume humongous amounts of time every time we even just wanted to add voice clips with nothing said.
We do believe that eventually, the way we’re expanding systems may allow us to add specific lines - namely, we’ve added the ‘’mind whispers’’ lines where she talks to the player for degradation or praise.
Voicing those seems like a distinct possibility, but will require us to do all the work locally in-house to reduce the time cost of iteration. This means that if we want to approach this issue, we’ll have to change our VA altogether. This may not be a bad thing, as while the overall ‘’vibe’’ of the VA was what we wanted, there’s a wide range of quality of clips in there from days where we were not doing as well.
It may also be a possibility for us to do it as a ‘’voice pack’’ system, allowing for more people's preferences to be met. More dommy, more cutesy, previous VA etc.
Alternatively, AI is definitely making great strides when it comes to voice generation, so this may be delayed until we can take advantage of those advances - but we really don’t want to approach that before it’s ready, as it could easily come across as cheap.
Multiplayer / Couples
All of our recent system changes like interactions have made the game significantly more structured to support multiple players. A lot of what would need to be done is name changing / targeting instructions, optionally marking players as ‘’givers’’ and ‘’receivers’’, etc.
It’s doable. We’ll take a look some day once we’re further along.
Content Expansion
Almost every system we build for VS is made to be expandable.
The general idea is that we start by implementing a system, leave it in the game for a while, see how players react to it and its potential issues, and once we’ve confirmed it works well, we can expand upon it nearly indefinitely.
Some examples of things we want to expand upon:
Interactions
Urges
Reactions (once added)
Praise/Degradation
Stakes
Consequences
Visuals
Reward Animations
Optimization
We are aware that every update seems to leave behind additional mobile devices, especially older ones or lower-end brands.
This is really unfortunate, but mobile is a challenging platform to optimize for. As much as we want to try to make things better, a lot of our new features also increase the amount of processing the game has to do, and the sheer amount of data it needs to consider becomes a problem for certain devices. This became very clear especially when we added Interactions.
We do have some plans when it comes to general fps/performance, but a lot of it will be challenging and intrude upon feature development significantly.
We also can’t really provide mobile minimum specs. The game’s demo kind of acts as that, since it behaves the same way as the full game.
Phones all behave very differently, and it’s very common for a technically ‘’worse’’ phone to be able to run things that a ‘’better’’ phone struggles with. There is no consistency like you would see on a platform like PC.
We wish it was possible to avoid leaving some devices behind, but we have to prioritize other things. Half of our playerbase is on PC, a large part of our mobile playerbase doesn’t have issues with the performance, and that is likely to only improve over time as phones are eventually replaced.
The general idea is that we want to do our best to avoid leaving devices behind, while also avoiding slowing down our development in a way that will hurt the majority of players who don’t have issues.
Release? & Our Other Endeavors
Having seen how things have progressed, we do not have distinct plans for a ‘’release’’ currently.
We will continue to update for as long as we can. We want VS to be a very long term, continuously updated project that is the core inspiration of anything we make.
We don’t think VS as a game can ever really be done developing until we feel it’s no longer appropriate for us to - for example if advances in tech made it outdated to the point where we need to make something else.
But we feel like the vast majority of you just want more VS content - I know there are still some of you attached to the idea of a ‘completed game’, and I hope you’ll find that some day a version is what you expected this to be.
On the other hand, Virtual Succubus is no longer just me, and we now have a team that relies on our work to do well and provide long term safety.
VS can’t be what we rely on forever, and it’s certainly not completely secure with all the platform run-ins we’ve had.
Our plan to address this is a long term initiative to expand with our experience in the adult games domain - specifically taking advantage of what we’ve built for JOI, pushing that further in new directions. We want to create infrastructure that allows for the easy creation of more types of JOI/BDSM content, develop related products for new niches, and explore other things such as developing and selling related physical goods.
We are working on a few things, including a brand. Our goal is to provide us security while giving you more than just a game. We want to be the people you turn to when you’re interested in this kind of content as a whole.
We have various plans in the works relating to this brand. This will be an extremely long term endeavour that will have growing pains, but it’s what I feel needs to be done to secure us a long term future doing what we like to do.
From a personal perspective, it’s also what I would like my efforts over the last few years to allow - I want us to be able to hire cool people to do cool things and feel good about it. And I want us to be able to do that in this stigmatised sphere, recruiting those who don’t have prejudice against BDSM & adult content as a whole.
Security & comfort is nice, but changing cool peoples lives is better.
I hope you’ll enjoy what we have to present when we do present it, and I want to re-affirm that this doesn’t mean we’re not committed to VS development.
It’s the backbone of our fanbase, it’s the backbone of our income, and it’s what allows any of this to be planned. This is unlikely to change, and we’re not about to neglect this project.
