Subverse News

Welcome back to another thrilling addition of the Subverse dev diaries, a series of creator updates with dirty words and even dirtier space girls.


Meow!



As you can see, we've put the finishing touches on our catgirl infiltration specialist - Taron Kraask! Taron was one of the first stretch goals for Subverse, and the whole team was super excited to bring her to life.

Taron's species is known as the nikith (nigh-kith), which are obviously the Subverse equivalent of the feline humanoids so prevalent in the hentai world. Most nikith are content remaining in the hunter-gatherer phase of their society, but Taron fell in love with technology as soon as she had a fateful close encounter with an alien vibrator.

Since she is still relatively young and doesn't have much experience with culture outside her primitive planet, this can cause Taron to come across as socially awkward in many situations. However, her radiant positivity, eagerness to please and genetically inherent addiction to the pheromones of solar males like the Captain make her a shiny beacon of endlessly horny hope aboard the Mary Celeste.

That previously mentioned and almost inconveniently powerful reaction towards the protagonist of Subverse leads to all sorts of hilarious and fun interactions in the game, especially during her recruitment missions. But don't worry...despite her seemingly whimsical characterization, this kitty has claws and sick ninja moves that will allow you to stealthily shred through the opposition in both grid and space combat. She is voiced by StudioFOW legend Milly Stern, who also voiced 2B in our most downloaded movie ever: Nier First Assembly (yes, even more popular than K3).



As we previously mentioned, the closed beta begins on Saturday, September 28th!

To make sure you are ready to go, use the following checklist:

1.) Have Big Bang Theorist backer status (donation of £75 or more).

2.) Redeem your Steam key that was previously provided so that Subverse is in your Steam library.

3.) Join the Studio FOW Discord server and access the Beta Oasis room.

4.) Send a DM to the bot "Masterbeta#1202" after it is launched on Saturday, September 21st, and follow the instructions to receive your beta key.

5.) Redeem that secondary key on Steam to add the beta download branch to Subverse.

6.) Download the update when Steam states it is available on the 28th.

7.) Open the first closed beta build and have fun!

Bug reports and feedback forms are available in-game and will be sent to Studio FOW's internal servers for review. It is immensely helpful if you can provide the context of what happened when you experience any bugs so we can potentially recreate these situations and analyze them, so please be sure to include as much specific information as possible!





On that note, we're starting the party with our SHMUP-tacular gameplay! The first closed beta build will include three sections:

1.) SHMUP tutorial level, administered by DEMI

2.) The first space gameplay mission of Subverse

3.) "Endless mode" for testing purposes

While the first two sections are obviously intended to give you a gentle introduction to how space combat works in Subverse, the third is our little gift to the community that will allow you to play to your heart's content and hopefully uncover some bugs for us to fix in the process. The first pool of enemies is limited to pirates but we'll add more dickheads to the builds as beta progresses.

For now, you will be playing the game mode that we refer to as ANNIHILATION (kill everything = victory). As we continue development, we will also make additional modes playable such as the previously revealed DEFENDER where you are responsible for protecting objectives.

So how exactly does space combat work in Subverse? Here's a mini-instruction manual and rundown of the gameplay:





Your ship is guided with WASD movement. Subverse is primarily one of those rare free-roaming SHMUPs that allows you to wreak havoc all across the map rather than forcing you in one direction.

Hitting the shift key will activate cruise mode, which gives the F3N1X a speed boost to help you dodge attacks, flank bad guys or get to a defensive position much faster.





Aiming is accomplished by moving a targeting reticle around the screen with the mouse. You can open fire on any targets acquired using the left mouse button, which is the trigger for the F3N1X's basic repeating particle cannon. It has unlimited ammo, so you can blast away and kill things real good all you want.

You'll also have access to the first special attack of the game, which is a precision-strike missile. It can be fired with the right mouse button. Should the projectile collide with anything, it will instantly detonate. However, you can also manually detonate it in the middle of clusters of enemies for a big sexy multi-kill. Note that this weapon reduces your ship's energy, so you must wait for it to recharge before it's ready to fire again.

Speaking of energy, the F3N1X has access to another attack tied to the space bar called the charge drive. This will send your ship speeding forward at lethal velocity, either destroying or causing heavy damage to any enemies dumb enough to not get the fuck outta the way. The charge drive can also be used to dodge enemy projectiles in a pinch.





With two attacks tied to the energy resource system, you're likely to run out fast if you spam them. However, lucky for you, energy pickups will be available from fallen enemies.

Note that there are two levels of ship integrity in Subverse - shields and hull. Shields regenerate automatically after a period of time when no additional damage is taken, whereas hull does not. You can pick up health packs to get your hull back into shape.





You'll be throwing down with the pirates, which are the first enemy faction in Subverse. We guarantee these guys are all complete assholes, so don't feel bad about reducing them to wreckage and racking up points in the process.

You can increase your score in Subverse by defeating enemies, and each enemy has a different score value attached to them. There are currently five unique rival vessels in the build, and each of them can be found in escalating levels of difficulty (distinguished by color schemes).

Each one will require a different strategy to defeat. It's when you have multiple different classes of enemy on the screen coming at you at the same time that Subverse really shines as an arcade shooter that rewards quick-thinking, resource management and defensive movement combined with aggressive attack patterns.

We're all thrilled to see how the initial gameplay is received! However, please keep in mind that we are still barely in beta (its more like an alpha) and we have a long way to go before the game reaches its potential.





More excellent news! We are very confident our digital art rewards will be ready on time for their estimated release dates (End of 2019 for the calendar, early 2020 for the art book). Both projects are turning out even better than we imagined, and we can't wait to send them out to our loyal supporters! Expect a few teases here and there as more dev diaries are published.



We're working around the clock like usual to finish up the last few waifu and main character models, so we'll have updates about those soon.

We hope you all take care and look forward to working with you throughout the rest of Subverse's development!

Sincerely,

Mr. Kristoff

- Senior Producer

Greetings once again to our loyal backers! I'm happy to be bringing you the most important dev diary yet.

By the way, Fortune says hello.





We're delighted to announce the closed beta will begin for all Big Bang Theorists (backers that pledged £75 or more) on September 28th, 2019! Make sure you have your keys retrieved and activated in your Steam libraries so you can access it.

As previously mentioned, this first build will include the SHMUP tutorial and the first mission of the game. However, we're also adding an endless combat mode for testing purposes. If you're eligible, Make sure you drop by our Discord server and sign up for the Beta Oasis room so you can give us feedback and report any bugs there.



Here's an updated WIP of Taron Kraask's model, which includes her color scheme. We're putting the finishing touches on her fur textures to make sure she's extra fabulous before her first appearance on the cat walk.



For all you Studio 69 VIPs, we're pleased to reveal the club itself in all its glory! Now that it has had a final pass done on the lighting and assets, it's up to the quality we first envisioned for it. We hope you all look forward to chilling, having a drink and playing a few bar games with your favorite waifus here.





And now, at long last, we are proud to present our unique and powerful system of customized hand-holding in Subverse - PANDORA!

Pandora is a tech tree that allows you to send your lap rocket on a fucktacular journey into the black hole of your choice. Remember how we talked about the XP capsule system (aka PP/Pooter Points) last week? Every time your waifu levels up, you get one PP. You can insert your PP right here.


There are three pools of hand-holding from which you can unlock scenes:

CAPTAIN - 1v1 fun with the panty-faced protagonist, both in POV and cinematic poses.

CREW - The ladies of Subverse get to have futa fun with each other courtesy of Dr. Lillian Margaliss's insta-dick technology as well as some group poses involving other Mary Celeste denizens.

XENO - Big old sloppy 100% certified organic Manticore meat monster hogs for your waifus to enjoy. You can look forward to fiends of both the bi and quadrupedal variety to play with.

All of these options also contain categories hand-animated by our artisan fucksmiths, and our animations are tailored to each waifu's unique personality, i.e. Killi will be more dominant with her teases.

Here are the categories below:

TEASE - (Pre-meal Cocktail) Good old fashioned animated pinups.

FOREPLAY - (Appetizers) Basically any kind of lewd act ending with "-job."

SEX - (Entree) The meat and potatoes course of the night where you can enjoy a variety of orifices.

AFTERS - (Dessert) The creamy, cuddly icing on your waifu. A great way to end the night.

You can insert the scenes you've unlocked into their corresponding Pandora Player slots (e.g. unlock a TEASE with Lily, it goes into the TEASE slot). This allows you to essentially assemble your very own custom short movies. Different scenes from different trees can be mixed and matched to create a smorgasbord of depravity. You can even save presets of your favorite combinations or just hit randomize and go to town on whatever Pandora has in store for you!

While you will gain enough PP throughout the course of Subverse to unlock every single scene, you are free to specialize in just a single tree if you wish. This gives you unlimited power over your own fetishes.




- Spend PP to unlock scenes of your choice

- Assemble the scenes in Pandora

- Generate scene and hit play to enjoy!




We are so thrilled to announce that two full-time software engineers with AAA gaming experience have joined the Subverse team. They're already making a huge impact on production, and we couldn't be happier to have them here.

During the past few months, we've also been in contact with several world-renowned game producers that have been acting as mentors for us during this process.

Their advice, along with that of our new engineers, have caused us to audit the current release strategy and pipeline. This brought us to the conclusion that Early Access would not be beneficial for Subverse.

Please note: THIS DECISION WILL NOT EFFECT THE CLOSED BETA IN ANY WAY.

The other good news is that this decision will actually allow us to significantly speed up production of the full release because it won't be necessary to constantly update and maintain the numerous Early Access builds. We're currently ahead of our internal production schedule and we see no issue with maintaining this pace.

This decision wasn't taken lightly. Subverse is currently 13th global on the Steam Wishlist, We could've easily taken the cash grab route and put out the unpolished Early Access chapters, but Studio FOW has always been committed to creating products that we are proud of and we know the fans will thoroughly enjoy.





1) Single-player, story-driven RPGs don't tend to do early access. Early Access is typically utilized by FPS games, rogue-likes, and MMOs that have gameplay loops and dynamic online components that need to be thoroughly tested.

2) One of our advisers made the excellent point that we have almost 4,500 eligible closed beta testers. This is a huge pool that we can tap into to make gameplay tweaks, thus nullifying the whole point of Early Access for the general public.

3) Subverse is a story-driven game meant to be experienced as a whole, not in the stop/start fashion that is forced by Early Access. Having to wait potentially up to a month for the next chapter to be released will really hurt the momentum of the overall game.

4) Internally, we've seen the difference between a fully completed section of the game and an Early Access one, and it's night and day in terms of quality. We feel it would be a disservice to you guys and the project to release it before the quality you deserve can be achieved throughout the game.



We'll be releasing public gameplay footage following the start of the closed beta and keeping you guys in the loop with our Youtube channel, so please don't feel left out even if you don't have closed beta access. We'll make sure everyone has a ticket aboard the hype train for the duration of the project, and we're extremely excited to take the trip with you.

Sincerely,

Mr. Kristoff

Senior Producer

Greetings once again! How are our special advocates of space titty operas doing this week? Step aboard this filthy rocket ride and hold on tight, because some serious Subverse information loads are about to explode all over your precious faces.





As you can see, Taron's model is turning out quite nicely thanks to our team of catgirl aficionado modelers. Her full model and outfit will be completed and added to our website soon. Taron was a bonus character unlocked during the Kickstarter campaign, and she'll be joining your crew about midway through the story.

Also.. in case you missed it, visit our Subverse homepage to see space elf Elaisha Sorn's model in full 3D!





We recently decided to give the Mary Celeste a complete overhaul since it just felt wrong having a pre-canned protagonist vessel.

For this task we enlisted Mr. Alexey Pyatov, a sci-fi fetishist with a raging hard-on for designing spaceships. He's been working closely with Daddy DC over the past month to cook up this totally sick concept for what is destined to be forever known as the "Millenium Falcon of Butt-Fucking."

The front or "maw" of the ship will house the hangar, and it's from there your trusty F3N1X fighter will launch during combat missions. There will also be sections for stealth drives, the bridge, cantina, laboratory, captain's quarters and even a locker room. The new Mary Celeste will receive a low-poly pass and then be implemented into the game by the end of the month (gropey Chewbacca not included).






And now, onto the gameplay details!

In Subverse, we've decided to merge traditional RPG leveling with a loyalty system. Instead of having separate combat levels and then a romance system, you will be able to progress both at the same time by simply playing through the game. Each time you win a battle or complete a quest, you will be given an experience capsule.

You can then give that capsule to any waifu of your choice to grant her XP towards leveling up. Once she "dings" and levels up, she then gains a talent point, or...as we lovingly call them: Pooter Points (PP).

PP is used to unlock the sex scenes in Subverse. The more PP you have, the better/more complex sex scenes become available (very much like an MMORPG talent tree if it included eating ass). This streamlined system means that you don't have to fiddle around with combat talents or stats - she'll automatically perform better in battle and you'll get to focus your attention on what lewd acts she can perform in bed.




As you can see from the top image, there are also some rewards to earn on her road to level 40. Every 10 levels include a major "milestone" event for your waifu, and we'll be revealing the milestone rewards at a later date.

However, we will confirm that she'll trust you enough to activate her loyalty quest once you hit the level cap!

To review:

1) Fight battles/quests with waifu of your choice

2) Gain EXP in the form of a capsule

3) Feed this EXP capsule to any waifu on the crew

4) She eventually levels up and gains 1 PP to spend on sex scenes

5) Rinse and repeat until level 40 to unlock cool rewards



I know all of you have been waiting patiently to know when the closed beta will begin and how it will work, so let's lay out the details for you now...

The closed beta will be available to all Big Bang Theorists (those that pledged £75 or more). If you qualify and haven't signed up for the beta yet, make sure you visit our Discord server!

We will send out a message in the "Beta Oasis" room to let you know as soon as the first build is ready to go live. Builds will be accessed through a special branch on Steam, so you'll need to use your key and add Subverse to your library.

Initially, we're going to release the first SHMUP mission (including the tutorial) for you to enjoy. We hope to have the same sections of grid combat available not long after. Keep an eye out on Discord and Twitter for dates.



If you haven't followed @studiofow or @subversegame on Twitter yet, make sure you do ASAP! We've posted lots of delightful things there that we can't post here, such as the very first actual preview of our dirty animations starring none other than Killi as she shows you just how useful prehensile Vanneran tails can be.



Later this month we will post the 7th dev diary, and it's here that we will finally reveal the details of how hand-holding works in Subverse and how can you spend those Pooter Points! It's a robust system of fuck machinations birthed straight from the depraved mind of DC-sama himself while lethal amounts of vodka, sausage grease and black hentai magic coursed through his veins.


Sincerely,

Mr. Kristoff, Senior Producer

I’m back, bitches! Our Commander in Queef, Big Daddy DC, has entrusted me with handling the dev diary updates while he traverses the globe on an unholy mission to relocate Studio FOW's headquarters from the volcanic fires of Mordor to somewhere more habitable for our filthy future endeavors.

I can’t wait to tease you degenerates with all sorts of taint-tickling tidbits! Also, I dare you say that last part ten times fast.



To you or any of your friends with hopes of one day getting paid to sit on a Bad Dragon, pretend it’s a space slug’s gigantic slimy reproductive rod and moan in sweet orgasmic bliss for the entire world to hear –

TURN IN YOUR AUDITIONS NOW!

The open casting call ends today. Don’t let this opportunity slip through your sticky fingers!

On the other hand, if you want to BE the space slug, we’re looking for those as well. Here’s a WIP of a "chutt" - our lovable species of obese lateral undulators. All you veteran hentai fans should recognize the inspiration ;)





We only showed a little a bit of the corrupt general last time, so here’s another shot of her base mesh in progress. The entire model (including outfit) will be completed in the next few days, ticking off yet another roadmap goal! Those of you waifu fanatics that have been dying to get down with the thiccness are going to be most pleased with this one.

Dear Diary,

Dat ass was phat.







As you can see, this thing is HUGE - and it's not even in its final form yet!

We've been hard at work day and night expanding the script of Subverse. Several confidential writing cumsultants have also been assisting to shape the story into something that we’re confident will make you laugh, cry and touch yourself all at the same time.



Once the scenes are finished, we're going to send them off to our amazing voice actors to record. The dialogue system of Subverse displays these lines on a sleek UI along with our character models that are capable of displaying fully animated emotions to emphasize the delivery. This design lets us show off our waifu models and set the mood for kino sci-fappage.





Our trusty programming duo, One-Eyed Jeremy and Hungry JJ, are still crankin’ away at the core systems coding. We’ve totally upgraded everything under the hood that to make sure all of the additional features and gameplay chapters added during the campaign will fit nicely and not result in some cervix-slamming nightmare later down the line.

We're still looking for a passionate senior programmer to help us move into full development, so contact us if you have the necessary experience/portfolio and want to punch a first class ticket to the dark side by helping us bring our space titty opera to life!

Our modeling team has also been swapping out our placeholder assets for new, custom hotness. We'll be teasing more vehicles as progress continues.

Can you guess who's going to be flying this bad boy?





For those of you most interested in the gameplay, we'll be announcing some of the integral gameplay systems in Subverse in the next update as well as showing off some more sweet models!

Sincerely,

- Mr. Kristoff

Senior Producer

Greetings perverts, it's time to tear myself away from the sheer unbridled horror that is the Planet Surveys, and fill you in on what filthy things we've been up to these past 2 weeks.



This character is actually really critical to the story in the opening Chapters, and features prominently in a very early cinematic - as such we have swapped her and Taron around in the production schedule to enable our cinematics crew to be able to work with the model. I don't wanna reveal too much but her inspiration is a hefty mix between Guts from Berserk and a Terminator...so yep, you can imagine what kind of badass we're crafting here.

Badasses still need to look good though, so here's a WIP shot of her lip-gloss. The General's model should be ready soon at which point we will resume the normal waifu roadmap.





We're continuing to update our texture library and of course we need some gross-looking stuff for tentacles and the inside of Moneyshot's colon. This is well ahead of schedule and only a few organic textures remain, so our scenebuilding team of Beamwire and WTX are primed for the rest of 2019.





No StudioFOW adult product is complete without anime-style fight scenes that 90% of you will skip anyway, so naturally we are working hard on this part of the game. Taking a leaf from our filmmaking ventures, we've gone ahead and storyboarded these story sequences out, in order to give our animators the best possible foundation for success. You can find a sample of these boards below if you want to take a peek. Eventually these will be voice acted along with the rest of the game.




I will also be expanding the animator team to help cope with the increased cinematic load, so if you're interested in being part of our animation crew then start prepping those CV's! Please note that only exceptional candidates will be considered for this position, but if you don't have the required industry experience then you can still apply if your demo reel is amazing. More details on the posting to come next month.



The planet survey has eaten up almost all my time these past 2 weeks. Out of the 400 or so planet surveys about 80% of these had to be completely rewritten, so this is going to take way more time than initially I thought. Combined with the huge number of non-english speaking applicants (Writing your entire lore in Chinese doesn't help us, guys) we're looking at one big shitshow. Luckily I have recruited somebody to help me out with this so god bless my translator for taking this unholy bullet straight in the balls. We'll get there, buddy. Hang in there, and hold my hand. But no seriously, patience is appreciated as we get through all the surveys.



Out of the 57,730 backers only about 70 of you still need a key. This is down to things like typing "gogle" instead of "google" on email forms, and using throwaway emails - Fow-Chan will be contacting you to sort out the keys manually, but in case she doesn't feel free to email her at [email protected]

Please remember to activate your keys on Steam. This can be done by going to the Games tab then clicking Activate, and entering the code you have been sent. The fulfillment team has done an exceptional job with delivering everything (especially considering this is our first KS and we didn't use BackerKit) so please help them out by activating your keys and checking your spam folders.





On a personal note, this will be my last update until September - I am moving countries next month so our Senior Producer Mr. Kristoff will be stepping in to do the next 4 updates for you guys. Hopefully everything goes to plan and immigration doesn't throw me out for attempting to smuggle DEMI dakimakura prototypes across the border. See you on the other side!

-DC