The Empty Star- Moriah update. non-scat preferences!

[quicks (mention)]

Edit: We are currently on the "Moriah update" which is just the tutorial and opening scenes plus one isolated encounter with preference testing for scat/non-scat.


https://mega.nz/folder/niwyTI5T#NbHqcXrZMeUdyMIVoLspBA


If you've come in mid conversation here, welcome! Say hi and let me know what you think. Early art was a gripe so I revamped the art style to have older characters. I am currently working on an update to fill more areas in the town.

Right now we have 3 preds. There are some visual one-offs with more but the preds are meant to be interactive sandboxes where finding the game overs or avoiding them IS the game.

In the next major update we will have horse girls, catgirls, bunny girls, humans, wolf girls, possibly a ratgirl, and probably the first run ins with some hostile goblins.


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Hey everyone. I wanted to announce a new game in the works! First off I want to acknowledge VigorousJazzHands who stepped in to help with programming, guide me in some of the process, and give feedback. It's coming along much faster than I expected and we have a brief demo build of the intro for 8/8! The 2 of us have coordinated on a few other smaller narrative choose you own adventures in the past in the photomorph forum, but this is a first (for me anyway) of making a visual novel that's more than just a choose your own adventure.

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We are using AI art but I am touching up visuals and merging images and whatnot by hand, then taking those and making slides matched to story and dialog. I hope people will see it as a more “touched up” AI vs just generating- but I will be clear this is all AI art other than my touchups. The scope of the art just wouldn't be possible without the use of AI- I've made games in photomorphs before but for the scale of this ai is really the only choice. It also helps me steer and direct a bit more and is much better than me doing things by hand. It might be a little janky, but I'm pretty proud of how it’s coming along. So far the build is only an intro section which has 2 predators, but don't let that fool you there is a lot of depth in the choices, combat, and dialog! This intro is 120 or so "slides" with more than 500 images just in this demo section and >50 pages of written dialog. The writing is 100% human.

I'm working on a dozen or more preds for this chapter and there is a plan to keep a story progressing through multiple chapters. I have the story beats, side quests, and an overarching main story as well as over 20 encounters already mapped out and others casually planned. There will be a active linear progression route but also side quests and content to collect. You can collect coins for doing tasks and exchange them for progress, gear, and easter eggs, just don't say easter eggs in front of my bunnies they consider that highly offensive!

The fun gimmick here is that combat isn’t just exchanging blows for HP, every encounter is a test of puzzle solving and exploration. Some fights you merely have to survive. Others you need to accomplish a task while being harassed by a hungry opponent. Maybe you are stuck in a house with a girl trying to eat you while you try to escape or maybe you are trying to navigate a dangerous river while avoiding gator girl infested waters. Every fight has multiple ways to progress, win, or lose depending on actions beyond "Attack." This is a game about experimenting and trying options and learning your opponent to succeed by doing things like talking/searching/interacting with the environment. Sometimes there are secret ways to end fights or options to avoid them or tips on how to defeat your enemy. Speaking of combat, there is a large mechanic that we have made around being eaten. Being eaten is NOT defeat! Often its just punishment for failing to dodge an attack or making a bad choice in a tough circumstance.

When in a stomach you will have the ability to try to escape and even then, you have choices! You can push through the throat and try to make the most direct exit through the mouth but many preds will use that as an opportunity to bite or attempt to swallow you again! You can try the rear but it’s a longer trek that will drain your stamina and cause you some more damage before a more humiliating escape. Learning your enemy and even their anatomies play a large role in enemy stats and decisions. As an example; be warned that trying to go through the rear exit of a naga is a long acid filled journey that's practically one long stomach and going down in a dryad’s guts leads to a dead end of dirt and roots, but many preds have dangerous throats too! You might want to go out the rear of a sharp-fanged lizard girl or to avoid the paralytic tongue of a poison frog girl. Some things you'll need to experiment but other times you can gain a combat advantage by talking and exploring the world for details and tips. There is a grapple system to determine if you break out or get shoved back into the stomach to try again. You’ll even be able to progress through anatomy, like failing a check in the butt of a predator will slurp you into its intestines then its stomach if you fail again.

Please be aware the the demo build doesn’t have this feature as the player is only just learning combat mechanics, but in the next update there will be real combat beyond the tutorial and that will have true battles with those mechanics in place- we've already tested and programmed them I'm just still working on building the next set of encounters where they will be used.

Player “stamina,” is basically a measure of combat effectiveness. Certain actions will not be available if you are low or might have a chance of failure. Maybe you need to skip some rounds fending off a hungry hound to save your energy to climb a rope, maybe you need to weigh that a trip through a gut might be the closest thing to a rest you are going to have in the heat of battle and hopefully you can make it out the other end with some HP to spare. Having moderate or low stamina is a penalty that affects success of actions like fighting or escaping grapples. A key piece of gameplay is controlling the balance of stamina and endurance. Losing all your stamina renders you helpless and easy prey which will be fatal very often. Stamina is lost by actions requiring heavy physical effort or, often in combat by cumming. Yes- A key piece of combat is that the monsters you fight want more than a piece of you, many will try to eat you but others will try to breed the resistance out of you first then swallow or even breed you until you’re incapacitated for an easy meal. Others might be willing to let you walk away uneaten in exchange for a good fuck. It’s a very femdom focused game. Many of the encounters have dialog or attacks that will end in you getting drained and that can play a role in survival.

What is in this: lots of oral vore, anal vore, full tour, scat (will be optional in the future but for now it isn’t), some unbirth, lots of taunting and femdom interactions. There's a little horror in story and cosmic horror and theology that make up the main plot. Lots of femdom sex "forced breeding" stuff from horny monsters desperate to drain you to get an easy meal.

What there isn’t any of: Male preds. (none unless there is something like a dragon in future (wink).
Other vore types and situations might pop up here and there or be given an easter egg as we go.

I have thousands of images I am putting together for this. I have hundreds of images of internals for various circumstances. The build here is at an early stage but I’ve been working on this a while writing and generating images so now we're at a point it can start coming together!

-Just this week we added sound and that's been a fun upgrade.

-I’ve made several short videos which are also going to be part of attacks or loss events. There is one in the demo if you can find it!


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-Enjoy some visuals on how the minigames and some mechanics work!

-Enjoy some images from some initial slides I put together and some direct from the game-

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Here is the download for the game!
https://mega.nz/folder/6uRR1Lpa#tkLcWer1rCmUlCbADPs7Cg

Enjoy! Let me know what you think, and please keep an eye out for future updates.

*REMEMBER THIS IS AN EARLY BUILD! You will not see everything pictured here or all the mechanics listed here- but more is coming! We just wanted to make an 8/8 announcement!

The next update will have merchant scenes, several more encounters, several more preds, dozens of endings, a few small side quests, exploration of the town, and a lot more content including full combat!

[CrossroadSeraph (mention)]

Are there any plans for a player female character and if so letting them be a player pred as well?

[ig00r (mention)]

Nice demo!

You get a lot of lore and the one training battle has a good variety of scenes.

Is the 3rd QTE winnable?

I guess you need to annoy Solina to get her vore scene, but who wants to be mean to her?

Will there be a mechanic that takes into account of preferred methods of consumption that adds boni / mali to the MC and makes a pred more likely to use certain attacks?

[quicks (mention)]

Are there any plans for a player female character and if so letting them be a player pred as well?
Link to post

The player will only ever be male. The images are hand edited so making a secondary player would double a lot of work. I’m not against a switch to a female character for small arcs or something like that. Maybe a section here and there or a side thing where you jump perspective to a female predator- but most of this will be male prey.

[quicks (mention)]

Nice demo!

You get a lot of lore and the one training battle has a good variety of scenes.

Is the 3rd QTE winnable?


I guess you need to annoy Solina to get her vore scene, but who wants to be mean to her?

Will there be a mechanic that takes into account of preferred methods of consumption that adds boni / mali to the MC and makes a pred more likely to use certain attacks?
Link to post

You know what- that rapid attack qte isnt winnable. We meant to change the dialog to clarify that or make an extra slide showing a success but I forgot to add that. Either way it’s there to demonstrate that attacking a readied opponent is a bad idea. Good catch and sorry for the confusion.

Preferences in general is something I want to put in but focusing on content right now. I don’t think we’ll have a feature that makes it so you don’t see a certain type of vore between oral or AV because that gets into mechanics- there are enemy encounter planned that allowing yourself to be eaten on way or another is advantageous and escaping one way or another is often going to be a tactical choice- so if you dislike throats or rectums that preference might butt heads with gameplay. That said- once combat starts you will have the talk option and feel free to surrender to enemies and ask them to swallow you with whatever hole you want to see more of. Most will oblige to an offer for a free meal.

[Lafrogo (mention)]

would there maybe be plans for some sentient fat content...? or some post vore digestion stuff that would semi loop

[quicks (mention)]

There ARE going to be game overs where the player is digested again and again and some game overs with certain enemies that can add you to their body in a way that is kind of like sentient fat but not in this demo. That's all I'll say about it for now.

[roflcopterz8 (mention)]

Demo is pretty solid so far!

[Monf (mention)]

Great demo! Do you have a release date for upcoming content?

[quicks (mention)]

Thank you.

Not sure on when the next update will be, maybe a month or 2. Maybe less if I end up with a bunch of time somehow. I'm excited for the next chunk it's when a lot of the actual stuff pops off. Expect to be able to explore the town and get into some trouble with horsegirls, some rabbits, a wolfgirl, a mage, and some one-off visuals involving a few other creatures I worked on tonight. I might also have another run in with a local paladin or 2 depending on whether or not we want to tie in one of the area's. Depending on how much of the side content we want to kick off there might be more. The good news is that if you made it through the prologue you got through "the boring part." We get a lot more action from this point on!

I got about 30 slides of probably 60 or so with the wolf girl this weekend. I want the next release to be maybe 200-300 slides. Some of it will be pretty fast because I have a lot already generated but a lot I need to touch up. I'm trying to balance quality/quantity/time a bit.

Genuinely I appreciate the support here.

[Doughnutz2000 (mention)]

Really keen to see how this progresses! Great demo!
Take your time, bigger spaced updates are more enjoyable than little and often

[TheSoulessGem (mention)]

Super peak, loved it so far, I think it could use a little more writing for some of the vore scenes, for digestion and such. Felt a little bare bones but other than that it was really awesome, the combat and the multitude of scenes was really, really nice. Great work, and nice to see more hopefully....

[Yarmonas (mention)]

I liked the game; it’s funny, features an open world, and is currently one of the most promising games in the vore genre—despite the AI ​​art, which didn't bother me. So, I’m going to follow the game, and if they launch a Patreon at some point, I might join.

[quicks (mention)]

Digestion will be a little more central to gameplay and game overs will be slightly more drawn out as we get into the actual combat in upcoming encounters. Aine and Solina both use magic to instantly digest the player here which won’t be true for other stomachs.

Thanks for the feedback. Stick around. Glad you’re excited to see more.

[Chaos199416 (mention)]

This is definitely going to be interesting can't wait until we get to the vulpine or cat like preds

[quicks (mention)]

By vulpine if you mean the top example slide youll see a lot of her next update. Wolfgirls in general play a big part in this chapter and the next so there are a lot of them coming up. Expect a few reoccurring wolfgirls and several mobs.

Catgirls I do plan on being future preds too. Theres one i already rendered a bit of but she wont be popping up for a while.

More foxy vulpine designs I hadnt looked at but id consider it.

[bernie99 (mention)]

Really excited to see where the project goes, it already looks and play like a great sandbox RPG and really enjoy that you went with the decision for semi sandbox free roam over the spam click through dialogue to choices alternative.
I'm very intrigued into what you'll turn the main story into overall, only thing that beats good vore scenes is a good plot imo!
Also a big fan of the semi-cruel femdom world theme in general that we got a taste of in the demo, do you have plans for more willing scene as well?

[quicks (mention)]

As far as willing stuff- there is a plan for quite a bit but mostly through just the speech/dialog options.

"I surrender" is always an option. Usually it will be a quick way for anyone you tell that to to mock you and then dispose of you however they see fit. You can even tell it to merchants, random girls around town, and quest givers just for fun. The only reason you can't tell it to Solina is because there is another option in her dialogs that results in the same thing, and you can tell it to Aine even if it isn't fatal.

The femdom only gets more dommy from here. Solina and Aine are friendly. Surrender yourself to an actual bad girl sometime and see what happens.

I want you to enjoy beating my game, but not as much as you enjoy losing it.

[VelvetPurple (mention)]

Really looking forward to this! What's here already looks promising, though I want more! I hope in the future we could gain an item or ability that makes getting digested not an automatic game over. I just wanna get churned and disposed off and then see my pred again smirking at me saying that I'm her little turd, teasing me that I got churned.

And sentient fat if possible (and not a game over, cause that would take away from being sentient fat) would be really neat too. Could have it tied to the reformation item/ability so you decide when to reform and basically watch your pred's life carry on while you jiggle on her butt. And lastly what I wish for is that being in a stomach or getting eaten during a fight can end the fight and the pred either carries on with their day or teases you with you digesting over a long course of time as you try to escape, with other random events happening like your pred meeting someone, eating something which makes her stomach fill up with food around you and maybe even someone that could try to help you who then could potentially also get eaten.

Really looking forward to whatever happens!

[quicks (mention)]

I had considered an item or something at some point that allows respawns. For me that’s more of a continuity hurdle- a lot of my plans kind of fall apart if you zap back to a safe zone because there are a lot of sandbox areas but there’s also progressive battles and traversal stuff planned that don’t make sense to just reset and I don’t think just poofing back with a 2nd health bar is as fun. I also like being on the edge of defeat more than “eh I have 5 more lives in the bank”

That said, yeah I get it, it does have some fun interactions. I especially like the idea of a pred being able to tease you about a rematch when they crapped you before. I’m open to it and I’ll think about it. Sentient fat probably not as much, I like the player being tormented, digested, and shat- but I kind of like that punch line. I do plan on a few niche interactions with enemies that getting digested isn’t the end in a "I own your soul now" or similar type fate but I think that’s always going to be a game over for me. The “game over” part is a lot of fun and it’s the vibe I want here.

Let me think about it though. Right now I’m backlogged but I’m more open the longer it goes on. Maybe a future area will fit better for canonical respawns and enemies who have interactions with it.