This month, we're gonna give you a quick rundown of the player upgrades and character progression. To start, players will be able to use their upgrade points in two distinct ways:

1. Upgrades to player HP and new interactions in the city map.
2. Learning new abilities to use during Dominance Battles

The upgrades will fall into 3 main categories:

• Increasing player Orgasm Meter (HP).
  
• Various methods of giving players additional Stamina, allowing them to perform more abilities in Dominance Battles.
  
• Map actions that allow the player to effect the Dommes outside of battle and to stall the turn timer that leads to failure.

We're not entirely certain yet whether those upgrade branches will be independant of one another or using a Tier system. Tester feedback will help us decide on the eventual form of the upgrades menu, but their functions are unlikely to change at this point.

That brings us to the more complex matter of Dominance Battle abilities. Aside from the obvious upgrades that simply make the numbers go up on the starting abilities to match the Dommes getting stronger in later Stages, there will also be abilities that allow the player to inflict buffs and debuffs. Players can only equip a maximum of 9 abilities (including duplicates) to their grid, so slapping random abilities on there is really only recommended for people who enjoy being berated by the Dommes after losing. Since the key to victory is outlasting the Domme rather than simply 'beating' her, players will have access to both offensive and defensive abilities.

On the offensive side, players can choose between 3 basic attacks with increasing damage equal to their increase in Stamina cost. There's also the ability to increase your damage, which can stack, and to interrupt Domme attacks. You can stick to low cost attacks, freeing up Stamina for cleansing debuffs and removing shields, or equip high cost attacks and go full offense.

Defensively, players will be able to give themselves shields, debuff Dommes and make Domme abilities take more time. Although a purely defensive playstyle might not be feasible (I don't think any of us have tried it yet), some defensive abilities will be necessary in later Stages when the Dommes unleash all their dirty tricks.

To complete DommeBreaker, players will have to use their heads. The brain one, that is. Although, not to fear, there's plenty for the other head to enjoy as well ;)

That brings us to the Roadmap update! What did we finish this month?

FINISHED:

• Tomie Victory Scene 2 art + programming
  
• Tomie Combat Stage 3 sketches
  
• Text fixes

CURRENT:

• Tomie Combat Stage 3 renders
  
• Stacy rewrites
  
• Ending writing

That doesn't seem like much when listed that way, but we're also working on additional Durak NTR dlc and we convinced someone to help test the game who wasn't involved in making it. That should help us get an outside perspective on clarity, consistency and balance in the current build and moving forward.

Finally, that brings us to the poll for next month 😊

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2468300/DommeBreaker/

With Tomie and titties! Whoo! Sorry, we've been making good progress and we're a little excited. The December poll was rigged, so you could really only pick Tomie, but we decided it would sneakily be not-rigged. Which is to say, the most chosen answer would decide how much we would show. Fortunately, "Tomie <3" won out, so you get the good stuff. You're welcome.

So here we have Tomie blowing a kiss:

Tomie teasing the player with her boobs:

Lastly, Tomie using a makeout attack in her topless phase:

You may recall we mentioned in the past that the art would get sexier as you progress through the 3 Stages for each character. That's still Stage 1. It only gets spicier from there and we can't wait for you all to see the rest when the game releases.

Since it's the start of a new year, we thought it might be a good idea to pull up the entire 'roadmap' again that we brought up a couple months ago. We've also been testing and polishing the already finished parts. That may not sound very exciting, but it's been a great joy for us to have enough of a game built that there's a point to testing and fixing it. Maybe we're just being massive nerds, but finding bugs and fixing them feels good. As you look through the roadmap, pay special attention to one important fact: the game design elements are nearly all finished and programmed. At this point, we're mostly focusing on art and music while continually testing, tweaking and bug fixing the core game. We're hopeful that DommeBreaker will come out this year. You know, barring unforeseen disasters. Haha. We wouldn't have another global disaster this year, right? ... right?

Oh, and I'm just sliding the poll in here, so people don't overlook it at the bottom.

FINISHED (Aside from Music and Voice Acting):

• Story Intro
  
• All Tutorials
  
• Backgrounds
  
• Base combat
  
• Game flow design
  
• Player Upgrades
  
• Player abilities
  
• Emily Dominance Battles
  
• Emily Victory Scenes
  
• Tomie Dominance Battles Stages 1+2
  
• Tomie Victory Scene 1

FINISHED MUSIC:

• Michael Theme
  
• Richard Theme
  
• Map Theme

CURRENT:

• Tomie Dominance Battle Stage 3 art
  
• Tomie Victory Scenes 2+3 art
  
• Music
  
• Testing and bug fixing
  
• Balance tweaking
  
• Ending writing

PENDING SHORT-TERM:

• Jitsuko Dominance Battles
  
• Jitsuko Victory Scenes art
  
• Stacy Upgrades art
  
• Additional scenes art
  
• Ending

PENDING LONGTERM:

• Voice acting
  
• DLC Chapter 1: Shizuru
  
• DLC Art Book