Ascension Simulation
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Goddess Maker Q&A Volume 4 (April 14th to July 28th 2025)
🕑 Added 2025-07-29 06:48:17 +0000 UTCIntroduction
Today is the Anniversary of the Release of the First Distribution Build, A.0, of this Official Multi-Year Goddess Maker Project.
As A.2.2 is coming near, today seems to be the ideal day to present a new volume of the pre-release Q&A.
On Chad and Stacy (Featured Illustration)
The promotional illustration for this Q&A is the character art for Chad and Stacy , and as there are many more characters sprites developed for A.2.2, apart from this, it felt appropriate to showcase their designs as a sneak peek of what's to come.
For those who have played the Goddess Maker distribution builds since A.2, you should be familiar with their height growth competitive mechanic and how it is tied to the core growth development of the lab (ex. Serums -> Super Serums -> Nutrient-Based Natural Growth -> etc.).
Aside from being the introduction to Super Traits in the World of Goddess Maker, there wasn’t much thought to their character designs, as Chad and Stacy are strongly based off the cultured stereotype of the American Alpha Male College Footballer and his woman who is an extension of his vanity.
If Stacy were to expanded to be more than just a tagalong, she would be a passive aggressive projector of envy, her appearance symbolic to her green color tones.
Since “Lab of God” is the human-centric game section of Goddess Maker, Chad and Stacy are good early rivals for the player and partner characters, as they represent a high human stock of desirable traits of height, strength, and beauty, whom contrast the low height, strength, and beauty starting traits of the player and partner characters.
With Chad possessing the "Alpha Reaction Gene", and Stacy too through the association of transmissive contact, even when the player/partner character grows to overtake their "alpha" status, their bodies reject this reality so they grow larger to reclaim their dominant status over the player and partner characters, and this process repeats until the Super Trait has been outcompeted.
Given the focus of Chad over Stacy, Chad is more of dilemma to the player character's character, as opposed to Stacy to the partner character, playing the part of a college bully who demeans the player character's self-esteem putting the player character into a position where they "fight or flee" to the challenge that Chad represents.
A flaw that is apparent to Chad's inclusion in contrast to the player character is the evident comparison to the cringe nerd vs. jock academic social norm that the degenerate American culture tends to reinforce as opposing social cliques, even though it is detrimental to society to separate strength and intelligence, as opposed to raising an intellectual and strong youth.
In spite of this, what Goddess Maker encourages is the development of a new kind of man, in contrast to the old ways, who focuses on developing both their strength and intelligence, becoming even smarter than their initial nerd / pathetic loser label, and ascends their way towards godhood, starting with overcoming "the alpha".
Q & A Volume 4
Q: Do you see Goddess Maker being considered as an Indie Game like those that the Influencers promote?
A: Probably not, as although Goddess Maker’s development will have a development lifespan like those indie games, I’m not one to position my project of passion toward that goal. Hence why my outreach so far hasn’t followed the popular playbook of how other indie games are developed.
A lot of what I’m trying to do is to break new ground, a revolutionary approach, that on its surface, is to go against the what has come before to form a new mold for trendsetters.
If that makes me popular, well I’ll appreciate what comes with it and use what is gained to bring my work closer to what I envision.
But I’m not really trying to appeal just to gain an audience, it is a selfish endeavor where my pursuit is to build something that I want to make, and if it trickles down and makes this journey more comfortable to venture then it’s alike a self-serving career.
Nevertheless, it is not mine to judge but others’s to write the history.
Q: What’s with the unimplemented cosmetics research?
A: Initially cosmetic development was present under the implication that it would be a low cost way to accumulate funds during the early stages of “Lab of God” to pay off the debt, however with the timing of “Lab of God” monthly calendar mechanic, I’m currently unsure if putting it in will be more of detriment to the game’s pace than without, since it is of a lesser development to the gameplay than the paramount growth serums.
As for the concepts for cosmetics, it would be manufactured items that would change eye and hair color, and perhaps costumes, general aesthetic things that would be best saved for a remake with a higher labor-time art budget.
Q: What are some ideas to implement time travel in an ascension game?
A: One is a long held idea of mine of moving forward in time and watching the generations of humans incrementally evolving themselves and their surrounding society to become superior beings, sorta like the transition from a planetary species to a species the size of planets.
Another is where one rewrites the events in the past to affect the present, like altering one's historical genealogy to give themselves better genes, thus rewriting material circumstances and evolving oneself in real-time.
Q: Will there be any plant-like transformations in Goddess Maker?
A: Possibly, disregarding discussion of plant-like growth visual aesthetics, I might implement an optional independent growing plant girl or a lab grown homunculi mechanic tied to the calendar day system of the “Lab of God” game section, whose growth aids the lab’s defenses, research, etc. during the later months of the game where the Super Lab behaves as a regional center of power.
Q: How do random encounters / events work?
A: Using basic random number generation, the program loops through a list of events until it proceeds with an event that meets the pre-existing criteria and therefore plays it in-game.
Since there is a lot of thought put to the game’s random events, it’s often the case that random events have their own randomizations like a different variant of the core premise or memory of the event having occurred before that influences how the repeat of the event is presented and executed.
Q: For extraordinary events, are they all transfer, growth, and drain events?
A: It’s the general idea that “Lab of God”’s optional extraordinary events, available after the debt is paid off, are those that imitate opening up Pandora’s box and allowing an external entity to meddle with the otherwise stable growth/shrink gameplay.
In addition to a chance-time wheel being spun or growth given to the character who wins a game of rock-paper-scissors, there will be more diverse consequences like condition-restricting curses and special extraordinary items, like an amulet of absorption, that are brought onto the ongoing gameplay that will inevitably cause much conflict.
Q: Will debug mode be expanded upon? Will a scene viewer be added?
A: Debug will generally be expanded upon over time as an aid to the development to toggle variables to reach certain gameplay conclusions or to check what would currently break the game.
Perhaps in the future I’ll add a scene viewer; but, the problem is right now the game’s balancing still in flux, so it would be wise to hold off developing the scene viewer until “Lab of God” is more finalized.
Q: Quantity or Quality?
A: Although not the popular consensus when comes to game development, I see the “quality” approach as something that can be reserved after the game is finalized, and as a sorta post-production or remaster of my project, developed by artistic imitators whom can improve on what’s there, without needing to pre-conceive of the parts that make the whole.
Whilst “quantity” in the form of building content for the game, I find to be a much more important aspect to tackle since a game is best enjoyed as a long form experience, as opposed to viewing a highly polished artwork to receive immediate gratification and then disregarding from it once experienced.
In light of my reasoning, the recent giantess fetish game, SAEKO, biggest complaint was that there wasn’t that much content in the game, despite the high quality experience.
Not that it was a game worth comparing my work to, since its very distinct in its premise compared to Goddess Maker’s more simulative direct fetish experience; but it is nevertheless, a tale of appreciation and caution that a developer can learn from.
Q: How do you write so much?
A: I’m a big fan of using Apple Notes to document my creative thoughts as I have them and expand them later into larger-form writings.
It’s no understatement the convenience of utilizing a free-flow writing program that syncs to all your devices, and the dedication to keep on writing.
Q: How’s your morale concerning the length of the project’s development?
A: What can I say that hasn’t been said with the burden of an independent indie game developer attempting to develop a game with high ambition?
It’s a roller coaster of pressing forward of completing and overcoming my own tough set expectations with some days being a mindless repetitive keyboard pressing session to build a part of the program, and other days I’m rejuvenating the future of the project by looking onward with much promise in what the game I’m making means to me.
Given that’s been over a year of game development, my dedication is sincere, the income I receive, through this pursuit, being a core aspect keeping me moving forward.
There is often the worry with the project's development, that I experience, where I feel like I’m progressing slower than what I feel that I can accomplish, but I can rationally put together that this feeling is like a self-inflicted curse of deluding oneself in a world of greater projects developed by hundreds of people and assertively managed to get as much productivity from them as possible, as opposed to my situation where my success is based on my own willingness to create and the luck that my endeavor bears long-lasting fruit.
It’s nevertheless the trend with indie games to be developed over a long course of time, with the game’s audience patiently waiting and waiting.
Despite the situation of struggling with the expectations that I have subjected to myself to, I do feel like I'm in the right place in my life, developing this project, as I believe it has a large legacy value upon the history that is currently being written.
Q: Has the project expanded since you begun with the distribution builds?
A: Sorta, the original scope of the game was to focus solely on the player character and partner character, with visitors coming to the lab occasionally. Though between A.1 and A.2, I decided to expand this in response to the early large fan support in order to include a whole “social’ aspect to the game which has added a significant amount to the game’s development, but is also something that adds a lot more depth to defining the basis of the fledging ascension genre.
Such things like politics, other romantic interests, and social experiments were not part of the initial Project Binary Ascension planning, but rather came as part of Goddess Maker’s forward development.
Q: When will A.2.2 be released?
A: Although much further than my initial scheduling expectations, the development build, A.2.2, will be released in August 2025, with it also being the last of the A.2.X series before the release of A.3.
A big time expenditure during this development period were the creation of over 200 additional experiment trials, a content feature that plays into the Prestige Mechanic and one whose groundwork dated back to the first distribution build (A.0), and granted that plenty of these additional experiments feature both the player character and partner character conducting the trials, I hope people can be sympathetic to why it was a big time-burden to develop and implement.
Other things like Prestige has been developed mechanically, although a concern that I'll brace for will be a lot of questions from play testers asking about how to earn this award or that award to raise the Prestige Level, as the majority of the 200 awards to earn between the player character and partner character won't be accessible to earn in-game, so I will preface now that the Prestige Mechanic was designed to cover the whole 12 months of “Lab of God” rather than just the early months, so the player can experience earning only some of them in A.2.2.
Another interesting accomplishment for A.2.2 is the plethora of new character art, which I’ve been enjoying developing. Although not efficient, I didn’t focus on the transformative variants, but rather new designs, so I leave that work for A.3 to accomplish, alongside breast expansion and other permanent growth mechanics.
Comments
Boosie
Sounds great! Perhaps in order to head off questions about which prestige awards are available, you make a list of the ones that can currently be earned to easily refer play testers to. I'm sure we'll still ask anyway, because... well.. reading is hard for many (including myself sometimes..)
Zuri
I'm very excited for the next build!
