Alexis Kennedy  🕯Verified account

there are three likely goals (and a number of other endings) in CS: Power, Knowledge, and Sensation

so this is a good start for our self-destructive Notion: Sensation, in that Hellraiser SM sort of way. There are even constant references in the CS lore to 'peeling back the skin of the world'.

of course, it is a lady bottom, and some people prefer the bottoms of mens to the bottoms of ladies.

maybe that's not a problem! It could be the bottom of the protagonist, for instance. It could be a general standin for people's bottoms, and I think, on purely aesthetic grounds, the general cultural consensus has been that lady bottoms > mans bottoms

but at the very least it could be *read* as imposing sexual preferences. I (a man) chatted to Lottie (a lady) and we thought it was probably okay, but not definitely okay

a relevant point here is that art time is at a bit of a premium. @cuckooclockwork are turning out magnificently horrible icons for us at a good clip, and thanks to the Kickstarter's success we have a bigger art budget than we expected

but there are a finite number of working days between now and May 31st, and for both pragmatic and quixotic reasons we dislike being late. There are, consequently, a determinedly finite number of bottoms that can be drawn by freelancers with other commitments

CS involves a lot of very similar icons - eg there are >100 different occult tomes, not all of which need to be immediatley unique, and a whole range of things like Rites and Commissions which are *supposed* to be similar. So Lottie is already doing some +

+ art tweaking, and she was up for drawing a mans bottoms. imagine. Lottie has now drawn (subject to searching creative review) a mans bottoms, and this solves the asset problem, but what about the design problem?

CS takes my usual approach in being agnostic about the gender and sexual preferences of the protagonist. So if there is a lady bottom and a man bottom, we don't particularly want to bring the narrative to a halt and say 'indicate your bottom preferences'

so what I am *inclined* to do is to randomly assign a bottom variety each playthrough. If you end up with a man bottom and you prefer a lady bottom, RP it; and vice versa

I will probably allow a, ah, back door to let people swap the one for the other, if only to cut down on the trickle of occasional very cross emails

I may *also* just offer a narrative choice framed in a relevant way: 'at the Ecdysis Club, do you choose this companion or that companion'. It's a bit micro compared to the rest of the game, but it might fly

anyway, we can now announce definitively the presence of multiple bottoms in Cultist Simulator