Hey Gang - I gave up on the project awhile back. Rewriting everything was admittedly biting off more than I could chew, and I lost interest.
Instead of remaking the game entirely with a new vibe of older teen Cream, I have decided to instead just trying to finish the original. I downloaded a fresh copy of the game two days ago, and have a bunch of work done already.
The time system was easy to change, tedious to implement. So I have started there. The time increments by a default of 30 mins for an event, but can also be input manually. All scenes have a check for the time of day, location, and current RWC level, and will give a custom greeting when you summon Cream. This is implemented in most locations already. If the time of day is too late, Cream will tell you she is sleepy, and won't do any more activities with you.
I have created variables for thresholds of the important stats, like RWC_LOW, RWC_MED, and RWC_HIGH. I have started to replace parts of the code that refer to checks of RWC by a hard value, with these variables instead, so they can be finetuned later without having to change them everywhere in the code each time I want to tune or balance the game. There are thresholds for Touch, Happy, Lust, etc as well.
For example:
Touch_LOW = 10, Touch_MED = 25, Touch_HIGH = 45. If I want to change Touch_HIGH from 45 to 40 later on, I can do that in one place, and it will affect the rest of the script in the game.
I am using a similar concept for energy. I have Energy_LOW, Energy_MED, and Energy_HIGH. This will help tune the balance of action economy with the "rewards".
Each time an event finishes playing out, stats and flags for achievements will be updated, time will tick forward, and hunger will tick as well.
I see AI art for the game is still going strong. If people are willing to share their work here, I would be more than happy to implement it into the game. The last thing I'll need to figure out is hosting the game for download, and submitting it to the mods here on a new thread.
Hope everyone is well!