- Dec 4, 2016
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We actually just released a new adventure (that's it, a stand alone story in DiCK) in which we redid this as you say; you have to manually go to locations and find the clues in a new city that you have to navigate through. It is more like CoC1 than TiTs or CoC2, though (you navigate through using the menu instead of a map), but at least its a better place to explore IMOI mean, you already have TiTS and CoC as great example how text-based sex games could be.
First priority would be categorizing the areas in something like a map. So far you've made it that events can only be triggered from either journal or traveling to the submenu under each areas, which is honestly, not intuitive. Putting them under few submenus can very easily fix the UI clutter.
For example, putting the map access under [Move] menu and removing the [Return to Base] and [Visit Last Location]. You can put the locations under the [Move] option:
[Town], [Forest], [Mountains] and the surrounding towns.
Inside [Town] Menu you can draw a simple map with movement nodes, like [Castle] [Downtown] [Outskirts] each with their own minimap and event nodes ([Blacksmith],[Tavern]) so the players don't need to navigate a lot of dropdown menus inside dropdown menus.
Secondly, using the lowerside bar more than just to choose dialogue options or battle skills. Like in the slave management, surely there's a better way to display all of that information aside from the main screen? The sex option also should be displayed in a new screen, not shoved on the lower right side like that. Items and equipment, too, shouldn't be a dropdown menu from the side of the screen (most importantly, show players the stats of the weapon and not just put flavor text, because that means people won't need to calculate how much attack they gain from the weapon). Adding to this, there's no need for the character's status page to be displayed 24/7 aside from the three important stats (HP, Lust and Corruption).
Thirdly, explanations of how things works. There's virtually no tutorial on managing your captured slaves nor explanation what did what. I've tried to put a captured E-rank succubus as a whore which ate leftovers, sleeping on barracks and with no salary and putting a captured S-rank bandit as Hunter with High salary, sleeping on personal room and fed with fresh meal. Nothing tells you what these things would give you. Same thing with the other management options for the town; setting the priority for goverment to high doesn't change the main politics of Nepotism for over 200 days.
I want, though, to make a map or something similar, and I am looking into how to do that.
About the rest, I overall agree, and will take it as considerations to work in it next. I am considering on reworking a little bit the management side of the game, although it is a little bit obscure, is the journal a good tool for this? How to assign what they eat, where they sleep, etc. is this good? or what kind of UI would you suggest