Ren'Py [Development Thread] Brothelmania: Brothel Management Sim

[osanaiko]

That however is not the case with portraits and bodies, because at least for V1.0.0, this game will require all those images used to be an specific size as Ren’Py (as far as I know) isn’t the best at seamlessly adjusting size on its own, and with this feature the UI will just start doing some funny things on its own.

Love this thread, it's very interesting.

I wanted to let you know about the "fit" style property for images within Renpy screens. it covers pretty much all forced scaling options you would need.
Lots more details here:

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And the manual entry:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Quintillian]

Love this thread, it's very interesting.

I wanted to let you know about the "fit" style property for images within Renpy screens. it covers pretty much all forced scaling options you would need.
Lots more details here:

You must be registered to see the links

And the manual entry:

You must be registered to see the links

Thanks for checking out the thread, and for the resources!

I wasn’t aware about fit. Currently, I was already computing the scaling myself (bottom part of this code)

        def get_image(self, tags=[], exclusive=False, width=1024, height=768, manual_scale=False):
            tags_to_search = [self._girl_pack_name]
            tags_to_search_temp = set()
            tags_to_ignore = set()

            for tag in tags:
                if isinstance(tag, ContentTags):
                    tags_to_search_temp.add(tag.value)

                elif isinstance(tag, AntiContentTags):
                    for tag_to_ignore in tag.value[1]:
                        tags_to_ignore.add(tag_to_ignore.value)

            tags_to_search.extend(list(tags_to_search_temp))
            search_results = list(tags_manager.search_tags(
                tags_to_search=tags_to_search,
                tags_to_ignore=list(tags_to_ignore),
                exclusive=exclusive))
               
            if not search_results:
                search_results = list(tags_manager.search_tags([self._girl_pack_name]))

            image_index = renpy.random.choice(search_results)          
            image_path = tags_manager.images[image_index].get("path")
            image_size = tags_manager.images[image_index].get("size")
            image = Image(image_path)

            if not manual_scale:
                return image

            if image_size is None:
                image_size = renpy.image_size(image)
                tags_manager.images[image_index]["size"] = image_size

            width_scale = width / image_size[0]
            height_scale = height / image_size[1]

            # Choose the smaller scale factor to ensure the image fits within the bounds
            # Selecting one scale_factor ensures aspect ratio is maintained
            scale_factor = min(width_scale, height_scale)

            debug_print("Image size: {}".format(image_size))
            debug_print("Width: {} Height: {}".format(width, height))
            debug_print("Scale factor: {}".format(scale_factor))
            return Transform(image, zoom=scale_factor)

But that said, fit "contain" works just the same and that is good to know. So, again: Thank You!

 

[Quintillian]

Time for a new update. Not much to report on the programing side unfortunately™. As I mentioned in the previous update, I wanted to spend some time deciding on the game's setting before going further. When I started this project, I'd envisioned it as a text-based fantasy sandbox sim, but things have changed. Not just to mention I moved away from text-based to more VN-style, I also realized I just didn't have the motivation in me to make yet another game set in medieval fantasy town #51 and that was the reason I had been putting this part off for so long. Well, that ends now. Last week I mentioned I was looking into Steampunk/Dungeonpunk for inspiration. If you are not familiar with Steampunk, you have some homework to do, if you are not familiar with Dungeonpunk either, think of it as Steampunk with the high fantasy elements you know and love, stuff like elves, dragons, magic, and no taxes.

The problem I'd with Steampunk and for that matter Dungeonpunk, it is the same I have with all of the '-punks' in the sense they really go deep into the punkiness, and while that makes sense from a selling point for those niches, it makes everything else that is not on the same flavor of punk stick out like a sore thumb.

I like some variety for the setting, or at least, the possibility of it. Therefore, I decided to go back to basics, I still want to have the fantasy elements (low-ish fantasy though, so we have elves, but also taxes). As for the time period, no medieval times or before. Modern feels boring too, honestly, and has other problems, specially for a slave brothel management game. No near future either, if I wanted to make a game twenty minutes into the future, I would be modding Free Cities instead. Space Sci-fi could be cool (makes notes for another management game about a space roaming brothel in a starship), but I have too much love for the genre to tarnish it with my amateur writing, so that's why, I have decided to set this game a little bit into the past, into the fictional city of Babylon, in the way I'm thinking of it, pictured it as if was fantasy Rome, with all the decadence real Rome was known for, but that it instead of collapsing, it somehow made it into an early 1940s Hollywood era.

With this change, I went back and re-touched the menus with a new color palette in mind:

Spoiler: main_meni_rework

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Spoiler: lobby_menu_rework

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And, now that I have a definitive setting, I can start writing lore to fill out the world. On the writing side, I already begin working on a skippable intro scene that is just there to give a little context to the player's situation and serve as a small tutorial. On the programming side, I began working in the barebones of the Character Creation. Thus, the plan for the next update is to keep working on these two items, and hopefully, in the coming weeks at long last formally introduce the Personality System inspired by the Big Five personality traits, but adjusted to fit an h-game and now on-brand with the setting, composed of the five Facets that will shape a Girl's personality: Wickedness, Lewdness, Industry, Spotlight, and Romance.

Until next week then!

 

[Quintillian]

Update. This iteration brought a lot of further changes to the UI. Some of them as only half-baked, but nonetheless, an update is due.

• Continued work on Character Creator and the intro/tutorial scene. Going slow on this two, as the CC is turning out to have very repetitive work.
• Renamed the previously mentioned Girls screen to Roster screen. Going forward, although is not currently a focus of mine to include male slaves, the game’s code base or UI shouldn’t just assume the gender or sex of the brothel residents.
• Simplified the now Roster screen so it fits more characters. It was getting annoying even for me as the developer to have 10+ characters in the brothel, but only being able to easily see 3 or 4, and having to scroll every single time to reach the others below. Now, it can offer a general view of 10 characters, which is a nice, round number, and I do like nice, round things. Also simplified this screen limiting the info shown. Going forward, the goal of this screen is to further prioritize displaying to the player which stats have changed recently for each character.

Spoiler: New Roster Screen

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• Consequently, changed the Overview screen so it is now an actual overview. It is basically what was previously on the Girls screen, but for an specific character. The wall of text that was the previous Overview screen has been moved to General > Description.
• On the same note, simplified the top menu, so it is now just General, Character, Interact, and Manage tabs.
• Switched Stats from having their own color to a semaphore coloring system from low to high, and give Stats bars their own sprite instead of using a Frame with a Solid color.
• Remove the Obedience Stat. Some sort of numerical value to determine how willing a character is to following orders will still be needed in some form, but I am moving away from the idea of having it being a discrete number. It will probably test going for some sort of baseline Obedience, and then add or subtract modifiers to that depending on the act the player is asking the character to do, that will hurt or help the ultimate Obedience Check required to get compliance.
• Lastly, the Adoration and Fear Stats were moved to be under the Relationships System. As a reminder, the Relationships System is currently implemented so everyone in the brothel has a relationship with everyone else, instead of just towards the player.

Spoiler: New Overview Screen

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• On the Character > Skills screen, added the same treatment to the Skills bars sprite.
• Added the Unknown icon at the right side of the Skill bar to indicate the player currently doesn’t knows the character’s dispositions towards skills. For Main Skills, not Sex Skills, these dispositions currently go as Hates, Dislikes, Indifferent, Interested, and Passionate. Hidden values like this are considered in the game as Secrets.

Spoiler: Skills Screen

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• For the Interactions Screen. 4 types of Interactions the player can initiate are Chat, Sway, Influence, Training Interactions.

Spoiler: Interactions Screen

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• For now, only implementation of the Share Rumor Interaction was started. Asking a character to Share a Rumor, will prompt the player make on a roll (TBA). On success, that character then shares a Secret they know about someone else.
• For now, since the only Secrets a character knows are their own, they will reveal one of their own Secrets. The plan is to change this so that characters learn Secrets of other characters through Interactions between themselves that happen in the background every time the player Ends the Period of the Day, meaning a max of 3 Interactions per Day.

Spoiler: Share Rumor

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[Graff koo2]

Looks interesting
Good luck

 

[Quintillian]

New update.

So March is over, and with are any hopes of any Q1 2024 release of v0.1.0. That’s unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. This project started mid September 2023, and from there, it’s been a wild ride and the TODO list hasn’t stop growing. I wouldn’t call it scope creep though, it is more like a scope’s enlightenment as the features I’m envisioning take form one way or another. That said, I still don’t dare to predict any release dates soon, because I’m going to be really busy with another IRL project from late April to late July/early August, which will severely limit my ability to work on this. Knowing myself, I’ll sneak in sometime even if cost me sleep, so the most probable thing is these dev updates will slow down further because they also take some time to prepare.

In any case, let’s go through the summary of the developments for this iteration. As always, please feel free to leave opinions, suggestions, and/or critics. I appreciated it.

Spoiler: Clip1

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Updates:
- Pause work on the Character Creator, and Intro Scene. As for the Intro Scene, honestly, I just didn’t feel like it. For the CC, the ‘backend’ has been mostly set up, now is matter of preparing the UI and adding content to it. For now, it’s limited to a Male player character, but with an asterisks that I may come back and expand this option later on. There are 3 Gender Classes in the codebase, Male, Female, and Futa, but for now the Player creation process only uses Male.

- Updated the top hud and remove Food and Medicines from the list of resources. Food and Medicines are now considered as Upkeeps. Instead of maintaining a Food or Medicine inventory, the Upkeep gets converted to a money/gold/Eros cost at the end of the day. Additionally, joining the list of Upkeeps are Luxury and Drugs. More on them on a Future Post.

- Reworked the Effects System, from the ground up including structure, data, and initialization. There are still some rough edges to smooth, this will make more sense once I start writing about modding again on a a Future Post. I decided to not make mod support part of the v0.1.0 release. v0.1.0 will be strictly for the main game loop and base simulation mechanics.

- Speaking of Effects, and adding to it the Stats and Attributes, the entire game data configuration files have been switched to use TOML format instead of JSON. Internally nothing changes for the application as it still uses the data parsed as a dict, but going forward all config files that are planned to be end-user-editable will use TOML format because of comment support among other things.

- For Stats and Attributes, expanded and added some of their effects within the game. As well as updated their respective Tooltips.

- For Skills, added another sub-Stat per Skill, that will be referred as Learning. I’ve been going over and over through my Game Design Document thinking on ways to implement training in a way that is not too grindy, but also more or less realistic, and for a while I felt I was going around in circles. The problem is that when it comes to training / learning stuff, ‘not too grindy’ and ‘realistic’, sometimes feels contradictory. In practice, getting better at a Skill requires repetition of some degree unless you’re a savant. But that gave me an idea, that’s were Learning comes into focus, adding it to the Skills/Training system. For now Skills can only gain experience and level up from doing the thing. Training a Skill will not increase its XP right away, but increase its Learning Stat instead so that the next time XP on that Stat is earned, some Learning is consumed and the overall XP earned is increased. In the future, I want to add some extra behaviors to Learning, for example that as long as it’s value is not 0, even failed rolls can give XP.

- Speaking of Rolls, I invested way too much time down the rabbit hole that is probabilistic analysis of dice rolls systems. Definitely putting a pin on that to come back it later on, but for now, I’m going to dumb it down to a simple roll with modifiers and difficulty threshold, basically means I’ll just be vibing it, which means v0.1.0 may be a unbalanced mess, but that’s okay for now.

That’s all for now.


Edit:
Managed to squeeze one more change before locking in for the week.
- Added first implementation of Rolls and Checks in the UI.

Spoiler: Clip2

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[Quintillian]

Turns out, I was not as busy as I thought I would.

Yet.

So I figured I just carpe that diem and update here with the progress so far even its not much.

Updates:
- Change the name of the game. Yes, again. But this is the last, promise.
- Added the ability to visit the Slave Market and purchase slaves. I still want to implement some sort of location-travel like in Jack-o-Nine-Tails or Brothel King, other similar games, but honestly the thought of devoting time to look for images or generating them, and them actually come up with a map it just sucks out the motivation out of me, so it’s all coding for now.
- Lastly, I also played around with RenPy Key bind system to navigate the ui.

As usual, here is a

Spoiler: clip

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[Quintillian]

UPDATE!

Good news everyone, I’m not dead. Better news even, this project ain’t dead either. Bad news, however, turns out if you neglect real life responsibilities to work on a porn game as a side project, all the serious stuff starts to pile up.

Anyways, this is a long way to say I’ve been busy catching up with stuff, but not as busy that no progress on the game was made. So here it’s a late may update.

This past weeks, I’ve been thinking on the brothel phase mini-game, and how to show it to the player. I already had a previous implementation on a separate branch, but I felt it was too bloated with too much info and not enough action. The brothel phase is meant to work as a secondary game loop and its thought out to play similarly like a turn base combat encounter, just that instead of defeating enemies, you’re controlling the girl’s actions to raise the Patron’s arousal while watching out their patience doesn’t reach 0. Originally, each action was going to have an randomised component to determined success, but the more I play-tested that implementation, I found this very frustrating myself when I got a bad roll, and in turn made the mini-game more complex than I intended.

Here is a quick demo of my newest attempt. Bear in mind this is still a work in progress. There’re still many missing features, and I’m sure I’m going to find some serious bug I’ve missed sooner or later.

Lastly, just mention that I want to get done with this version of the brothel phase on the next weeks. If you have suggestions feel free to post them, meanwhile my goal is to polish all the existing features.

Until then.

 

[Quintillian]

New update. (I know, I know, need to start writing this more often.)

I finished the barebones of the Brothel Phase mini game.
I stripped away a lot of the previous complexity and started from scratch.
Here is how it goes…

At night, every Turn of the Brothel Phase Patrons will arrive at the Brothel seeking your girl’s services. There are different types of Patrons, with their own resistances, effects.

You have the option of assigning the girls straight away, though with the use of Abilities you can raise the Patron’s arousal which will increase how much they are willing to spend. Just be careful cuz aroused Patrons are less patient, and those with no patience left will leave the Brothel.

Missing items:

• Allow the player to review girl’s stats and skills during the Brothel Phase.
• Show Patron’s sex preference. (Patrons will have preference for a particular activity). (Showing this will allow the player to pick the right girl for the job.)
• Add a end of phase full report.
• Add more Abilities.
• Add more images to distinguish the Patrons.
• Allow Patrons to execute Abilities themselves.

I’ll be adding this at some point, but right now, I need a break from the Brothel Phase, and want to focus on other things.

So that said, my next objective for this game will be to stablish the definitive structure for modding support. This is vital because one of the hopes for this project is that it can grow with a community.

Of course, not everyone that will play the game will want to mod it. But for those very few who do, I want the simple (Not necessary easy, mind you, that will depend on the complexity of the mod, but I want to create a framework that will make extending the game through mods simple to understand, and leaving implementation details for the modders themselves). For now, modding tools will focus on facilitate adding the following:

• More Jobs.
• More Effects.
• More Abilities.
• More Rooms.
• More Room Upgrades.
• More Perks.

I think I’ve a good idea how to go about this at best of my ability, but that’s all I’m ready to say at this moment.

Anyways, that’s it for now. Until next time.

 

[Quintillian]

Tiny update.

As mentioned in previous post, I want the game to be easy to mod. I’m not expecting a high percentage of modders, but for the few, I want to give you the tools.

That said, one of the biggest problems I now have is creating documentation on how to mod. For now I want the implementation speak for itself, and if I receive feedback or questions once the game is out about how to mod, I’ll start working on a proper doc.

In the same line, with the ‘speak for itself’ statement, I mean that modder will need to look at how the game is currently made for guidance on how to mod. This is because even the game’s core content is considered a mod on its own. Once created, mods can be added to the mods/ directory, and players will be able to activate or deactivate mods through the Mods screen on the Main Menu.

 

[Quintillian]

Gave the Character Overview Screen some TLC.

Spoiler: Character Overview Screen

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I also changed the previous indicator Obedience to Defiance. The underlying funcionality remains the same, it is a 1d20 ( 1 twenty-sided die ) roll, with a base threshold of 10. But now it makes sense that the lower the value, the better.

 

[Quintillian]

Continued the ui improvements, and I can finally show off the progress on the perks tree screen (it's not a tree though, more like a board). The plan is also making perks fully moddable, with the ability to assign them positions to the board, or leave it to chance. Right now all boards have the same perks in cross in the center, but all others are placed randomly, between unique and repeatable perks. To unlock perk, another neighboring perk needs to be already unlocked.

Additionally, I started to mess around with Renpy's image prediction, which is something I had jotted down somewhere deep in the backlog, next to where my hopes and dreams go to die, but decided to finally look into it. As it can be seen, there is still a lot of room for improvement (honestly, not sure if necesary, right now since fps seems still fine*) when it comes to predicting imagepacks images, but at least all the images used for the perks are now being predicted properly.

*: Like for example, when I'm running the game with 100 characters, I get 60fps with the expected lag spikes when the game has to iterate through all the characters (usually for 5 to 7 seconds) for something, that there should be where a loading bar will be a great visual feedback, if I can get one to work, that is. Another part where lag appears is due to the sheer absurdity of ui elements with tooltips attached to them exist on the screen, to the point even with a vpgrid which only renders what's visible, the game lags a little. Fortunately, this is not surprising since currently I'm instanciating an objects of the TooltipData class on every mouse hover, which is textbook definition where a Object Pool optimization may be useful.

In any case, this post concludes the implementation of any mayor system for v0.0.1 !

From now, I need to start adding actual content through the .toml files, and review again if any of the old codebase needs a rewrite.

 

[Quintillian]

July is ending, and that means another update.

These past weeks I have been refactoring alot of the oldest codebase to make the whole thing share a common design that focuses on modability. Modding is not the main goal for v0.0.1 but it needs to be there so it serves as a foundation for the future. Fortunately, Ren'Py game makes themselves very modable by nature, and so most of what is left is adding the writing content.

And speaking of the devil, I mean, the writing content, now that I have all those systems in the background, I started to put it all together in what previously was the hardcoded wall of text in the Character's Description Screen.

So far on the Health status of the character is getting described. But thanks to how it is implemented, there is no messy spagetti if-statement stravaganza going in the codebase. Just rules matching. If a rules matches, shows a piece of text, if no rule matches, it shows NOT FOUND but only in dev mode, so myself or other modders know where the game is lacking content. New descriptions get automatically loaded by the game, so all that is required to add in new flavor is to add new line to the .csv file.

I settle on a .csv format because I think it's what the average person is more familiar to use, instead of modifying a .rpy file.

I'll add a more indept example later today if I am able.

 

[Su13n]

Just wanted to check in and ask whether you are still working on the game?

 

[Quintillian]

Just wanted to check in and ask whether you are still working on the game?

Thanks for checking in! I appreciate it.

Short answer: Yes, I am, just not as much as before, for now.

Long answer: The project is on forced hiatus. I'm taking it easy deciding where I want to commit my efforts next. To be fully honest, going into this project I knew the writing part would be the hardest, and despite being aware of it, I still got burned out.

Don't get me wrong, I got a lot of the worldbuilding done, at least to a point I'm happy with it, but it left me with no creative juices remaining for anything else. It got so bad, this burn out got me questioning other parts of the game, so before I spent more effort into features that I wasn't confident enough, I decided to back away from the project for a couple of weeks, go do other stuff and come back fresh.

Then catastrophe. I came back alright, came back to the realization, that to my horror, indeed, one of the core parts of the game, where I've already poured dozens of hours, didn't really fit. Specifically, I'm refering to the Brothel Phase. The point of this Phase was to serve as a 'card-battler' minigame where the player controls each girl's cards to min-max Patron's arousal and Patron's patience to maximize profit. This works great as a concept, but it doesn't fit with the whole picture so it needs to go. I thought I was done making systems, that now it was just a matter of adding content, but this obviously is a set back. Ripping out the Brothel Phase system is not goin to be painless, but is it not the end of the world.

Lesson learned though, so that's a plus. I got too trigger happy coding features left and right without a proper thought on the bigger picture. But now, I'm going back to the basics. A simulation game, where the fantasy comes from power-tripping of being a slave-trainer, a sandbox where the player can go about managing their bussiness as lenient or as cruel as they want. Right now, I'm just working on a roadmap document for classifying game features. I want to have it ready beggining November, just to have myself something to work towards. That said, I'll never stop listening to suggestions, if there are any, since my own imagination is limited, if you have something you wish to see, please suggest away. I can't promise it will make it to 1.0, of course, but I'll definitely give it some thought.

 

[Quintillian]

I know, I know. On the last post, I said I was going to work on a roadmap document to share, but the more I wrote, the more it felt like an encyclopedia, and the stuff I'm forced to do at work. Yes, I'm of those devs that hate making documentation, sue me.

Anyways, that said, I'm still working on said document, because unfortunately it is needed. However, I took a break from that document to actually do some coding again. Here is the latests report.

Improvements:
- Added a Notification System, something like an event log. Messages can be clickable to carry an appropiate action, for now that's opening another screen or showing a menu.
- Jobs now are expected to return a report. This report is just an associative array, aka, a dictionary of key-value pairs of stuff that happened during the execution of a job. This report is then turned into prose by the already existing pattern-matching Descriptor System.
- Fix a bunch of bugs regarding saving and load.

 

[Quintillian]

Update!

• Finished working on the Office room for now. Thematically, this room will be where the player manages/chooses upgrades and policies for the brothel. This room was added, number one, for role-play, and number two, programatically is the channel through which the brothel object gets modified, separating it from the player, meaning that the possibility of owning more than one brothel is out there. Not that it is a priority, but nice to have.
• Current Policies added to the Office:
  • Bussiness Hours: Instead of the brothel only opening at Night, now the player can select which periods of the day to open. And also added the option to choose which services the brothel will cater too.
  • Market Share: Don't want to offer a particular service, this policy allows to control demand distribution at the penalty of reduced customer attraction.
• Fix a bug in the simulation phase where characters claimed they were not alone, when in fact they were.
• Move all code/implementation not planned for release of V0.0.1 to a separate branch.

 

[Quintillian]

I have a secret to confess.

I have been learning to draw!

It's crazy to think this hobby project is now older than year, and in that time, I think I have learned a lot about a lot. Game Design, programming, and yes, making 2d art. Here is a snapshot of what I'm currently able to create after I don't know how many tutorials, and several sketchbooks.

Spoiler: WIP (SFW for the NNN brothers)

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Not bad, if I say so myself. Self-love is important in this economy. Of course, a lot of room for improvements, and I still have a long way to go on this learning journey, plus a game to make, and release Soon™. I don't have anything against using IA images. But since this is a hobby project, if you ask me if I rather spend time between spending my sanity (and my poor GPU) generating that illusive perfect image, and learning how to make it in the first place. I know what my dopamine-starved brain will rather do. I'll probably still use IA for generating backgrounds though, because those are really time consuming, and the Omnissiah only gives me so much time on this green Earth.

That's all for now. Next week, the goals is to wrap up the Jobs. Until then.

 

[Quintillian]

Update.

- Added the following rooms and jobs: Bar, Parlor, and Stage. These rooms can be purchased from the Office, and they each enable a different Job, respectively, waitress, masseuse, and dancer. The issue I'm seeing now after playtesting a little is a funny one, as the courtesan job is so damn profitable that it makes the other jobs irrelevant. This makes sense thematically, after all, can't have a brothel without whores, but if the optimal strategy is too obvious, then it feels boring. So first, more playtesting needed before tweaking some levers, I want to see how the progression scales as the 'enemies' customers get to tougher.

- On a separate note, some QoL improvements:
- The upkeep tooltips now show a breakdown leading up to the total.
- All character menus now have small circular icons at the bottom to switch faster to another character. The currently selected character will always be placed at the center.

Tasks to tackle for next update:
- Implement End-Of-Day report before starting the next in-game day.
- Add QoL enhancement to sort characters in the Roster by Name, Level, Attribute, Attribute Bonus, Skill, Stats, Job.

 

[Quintillian]

Isn't it great when past self comes in with the clutch?

Apparently, I'd already made the hooks for sorting, so it was just a matter of connecting it to the UI, and make it look pretty. This was nice, because it freed some time address the End-Of-Day report. Less of a report on itself, the last period's work report now gets automatically pushed at the end of the day.


And speaking of freed time, I've been using some of it to hone those artsy skills and doing some tests. Basically, by abusing the heck out of the simmetry ruler to make drawings, I'm trying to see how feseable it is to create paper dolls. I still need to see how scalable this workflow is overall, but the first step seems to be starting with very simple artystyle, and I mean simple, dirty lineart, simple shapes, simple hair, boring flat colors, and simple shading. WIP example:


I know fully fledge paper doll system will very probably be a pipedream, but for now I want to see if a simpler version of it can work for the NPCS or other non-customizable characters in the game.