Others [Devlog] Monster Lord

[BPM222]

Join the discord if you have any questions, I'm also keeping a daily devlog in there. I'll save this forum for the bigger things with something to show for it.

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Overview: Currently working on an RPG with some erotica, a pretty big project with many ambitions. Despite the erotic nature, the goal is to make a great game that would still be able to stand on it's own without the erotic content. So why the erotic content? I don't have a good answer for that other then it's something I want to do. This game is a culmination of everything I personally like in games. Simply put, it's a passion project.

Synopsis: The human race was eradicated during the war between gods that lasted eons. The protagonist is the last surviving human that was held in a research lab and preserved for roughly a millennia. As the lab malfunctions and allows him to escape, he awakens in a world long after the war. A world where humans are remembered as nothing but scary stories of the evil beings that once were to scare children. Join our protagonist as he tries to find his place in this world that's openly hostile to his own kind.

Planned Features

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Short Term Goals

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Meet the characters for the tech demo

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Videos

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Final notes I'll jolt down here cuz I know they'll come up, this isn't my first rodeo; yes I know this is ambitious, yes I know most porn gamers aren't looking for gameplay and story, and yes I know most regular gamers will get turned away from the porn even if the game is good, no this isn't my first game and this isn't my first story either but I'll start fresh under a pen name due to the pornographic elements so feel free to pretend this is my first game, this is a passion project I'm doing for myself and I don't care if this becomes popular or not. I'm open to suggestions for the gameplay, balancing, extra QoL, design, even the art. But the story and characters are pretty locked and completed.

As for why I'm deciding to share this now, I've been grinding away at this since January (and that's excluding the story-boarding) all on my own and practically never showed anything to anyone. Just had an urge to share and show people what I'm working on even though it's not really in a show-able state yet.

 

[BPM222]

So a few things I didn't want to put in the first post, my current progress at the time of posting this. I'll jolt things down randomly as I think of it.

player movement, stairs and collisions
pixel-perfect targeting system (was not easy fyi)
target display
interacting
party mechanics
battle system's basic framework (missing hate mechanics)
damage calc + making it take into account effects and equips
status effects (missing buildup and stacking filter)
55 status icons
status effect display (missing tooltips)
using abilities manually
ability max usages (inifnite/battle based/map based)
main hub
extrerior (might redo)
warping between the two and the loading screen
art for 3 basic mobs, 1 boss, and 8 party members
mob AI
mob spawners (+loto spawn support)
2 r18 art i framed in the protags room
main HUD, friendly and enemy
the mapping system (think ill redo how layers work tho)
pausing + pause menu
main database for pretty much everything
inventory screen
equip screen
equipment system
status screen
party AI screen
party AI customization framework (this took weeks on its own)

basically a lot, progressing nicely

none of the UI are stylized yet, only functional basics

lately ive been working on implementing the abilities of the characters, and tackling the required mechanics as i go

 

[Lerd0]

 

[XforU]

So basically a porn game with a good story and original gameplay... Sounds great.
Good luck with your game, interested to see more.

 

[BaasB]

 

[quarzo]

oh, i really like your female characters desings.

you will implement custom battle mechanics / maths too?

 

[Tompte]

Looks great so far! Keep it up!

 

[BPM222]

oh, i really like your female characters desings.

you will implement custom battle mechanics / maths too?

Thanks! Means a lot to me, the art is definitely where I'm least confident.

And yes, it's actually a lot more than just "custom mechanics". AFAIK this is a completely new take on party based RPGs, the way it plays hasn't really been done before. I can't even give it a proper genre rofl. If you really want to try and draw parallels, I'd say think about Wizadry 8, but in real time with a more sophisticated FFXII gambit system. Or... trying to multibox FFXI.

As for the math, I'm aiming remove all RNG from the battle mechanics. There's nothing more frustrating then losing a boss fight due a few unlucky misses, unlucky crits or unlucky proc rates. I don't know how we haven't moved on from those dated design philosophies. I'm also trying to new way to envision how elements work, I'm pretty excited at the possibilities this approach opens up.

 

[BPM222]

So I got the display for status effect icons pretty much done (there's still a special type of effect that works differently to do though)

All the icons show up properly, lined up. And if one effect is removed they also cascade properly.

By hovering your mouse over the icon a little window pops up with more info. The timer ticks down in real time.

My icons work a little differently than most. Instead of having one icon per effect, I'll have one icon per relevant stat, when hovering over the icon you'll be able to see all the effects affecting that stat and the total on top. The window refreshes and resizes in real time as items are added or removed regardless of if the window is already opened or not.

So you can see that the positive effects turn up in green text and the negative effect turn up in red text. The total on top also does the same thing. (and yes <1x is good for delay, having more delay is bad)

And one last little neat thing. Whether or not the total is positive or negative affects the icon's colour. In the previous image you see the total is positive and the icon is blue.

And now that the total is negative the icon turns red.

Proud to say the whole thing functions in real time and doesn't even add 0.01ms to the process time. Very efficient. The icons also do not cause stutters when added/changed since they're all pre-loaded. And the popup windows are extremely responsive and satisfying.

 

[PinkBrushArt]

Loving to see the progress so far! Keep it up!

 

[BPM222]

So today I just hit 20k lines of code, most of it is the AI customization framework. I'll commemorate by going over some features. Namely the basics of how the stats, effects and abilities will work.

First off, the max HP stat, pretty self explanatory.

Damage is split into two types. There's the raw damage, and the elemental damage. Abilities give a "raw value" and the stats act as multipliers. This is actually the exact opposite of what's conventional. Trust me, there's good reasons

Raw damage is split into 4 types; slash, blunt, pierce and magic. Each of these types has an appropriate offensive stat and defensive stat. So your slash attack will boost your damage with slash based attacks, while slash resistance will lower the damage of incoming slash-based attacks.

Elements are divided into 7 types; fire, water, electricity, earth, ice, light and dark. Unlike raw damage, you only get 1 elemental affinity stat per element. That one stat will govern both your offensive and defensive capabilities with that element. Lastly, if the defender happens to have higher elemental affinity than the attacker to the relevant element, the elemental portion of the attack will actually heal instead of damaging.

So the final damage formula is a simple (adjusted physical damage)+(adjusted elemental damage)

As for effects, basic effects work as you'd expect. When it's applied, you suffer or benefit from the effect until the cooldown expires. When it comes to re-application, some effects can stack up to a max stack, and all re-application will reset the timer.

But there's also a special type of effect called build-ups. Buildups will only activate when their gauge fills up, and deactivate when the gauge completely empties out. The size of gauge is dictated by max hp, and the decay rate of the gauge depends on the resistance stat.

There's one buildup per element and they give a multitude of effects when activated. Whether or not the effects are positive or negative depends on the elemental affinity of the unit in question. High enough affinity means these buildups are actually positive.

Example of the electric type buildup "Shock"

Then there's the delay stat. Every ability has a recovery time that you have to wait before being able to use your next ability. The delay stat works as a multiplier for those wait periods, effectively speeding up or slowing down the rate you can cast your abilities.

Last stat on the list is the luck stat. Luck is a simple stat that affects your drop rates. Although I cleaned RNG entirely from the combat. I personally think loot and spawns are still fun to have randomized. I plan to use this stat to introduce special challenges indirectly. High luck members will be weaker and you'll have to rethink your strategies to make use of high luck teams. Some drops will require a minimum amount of luck.



Moving on, might have noticed I didn't mention MP or AP or whatever. That's because ability usages are governed per ability. This leaves us with 3 types of abilities.

Infinite use: You can use them as many time as you like, like your normal attack.
Per battle: These abilities have a max usage but that usage recovers passively over time when not in combat.
Per adventure: These abilities have a max usage and will only recover after going back to a safe zone. These are your powerful abilities you want to save for when you need them.

Example: No usages is the infnite uses, the white numbered usages are the per battle abilties, and the yellow numbered usages are the per adventure abilities (still have the default stylebox on this, it'll look like the rest of UI later)

Lastly, there is no leveling in this game. Since a big cast is planned, the last thing I want to do is force players to grind levels for each party members. Instead progression is made through gear, gear that can be swapped between members if compatible. Gear is not bought, but crafted from loot. This prevents players from being able to just grind to powerlevels above what their current gamestage was balanced for. You can't get the gear crafted from the next area before reaching the next area.

Boss fights will be more akin to puzzles, figuring out what team to use and what strategy to employ. Don't worry though, although specific solutions might be required for some cases, I will leave appropriate hints in the game to help guide you.

And that's it for now, there's still so many things to talk about but I'll have to stop here. Thank you if you took the time to read this and I'm looking forward to share more soon.

 

[BPM222]

So today I finished implementing one of the bigger features of the battle system, I believe this was the last "challenging" thing to implement.


The hate mechanics.

Every mob has a hate stat towards each individual party members and that's what determines who that mob will target. There's many ways to generate hate towards a mob and mastering your "hate management" is the key to success in this battle system. Failure to manage your hate will result in the mob targeting your weaker party members (like your healer) and the rest will topple like dominoes.


So here's what can affect your hate towards a mob:

Every ability has an innate "hate" stat. Some abilities are made to generate hate, like those that your tank will use. Others have high hate to introduce risk to it's usage, such as healing spells.

(Case by case, some abilties may need to target the mob to generate hate, others may generate hate regardless of the target)

The raw dmg inflicted. More dmg = more hate, pretty simple.

Linking. Some mobs will partially share their hate buildups.

The things that the mob hates. Every mob is different and will have a list of things they hate more. So let's say a monster hates healing spells, all hate generated by healing spells will be increased for that mob. Things a mob can hate can extend to any ability, type of ability, element, stats of the party member or even specific party members.

(Case by case, mobs may hate certain abilities to be used onto them, or in general)


You can also lose hate

You can lose hate with the same methods as above, some abilities are made to reduce hate, some mobs might actually like some abilities.

But as extra, there's a slight decay to your hate. All hate generated by a party member lowers the hate of others by a fraction. Meaning if you want to keep your hate, you need to keep generating hate.


Here's how it looks:

Hate is displayed as those 8 little bars in the bottom of the mob info. Each bar corresponds to one party member. Which ever is the fullest is the most hated. So in this example, the 2nd party member is that mob's current target. (I'll make the current target show up as a different colour too so it's easier to see now that I think about it)


Once again, thanks for reading and I'm looking forward to share some more!

 

[BPM222]

Been a while, but the development has been going well. If anyone's interested, I haven't missed a single day in my daily devlog since I started doing that exactly a month ago in my discord. (link in OP)

I make this post today since I've reached a major milestone in development. Pretty much all the frameworks for the core mechanics are now successfully implemented. You really start to appreciate the little things you take for granted when building a project from the absolute bottom.

On top of the core mechanics, I also added pretty much all the animations I'll need.

I'll show the progress so far with a video, it's a quick one that shows a few things at random. If I were to go in depth into every little detail the video would have been at least an hour long.




So now I'll list my current roadmap to give an idea of what's left. For context I work on this 4 hours a day. The ETAs aren't promises, just there to give an idea of how heavy that workload is.

-Implement a skyrim-style console to ease testing and development, with the way the game will play and flow, it's pretty much a necessity.
(a week)

-Develop a balancing framework, my plan is to come up with a universal function that can determine the "power levels" of party members and mobs, accounting for stats, skills, effects etc, etc. Balancing is surprisingly extremely complex and IMO this is the biggest challenge overall. I actually started this already, but I decided I'd implement this into the console instead of a spreadsheet since some variables were just a little too complicated to grab from the spreadsheet.
(a week, might be optimistic, also this is likely to be revisited more than once)

-Properly test and finalize the AI system, it's implemented and mostly working (in the video you can see me setting up Alice to heal party members whose health drops bellow 90%), I just didn't have a functional game to properly test it in yet. There's countless possibilities to go through here, tedious work.
(a week)

-Finalize the mapping system, there's a few things i wanted to tweak and add to it, just never got around to it yet, hopefully im not tempted to rewrite it entirely, I tend to do that when revisiting old modules
(a day or two)

-Save/Load + start screen
(a day or two)

-Encyclopedia + hotlinking, this is just implementing the framework, not populating the entries
(a day or two)

-Menu graphics, shouldn't take too long since I like to keep things simple.
(a day or two)

-Do the exterior map, what you see in the video was just a temporary place holder.
(a week)

-Finalize variables, populate entries (loot tables, crafting recipes, spawn rates, etc etc)
(unknown, writting descriptions, entries, and hot linking everything might easily take longer than expected)

-Draw (maybe animate?) the two H-Scenes I have planned for the demo
(a week, im not a quick artist, two if i tackle animation)

-Draw some facial expressions for the sprites, didn't do that yet, might add an alternate pose for the sprites too. Usually games do like, 2-3 poses with like 5/6 sets of eyes/mouths. I haven't decided what I'll do yet.
(a week, maybe less, 8 characters to cover)

-Implement cut-ins (like when a party member's sprite pops into view when they use a certain ability or trigger certain events)
(a day or two)

-Eventing, meaning developing the progression of the game, aka the cutscenes, the interactions, the quests, the triggers and switches, etc. etc. In the future when I work on the actual canon chapters of the game, this, populating entries, art and map modelling should be the only steps required.
(a week or two)


Might seem like a lot at first, but for me whos been working on this for about 6months, this is first time I can actually see the finish line. So this is quite exciting.

Again thanks for reading and see you on the next one!