What about add an option where you can ask them to get on the pill or they ask you if they should?
If it makes sense in the course of the dialogue and the discussion 'feels' natural, then that could absolutely be a possibility.
I agree that the entire pregnancy system should be optional, as well as being avoidable with in-game choices (depending on how much work that is). Players that don't want to deal with the system at all can turn it off, while those that enjoy it can choose whom they want to risk pregnancy with. You could even make it (the pregnancy system) part of a higher-tier offering (it does take more work to implement, after all), depending on how patrons react to that idea.
We agree with all of this. But I don't think we need to make it a tier reward. It's a very easy fix and from the sounds of this discussionf it will increase the enjoyability for a large number of players.
I would GREATLY prefer that. I like skin on skin, but a lifetime of responsibility for one night of fun not so much.
And we hadn't considered players who wanted the skin on skin action but didn't want to decorate every woman in the game with semen. So shame on us for not thinking about this angle, but fortunately we can very easily fix this! I'm just glad this conversation came up now because it would have much more difficult to fix further down the road.
Yes, please allow this as an option. It can just be assumed that everyone is taking birth control. I personally like unloading inside scenes, but not the preggo thing. Allowing this to be turned on or off would appeal to a wider range of fans.
And so you shall have it!
I prefer the option to pulling out/use condoms than just an option at the beginning of the game to disable pregnancy or not moreover the first option adds even more realism to the story as a consequence
So the way the mechanic currently works, every female starts off pregnant = False. Then, when a character unloads in her during a scene, a function is called that looks at a number of factors and calculates a probability of pregnancy. It is by no means a real simulation, just a mechanic to add some randomness and variability to the story.
We intend to leave all of that in tact. But for players who want to turn off pregnancy the game will just never call the function. So a female character simply never gets tested for pregnancy. But for those who want it on, the system will work as originally designed.
@RomanHume Just my 2 caps worth
I'm really hoping this is a Fallout reference...but I digress...
Pregnancy on/off If on then %x chance of pregnancy
Cum shot Y/N or cum inside/outside
I've played games with condoms and pills, didn't really care for either, but pill is better than condom since pills go 30 days. I Really can't agree with "realism" since
1. it's a VN/game, not a sim.
2. "Realism" requires 2 forms of birth control, else %x - y chance of preg. and don't forget to track a 29 day(lunar) cycle.
3. I doubt you would want to render condom/non-condom scenes, and if it's not shown, what's the point?
4. What happens when you got no condom? MC exits/no sex, or sex anyway question? I'm sure I'm missing something, since it's an off the cuff, glance at the "issue" being discussed and not really enough time to really evaluate the changes needed and implementation method impact on Dev side.
Just to touch on your points:
1. & 2. Absolutely correct. It's not a sim and we weren't trying to make the pregnancy thing ultra-realistic. We thought it was an interesting mechanic that added a sense of randomness to the story that could lead to some interesting and dramatic story telling. As well as some funky preggy sex for those who want that sort of thing.
3. We planned on doing this anyway. By rendering everything in layers we're only looking at an additional two or three minutes to render a condom and lay it over the scene in photoshop. So it's a small commitment on our part.
4. Our MC was always going to have a condom in his wallet. There might be scenes composed of intense, irrational and spontaneous sex in which he might not want to interrupt the moment to put it on (Nanami's first sex scene for instance), but those would be the exception rather than the rule. We never wanted to slow the game down with trips to the drug store for rubbers.
Lol. In fact, one of my biggest complaints about DMD was that condom acquisition was totally random. We weren't going to do that here.
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So in closing:
We thought controlling the pregnancy option through in-game choice was the most sensible way to deal with it. Players who didn't want it could take actions to avoid it. However, your comments here have persuaded us otherwise. So for the next release we'll include an option to turn pregnancy off altogether.
Whenever a new game is started you will be presented with an option to turn it off. We will also include a small patch that will offer players who already have a saved game the chance to turn it off. This way if you've played the first beta release and gotten Nanami knocked up, but don't want the pregnancy, it will reset her to pregnant = False, and never test for pregnancy again.
We talked it over and we figure all in it will only take about ten lines of code and ten minutes of testing to put this fix in. The way we've designed the pregnancy system makes this a very easy tweak.
