Aug 23, 2020
27
12
I'm warming to the Mori concept (your characterization of him definitely sounds better than the mad scientist I had in mind), but I'm not sure about the details of the ritual. From my previous theorizing, it would need the intercession of some higher power to allow the soul to form properly (Vatican method, presumably with some horrifyingly dark undertones), or it would need a workaround like substituting a different soul (so the baby's original soul "dies" but the body lives on, home to a different soul), which has its own horrifyingly dark undertones. But hey, if the baby laughs and giggles, who cares if its soul came from a tortured prisoner?

- Things you can say on the internet.
 

qwertyu12359

Jack-o-nine-tails
Game Developer
Aug 1, 2017
1,570
1,699
I'm warming to the Mori concept (your characterization of him definitely sounds better than the mad scientist I had in mind), but I'm not sure about the details of the ritual. From my previous theorizing, it would need the intercession of some higher power to allow the soul to form properly (Vatican method, presumably with some horrifyingly dark undertones), or it would need a workaround like substituting a different soul (so the baby's original soul "dies" but the body lives on, home to a different soul), which has its own horrifyingly dark undertones. But hey, if the baby laughs and giggles, who cares if its soul came from a tortured prisoner?

- Things you can say on the internet.
Are you familiar with Berserk? All this conversation reminds me of the : "Used to create the by submerging a pregnant woman into it so the offspring is infused with the Abyss' evil power an apostle has within in order to transform it into a demonic creature".

It looks like that (read from right to left):
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Lokplart

- I can code, I guess :D
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2018
566
494
The thing is though, we don't have to explain it.

We can have a dialogue option "How are you able to do this" so flavour be he would respond with a cocky "You know as much as you need to" type of reply. He would of course feel like his method is better then the Vatican's so we could use something like: "And I don't have to appease some higher being either" to explicitly differentiate their methods.
 

qwertyu12359

Jack-o-nine-tails
Game Developer
Aug 1, 2017
1,570
1,699
The thing is though, we don't have to explain it.

We can have a dialogue option "How are you able to do this" so flavour be he would respond with a cocky "You know as much as you need to" type of reply. He would of course feel like his method is better then the Vatican's so we could use something like: "And I don't have to appease some higher being either" to explicitly differentiate their methods.
I feel the first sentence feels lazy and the second says too much.

"You know as much as you need to" = the developers were too lazy to think of a current explanation. Instead, we can think of a coherent way he does it and just silence it in the game, or give discrete hints so people can guess but also come up with their own credible theory.

"I don't have to appease to some higher being either", if I understand, that explicitates how the Vatican themselves do it. But this could/should be left unsaid, or better thought of. The Vatican could really well be holy persons in disguise; there can be no deities, just a facade to try to control the general population into obeying their laws. Or it could not appease a deity but even piss a deity off but the Vatican have enough power to defy the gods. Etc.
 

Lokplart

- I can code, I guess :D
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2018
566
494
I feel the first sentence feels lazy and the second says too much.

"You know as much as you need to" = the developers were too lazy to think of a current explanation. Instead, we can think of a coherent way he does it and just silence it in the game, or give discrete hints so people can guess but also come up with their own credible theory.

"I don't have to appease to some higher being either", if I understand, that explicitates how the Vatican themselves do it. But this could/should be left unsaid, or better thought of. The Vatican could really well be holy persons in disguise; there can be no deities, just a facade to try to control the general population into obeying their laws. Or it could not appease a deity but even piss a deity off but the Vatican have enough power to defy the gods. Etc.
I wasn't saying to use those exact sentences, just their general theme.
It would for sure be both stupid of him and really out of character to explain to you in detail how everything works. He's not there to teach you, he's there to do a job you paid for. We can use his ego as a reason for why he might let some info slip but in general, the answer to that question won't be a thesis detailing his work. That'd be really immersion breaking imo.
So the words that he'd tell you when you ask him how it works, whatever those may be, would need to 1. Let very little slip and 2. Give off the feel that he thinks he's better then the Vatican.
 

wacek

Member
Aug 6, 2017
101
108
yeah i had a question and shieet but i'll just give up at this point.

this game looks amazing, but i hate economy feel(having a legal whore on chain who only costs money feels just wrong to me)
i can't profit in this game when following "how to start" guide
i'm just tired of counting how many more days till i'm broke after: 12 new games, hours on wiki, and my record of 0 earned sparks, 0 whores sold in total

still it was a nice torture, and there's 186 pages here so you guys must enjoy it.
 

qwertyu12359

Jack-o-nine-tails
Game Developer
Aug 1, 2017
1,570
1,699
yeah i had a question and shieet but i'll just give up at this point.

this game looks amazing, but i hate economy feel(having a legal whore on chain who only costs money feels just wrong to me)
i can't profit in this game when following "how to start" guide
i'm just tired of counting how many more days till i'm broke after: 12 new games, hours on wiki, and my record of 0 earned sparks, 0 whores sold in total

still it was a nice torture, and there's 186 pages here so you guys must enjoy it.
Have you seen the roadmap? For next version there's the "economy rework" :)

On the other hand, this game is a management game. If we remove the difficulty to make money out of a slave, it's difficult to make the actual gameplay rewarding (because yes, this is not a VN). And about the game over, as they say, there's no game if there's no stake.

So the goal is literally to git gud and profit of your slave. And it's definitely possible, although it's reserved to the elite :cool:... of which I'm not a part of ^^ I needed guides too. But then... after a few game overs and save scumming, I understood the game enough to create my own strategies.

So yeah, this is not a bug, this is a feature. :Kappa: If we can make it better, well it's even better.
 

wacek

Member
Aug 6, 2017
101
108
oh don't understand me wrong... 12 tries dude
i wouldn't try so much if i didn't like it

it's just absolutely not new player friendly if compared to let's say... free cities
had a nice gladiatrix in my last game but one unplanned stat made her useless(20 purple heart)... so yeah
i'm pretty sure i'll try it tomorrow tho
 
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Riujin

Member
Jul 29, 2018
339
237
oh don't understand me wrong... 12 tries dude
i wouldn't try so much if i didn't like it

it's just absolutely not new player friendly if compared to let's say... free cities
had a nice gladiatrix in my last game but one unplanned stat made her useless(20 purple heart)... so yeah
i'm pretty sure i'll try it tomorrow tho
It's heavily depends on: starting character and how much do you understand of the game.
The early weak are mostly a pain, but you should try to focus on the early jobs: D-, D+ slaves that you can buy at little and sell at a decent price while you level up your trainer skill.

Also do not accept hard jobs, like: Gladiatrix, ponygirl, whore, etc. The easy one are: witchdoctor, secretary, house maid and like that
 
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qwertyu12359

Jack-o-nine-tails
Game Developer
Aug 1, 2017
1,570
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oh don't understand me wrong... 12 tries dude
i wouldn't try so much if i didn't like it

it's just absolutely not new player friendly if compared to let's say... free cities
had a nice gladiatrix in my last game but one unplanned stat made her useless(20 purple heart)... so yeah
i'm pretty sure i'll try it tomorrow tho
Yes, I didn't have a game which made me fucking die at a tutorial since Dark Souls :KappaPride:
 
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qwertyu12359

Jack-o-nine-tails
Game Developer
Aug 1, 2017
1,570
1,699
Good news every one! I finished completing the normal_scenes folder!

Now every girl will have a picture for herself instead of the generic one. This was painful... but look at that:

Original folder:
Annotation 2020-08-30 224037.png

Folder for the next update:
Annotation 2020-08-30 224142.png
 
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Asia Argento

The Golden Dragon Princess
Donor
Apr 14, 2020
1,822
4,044
Yes, I didn't have a game which made me fucking die at a tutorial since Dark Souls :KappaPride:
Tales of Androgyny does that for me... but the ending isnt a creepy YOU DIED screen. It's the first vendor enslaving my character and turning them into a sissy.....

Good news every one! I finished completing the normal_scenes folder!

Now every girl will have a picture for herself instead of the generic one. This was painful... but look at that:
Very nice, dude.
 
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Asia Argento

The Golden Dragon Princess
Donor
Apr 14, 2020
1,822
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Shit, reading above and excuse my double post... I thought the cop out for pregnancies was just dumb anyway. Obvious way to cancel bad lore, the fiends are making the population low (I mean they are all out raping and forcefully impregnating girls out in the wastes) and the vatican ends the policy to monopolize births. Crisises often change old ideas...

Just a quick brainstorm to fix really tbh the lone bad thing about this game...
 

i107760

Sistersitting / Housesitting Developer
Modder
Game Developer
Nov 1, 2016
849
1,477
I would prefer not touching the lore on pregnancies. If pregnancy content is wanted to be implemented, I would suggest a post-patrician quest for the pope, who the teaches you their techniques + gives you permission to sire offspring with your assistant/slaves. Would also need to make some sort of incubation mechanic, probably in the medical center to grow your children to legal age at rapid pace.
 
Aug 23, 2020
27
12
That idea does not need to be mutually exclusive. One is Vatican-ally-route, the other is Vatican-antagonist-route (or at least strained relations, if they find out about it). Incubation was part of the proposal, and is already mentioned in-game (smugglers in slums rapidly grow the clones they sell).
 
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utterlyjunky

New Member
Aug 31, 2020
8
9
There are two things that frustrate me most about Jo9T:

1) needing to savescum random contracts for servants or assistants (I agree that one approach would be to equalize the work done, but another approach would be to pay more for more time consuming slave training.) A big improvement, and one that would improve life for everyone is to have an additional menu to click through after choosing contract quality (D-, C- etc.) so that you can choose the speciality you want to train for (and maybe a random option in there, with a bonus, too.)

2) There is really poor in-game information as to why slaves are unacceptable to turn in sometimes. One thing I'd like to mod most is having information about what a slave is missing to be able to turn it in (and there are predictable requests on forums for Jo9T every so often which demonstrate why this is a problem --stats/mechanics can be a black box.) Perhaps a menu item could be included and there could be a popup in addition listing the criteria that the slave meets, and the criteria that the slave falls short on, at the turnin locations.

My thoughts about this: Just looking at code in general, offhand, I'm guessing you don't necessarily flag what is missing individually, just that one of the criteria is missing, but it shouldn't be too tough to create some variable structures to hold the information necessary in the check, and display a popup in there, if necessary.

Any thoughts on these ideas, either as far as how worthwhile they are, or implementation details? (I'm a software engineering major so... I can understand implementation... the only reason I've not dug in yet is because I thought I'd ask people who are actively maintaining it first, plus QMOD is a pain in the ass to deal with on my ultra high res Surface Book.)

---

That's the simple improvements. I also really like the idea of creating an "Active Torture" subgame a lot like the "Active Sex" section. While the punishments that already exist and have art are great. I'd really like to expand the use of magic (especially causing pain like electric shocks, which is how I see the magic punishment spell) in this part. You could choose to restrain the slave in various ways, including on furniture (maybe with a store focused on that,) and torture different parts of their body. Instead of focusing on pleasure, arousal, interest and stamina stats in the subgame, you could focus on pain, fear, resistance, exhaustion and health (like hps) (perhaps you could even torture a slave to death this way.)

This could be a quicker way to mindbreak slaves, perhaps, for higher powered magic users.

Also, I know combat needs a bit of an overhaul, but if there needs to be a boost to face some of the opponents, maybe magic could be expanded as a different special action in combat.
 
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qwertyu12359

Jack-o-nine-tails
Game Developer
Aug 1, 2017
1,570
1,699
There are two things that frustrate me most about Jo9T:

1) needing to savescum random contracts for servants or assistants (I agree that one approach would be to equalize the work done, but another approach would be to pay more for more time consuming slave training.) A big improvement, and one that would improve life for everyone is to have an additional menu to click through after choosing contract quality (D-, C- etc.) so that you can choose the speciality you want to train for (and maybe a random option in there, with a bonus, too.)

2) There is really poor in-game information as to why slaves are unacceptable to turn in sometimes. One thing I'd like to mod most is having information about what a slave is missing to be able to turn it in (and there are predictable requests on forums for Jo9T every so often which demonstrate why this is a problem --stats/mechanics can be a black box.) Perhaps a menu item could be included and there could be a popup in addition listing the criteria that the slave meets, and the criteria that the slave falls short on, at the turnin locations.

My thoughts about this: Just looking at code in general, offhand, I'm guessing you don't necessarily flag what is missing individually, just that one of the criteria is missing, but it shouldn't be too tough to create some variable structures to hold the information necessary in the check, and display a popup in there, if necessary.

Any thoughts on these ideas, either as far as how worthwhile they are, or implementation details? (I'm a software engineering major so... I can understand implementation... the only reason I've not dug in yet is because I thought I'd ask people who are actively maintaining it first, plus QMOD is a pain in the ass to deal with on my ultra high res Surface Book.)

---

That's the simple improvements. I also really like the idea of creating an "Active Torture" subgame a lot like the "Active Sex" section. While the punishments that already exist and have art are great. I'd really like to expand the use of magic (especially causing pain like electric shocks, which is how I see the magic punishment spell) in this part. You could choose to restrain the slave in various ways, including on furniture (maybe with a store focused on that,) and torture different parts of their body. Instead of focusing on pleasure, arousal, interest and stamina stats in the subgame, you could focus on pain, fear, resistance, exhaustion and health (like hps) (perhaps you could even torture a slave to death this way.)

This could be a quicker way to mindbreak slaves, perhaps, for higher powered magic users.

Also, I know combat needs a bit of an overhaul, but if there needs to be a boost to face some of the opponents, maybe magic could be expanded as a different special action in combat.
1) About needing to savescum contracts, I wholefully agree. Upcoming v2.2 developpment has been focusing on other (arguably more urgent) matters, but we're definitely tackling that for 2.3. :) We'll really think this through, we already have paved the way on private messages between devs' for this to happen.

2) Yes, that also was frustrating me. I wrote in the roadmap: "make sure that the buyer states all the reasons he refused a slave". But then I didn't really receive complaints this past year so it was a little forgotten. Mainly, we haven't been given an exemple where the refusal message left the player totally clueless as to why the slave was refused.

One thing that really bothered me was that if a slave was refused once by a buyer, they wouldn't bother to look at her. Not only that, but it wasn't clear why she was refused this time. I think we can at least invistigate that before releasing 2.2.

But the game knows what's missing. In the code, there are "charm refusal quote", "skill refusal quote", and so forth.

-----> About the active torture mini-game, I think that first things first, we should make active sex not be so awful. However I love your idea, I'll put it in the Roadmap "future version".

And again, fighting system will be overhauled :) We've already started thinking about the system and made a diagram. We even have working code. :coffee: :cool:
 
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utterlyjunky

New Member
Aug 31, 2020
8
9
2) Yes, that also was frustrating me. I wrote in the roadmap: "make sure that the buyer states all the reasons he refused a slave". But then I didn't really receive complaints this past year so it was a little forgotten. Mainly, we haven't been given an exemple where the refusal message left the player totally clueless as to why the slave was refused.

One thing that really bothered me was that if a slave was refused once by a buyer, they wouldn't bother to look at her. Not only that, but it wasn't clear why she was refused this time. I think we can at least invistigate that before releasing 2.2.

But the game knows what's missing. In the code, there are "charm refusal quote", "skill refusal quote", and so forth.


Thanks... I returned to Jo9T after a long way away, played the old 1.7.5 game on an existing save, and was churning out D-/D+ contract slaves left and right, and never had an issue turning them in (matching the contract specialization grade and the overall grade just fine.)

I started a new game with Johnny (on 2.1dev-loli,) turned in a first contract okay (so I'm not a COMPLETE idiot,) and then it doesn't make sense why I can't turn in the second (I've checked for things like diseases/bruises/pregnancy. I'm sure its another stat other than the specialization skills/overall grade, like IDK... pride/obedience/taming or something? but I've got no clue, and the hgames wiki is old and not really very clear any more. This was with slaves from the auction house, because I froze an almost perfect contract slave I got on the original contract.


1) About needing to savescum contracts, I wholefully agree. Upcoming v2.2 developpment has been focusing on other (arguably more urgent) matters, but we're definitely tackling that for 2.3. :) We'll really think this through, we already have paved the way on private messages between devs' for this to happen.

*snip*

-----> About the active torture mini-game, I think that first things first, we should make active sex not be so awful. However I love your idea, I'll put it in the Roadmap "future version".

And again, fighting system will be overhauled :) We've already started thinking about the system and made a diagram. We even have working code. :coffee: :cool:


Thanks for the warm welcome, and I'm sure you guys have it well in hand. I see the dev thread, too (I'm playing one of the dev branches, fwiw.) I'll load qmod and so on, on a desktop so I'm not squinting at absolutely tiny text or dealing with a 640*480 hi res compatibility mode. I saw that its a fairly basic scripting interpreted language. Are the inteface/UI implementation in the qsp, or the json or both? I've done some reasonably meaty C++ coding and dabbled with WPF back in the day. If I can deal with Microsoft's fucked up UI coding, I'm sure I can manage this. Seems like you guys have this in hand, but would you like another to push out the updates a little faster (because I'm sure we'd all like a bug free game and more feature enhancements... Jo9T has so much potential, and is surprisingly addictive for its repetitive play...)

---


Also, I've been mulling making the underlying psychology (I've done quite a bit of academic reading on the subject) a little more accurate to how behavioral extinction/operant conditioning actually works. I'm not suggesting these even need to go onto a roadmap, because I like to design before I code, but I wanted to get thoughts on this. These are just thoughts and not a complete design.

There are a few things that don't make sense:

1) Guilt being random from 1-5 (it seems like,) when the "correct" and non-spoiling thing to do is to match the punishment to the guilt level. Would a slave feel guilty enough to be tortured over a flame pit (and spoiled otherwise,) when they're a new slave and just refused a consensual blow job? My concept is that the slave should not be guiltier than 1 (or 2 randomly maybe?) more than the maximum fear that they've experienced. Thus that could ramp up quickly, but just starting out with torture doesn't give much of a realistic progression.

2) Spoiling is surprisingly persistent if you don't nip it in the bud, even with a slave that's punished appropriately and harshly on regular occasions, and "put in place" isn't viable. The game does need challenge, so it shouldn't be press one button to win, but at the same time, it doesn't seem like horrific consequences are as effective on a spoiled brat as they should be.

(And I get depression is, too... but I see that as the thing which prevents just pure punishment from being too effective, which would take any kind of challenge out of the game, but I have some ideas to improve the system beyond exploiting quirks like items for happiness and so on, and employing more consistent psychologically valid approaches. I like the stockholm vs. mindbroken dynamic but its a bit of a mess at the moment.)

3) One of the most important things with operant conditioning is consistency, adaptive punishments (a punishing/reward act isn't a punishment/reward technically, if it doesn't alter behavior) so escalating threats/promises with follow through of associated punishments/rewards should result in a graduated measure of punishment_consistency and reward_consistency, which is how much a slave trusts whether a master will follow through on threats and promises, and that their refusals/agreements have consequences (this is already partially in place with obedience/fear/mood/taming but operant conditioning has a concept of frequency and regularity of punishment and reward effecting behavior. I think these two consistency stats would allow a more appropriate forced type of communication of how slavery works, even when the slave is uncooperative.)

4) Incredibly aversive acts for the slave should have slaves begging for the slaver to not do those things, unprovoked -- provided that punishments are consistent with guilt (And there could be multiple cognitive behavioral messaging options in response. I.E. Glass half empty "I'm doing this because you refused to do what I want," or Glass half full "If you don't do what I want."

5) Are imprisonment and isolation mechanics clear and do they make sense? They're not explored on the wiki.
 
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