October 26th, 2020: Progress Report and Surprise Dev Log (again??)
Hey everyone, sleepy Rem here with itchy eyes with this week's Progress Report!
I spent the last week working a bit on the Glory Hole as well as fixing some bugs with the Glory Hole and the sex position changeup thing I mentioned last week. And speaking of BUGS, turns out the pleasure damage issue with the Glory Hole I was talking about last week was just a display bug. I realized that when I was doing more tests and bugfixing with the sex position changeup thing and saw that the numbers were abnormally low only during the Glory Hole battle. Karryn's pleasure damage might even be too high now with all the new changes, but well, we'll see.
Anyway, the main thing I was, and am, focused on currently is the big overhaul I hinted about last week. While working on the Glory Hole and bugfixes and other stuff, I've been agonizing on whether to go through with my idea or not. And I'm going to go through with it.
The core idea is based off of three things:
- I want Karryn's descend into being a slut not be so fast, and more gradual. You might be screaming, 'What Rem, are you fucking crazy? Isn't it slow enough already compared to other games??' but hear me out later.
- I want _____ to matter more.
- More _____ in order to increase Karryn's sex skill damage. Since my original worry is now known to be based off a display bug, this point basically no longer matters, but it was always a minor reason compared to point 1 and 2, especially point 1.
Alright alright, so what is _____? It's Desires. I'm overhauling the Desires system. It's not a complete, full overhaul though. There's still the five Desires, sexual stuff will still increase Karryn's Desires, and certain amount of Desire is still required before Karryn will do this or that.
But instead what I'm changing are the following:
- Instead of having a max Desire value of 100, Karryn will start off with a max Desire of 50 for Mouth, Boobs, Pussy and Butt. And a max Desire of TEN for Cock.
- Certain Passives will gradually increase Karryn's Max Desire, and Max Desire can go beyond 100.
- Desires increases and decreases slower as it gets higher. It's much easier to go from 0 Desire to 50 Desire compared to 75 Desire to 100 Desire as an example.
- The Desire Requirements will remain static. Currently, it changes depending on the situation, such as if Karryn is working in a side job then the requirements will be higher, or if Karryn is in a vulnerable positions then the requirements will be lower.
- The Desire Requirements will be changed to generally be at 50 for the first tier of actions (light petting), 75 for the second tier of actions (heavy petting), and 100 for the final tier of actions (sex).
- Currently most passives reduce the Desire Requirement of this or that. Instead, most of them will now instead increase Max Desire or speed up Desire Gain.
- A secret. I thought about revealing this here, but as I will be recommending people to start a fresh playthrough to try out all the new changes to game progression, it would be wrong of me to rob those people the joy of seeing the new, changed effects of some Passives. But this #7 thing is a pretty big change, so in the changelogs I will be telling people who don't want to start a new playthrough to go look at the new effects of certain Passives.
Anyway, so what #4, #5, and #6 will hopefully do, is make it easier to learn the Desire system. Right now since the Desire Requirements change all the time, even in the same battle, you're kinda of beholden to going to Status menu and looking at the Desire tab to see why something isn't going as planned. It's just bad for learning. Instead now it will for example just be, 'Okay, I need Karryn's Mouth Desire at 100 and Cock Desire at 75, and that's one of the condition for giving a blowjob. And if she's still not willing to do it and I'm not equipping something that changes the Desire Requirements for a blowjob, then there's something else I'm missing but I'm always going to be 100% sure that it's unrelated to her Desires.'
And of course, currently veteran Karryns would just push all their Desires to 100, and then never give another thought to it. Which brings me to #1, #2, and #3, as well as how I mentioned earlier that I want Karryn's descend into being a slut to be more gradual.
This also goes with the new changes I talked about on not having Karryn start off with Cautious Stance (and by the way, the Wait Out Pleasure skill will also cost Energy now). Karryn at the start, should not be willing to just have sex with a random dude. That's the whole premise. It's the gap between Karryn at the start, and your current super slutty Karryn that has guys lining up in the bathroom to fuck her and cum inside her, that makes the journey so rewarding. The premise of Karryn's Prison, is that this isn't a game with virgin protagonist who then goes and has full on penetration sex in the first ten minutes.
But currently as it stands, if you know what you're doing then you can still make a fresh Karryn in the first couple of battles: lose her first kiss, give a random guy head, and allow some guy to finger her. It's just too fast. The thrill of corrupting something, is if it's not quickly corrupted. The image I want is of Karryn literally succumbing to increasing desire. First she will only allow light petting, but then she begins to think that maybe some more risky petting is fine too. After some time, she's beginning to entertain the idea of sex and we all know where that leads to.
To me, I'm perfectly fine with most people's first blind playthrough not leading to sex in the Level One. Level One was always supposed to be the tutorial experience. Unless Karryn is grinding for some reason, Karryn most likely will not even learn Taunt before the end of Level One, and most definitely should not unlock Cockiness yet. It's only starting with Level Two that side jobs and much more Edicts are available, you have better income, there's new enemies with new tricks and old enemies with surprisingly new stats and so on that really opens up the game.
Karryn is 100% intended to be able to stay a virgin and relatively pure and still beat the game. It's a super hard task, but it's suppose to be possible. So one or two accidents should not put her in a full on gangbang. But what it should do, is make her more vulnerable if she keeps getting into accidents and fuck ups and to me, that's fucking hot and the whole point of the Desires and Passives systems in the first place.
I have a confession though. While I had always talked about how I plan and design things out for the full game, even if only a part of that stuff is only available in the current released version or whatever, the shortcoming of the current Desire system is obviously an unconscious decision on my part to make it easy for Karryn to have sex in the very first version of the game when Level One was the only content available and I really, really wanted to show off the battle fuck system that I spend months creating. It's a human weakness to want to impress, even at the cost of a slightly worse design.
What I'm about to do, is actually the first time I'm going to be changing the effects of most Passives. Because when I say overhaul the Desire system, it really means going into each Passive and changing most of them. Like, most of these Passives are stuff I coded into the game two years ago and have remained untouched because I had planned them all out from the very beginning. So it's going to be a massive amount of work to go back and change them. Which is why I agonized on whether or not to just leave it all alone. But since the Glory Hole battle requires so much art to be drawn by Sachinama AND I managed to implement tooltips into the game, I figured now is the only realistic time to do it if I'm ever going to do it.
The ultimate end goal is to make the early game progression more gradual and immersive, and also more newbie-friendly from the Desire system being easier to learn and process. This might? seem like a disappointing, maybe even unnecessary decision on my part? for someone who already has a fully slutted out Karryn, but as always for everything I try to do, I think it leads to a better game, and also a much better game for someone who has yet to play Karryn's Prison.
And I hope this does lead to a better game experience for current and future new players!