December 9th 2019: Progress Report
Hey everyone, Rem here with this week's Progress Report!
But sorry, there's not much to currently report! Sachinama and I have been busy the whole week playtesting and fixing up the stuff we found, as well as adding new quality of life features and polishing some other stuff. While I feel like 'adding new quality of life features and polishing some other stuff' is something that can take up forever and it isn't technically necessary to completely do all of them before releasing an alpha version, there's still just some stuff that bothers us too much to release as is right now.
I wanted to stop writing this Progress Report at this point to go back to working on the game, but I feel like that would be too unfair for everyone who has been supporting us so I'll describe some of the revamp/overhaul that I recently did.
First is for the defeat battles. Previously and in the current released build, the defeat battle (aka the one in the Bar Storage) would end when Karryn ran out of stamina and energy, like all other battles. However, I personally feel this goes a bit against the point of the defeat battle, which is a bit of a 'punishment' for Karryn and a reward for the inmates, if she can cheat her way out of it by just being too tired. So I had to change some core code for the defeat battles not to end even if Karryn ran out of stamina and energy. Instead, she loses the ability to use skills and just has to TAKE IT ALL until the inmates on the screen are satisfied.
Second one and this is related to all battles. In the current released build, there is only one way enemies are decided for a battle which is the fixed method. And when I say fixed method, I mean the enemies who join that battle are completely predetermined and handpicked by me. But with the next alpha release, there will be second method which is the dynamic method. Which enemy show up in a dynamic battle are random within current parameters. When I did the waitress battle code, I had to write this new method. Then after writing it for the waitress battle, I decided to slowly expand it to other battles over time. So finally right now, the only battles that use the fixed method are Anarchy and Invasion battles. Because the difficulty of a normal battle varies based on the enemy configuration, for example, fighting 5 Prisoners isn't as scary as fighting 5 Thugs, which also isn't as scary as fighting 4 Thugs + 1 Rogue, Anarchy battles will always use the handpicked fixed method.
Last one for today and this is really something that is really, really in the backend of the code, even more so than the first two changes I explained above. And this is about how enemies choose their next skill to use. Basically, I overhauled and revamped the system for how enemies choose their sexual skill to use. This is something that is not going to be noticeable or felt by most players. But this change makes it easier for me to design enemies and most enemies, specifically Prisoners, will use a wider range of skills in a bit more escalating fashion. For example, if an enemy is presented with the option to play with Karryn's tits or nipples, then they will always go for the nipples. Previously, it's a literal flip of a coin with which option they will choose. Since this is still a super new change, I don't know the long term effect of this change yet. For example, maybe it will be significantly harder, if not downright impossible for people to play with Karryn's tits once she has developed enough passives, which also has a side effect of making it impossible to get boobs related passives since everyone rather play with her nipples instead. But this is something I think I'll have to observe over several alpha build releases instead of thinking too much about it right now.
With that all said, we're still on schedule to release the next alpha build for Patrons this month!