October 19th 2020: Progress Report and Surprise Dev Log
Hey everyone!! Rem here with this week's Progress Report!
Ever since the middle of last week I've been looking forward to writing this report. No hold it, this is not about v7 being ready - that is still pretty far away, so let's burst that bubble right from the start.
No, I did some major accomplishments since last week.
First, let's talk about how it all started. So after I posted last week's Progress Report and was getting ready to go to bed, I thought about the Glory Hole battle and how there is an issue with it, that issue being that as it stands right now, it might take forever for most players' Karryns to get anybody to cum. And well, yes it might be because their Karryn has low Dexterity. Yes, it might be because they don't have enough Passives to make their sexual attacks stronger. Sure, that would be working as intended...... but it also wouldn't make for a super fun experience and it doesn't change a fundamental problem with the system, Glory Hole or not.
So I wrecked my brain, came up with a few ideas and then fell asleep. I woke up the next day, I decided that I wanted to go through with one of the more radical solution that I came up with, but in order to implement that solution, I needed something.
And that something was...
Tooltips.
Anti-climatic? But it's super important for what I want to try to do!!! And holy moly, I managed to implement tooltips into the game!! Basically, now you can mouseover the buff/debuff icons in the battle screen and a tooltip would pop up explaining what that icon means. Just having this is freaking huge, I'm sure I'm understating the importance of tooltips but it is so, so big as a developer to have the ability to show tooltips.
And I did it, the freaking madlad. Also, while implementing tooltips to the battle screen, I also managed to implement tooltips to battle results screen where it lists out the new Passives Karryn just obtained. Now if you mouseover the Passive, it tells you right there on the screen what its effects are, and I think this is super, super freaking cool.
Anyway, managing to implement tooltips somehow broke open a dam of new ideas in my head. If I really want to go through with the radical solution that I came up with, which is going to be basically an overhaul to a lot of stuff, I might as well change up some other stuff along the way.
And since I was just flooded with new ideas, I spent the rest of the week implementing them first before I go through with the overhaul. I have been thinking, worrying, and sketching out some of the stuff I wanted to do with the overhaul, but I really also needed to just get all these unrelated ideas out of my damn head so I had some breathing room in there.
One of the first new idea I got was basically implementing a way for certain sex scenes to get changed midway into another sex scene. To give an example, let's say Karryn is doing that handjob sex scene where she is giving a handjob to someone while standing up. Now, that sexual position doesn't allow anyone to vaginally or anally penetrate her, among other things that no one can do while she is just standing there. But under certain conditions, instead of everyone just being like, 'Welp, time to just jack it for a while then', Karryn can be moved into a different sexual position while still retaining the people that she was giving a handjob to.
It was a lot of code to implement something that will most likely not occur in a majority of the situation, but, I think it was still very worthwhile to do because under the situations that all the conditions do match up, I think it's a much better playing experience for it to occur. Plus, the code is now there if I have an idea to do something else with it.
Afterwards, I also did a ton of changes here and there that ironically did not involve as much coding as the sex position thing I just talked about, but their effects would probably be much more pronounced for most cases:
- Endure Pleasure / Wait Pleasure / Open Pleasure got their effects changed a bit, and I also added a 3 turns, 5 turns and 10 turns version of Open Pleasure that basically just skips Karryn's turns for that many turns. This is for the people who want to just see Karryn take it without their input.
- As previously mentioned in past Progress Reports, Cautious Stance has to be brought as an Edict first now. And also, there are now versions of Cautious Stance / Defensive Stance / Counter Stance that uses Revitalize or Second Wind on the same turn. The slight downside of them is that the you don't get the effects of Cautious Stance / Defensive Stance / Counter Stance like you normally would at the very start of the turn, but after whenever you would get your turn. So fast enemies might act before the Stance's effects come into play.
- Using Attack Skills consecutively in a row makes the next Attack Skill stronger and more accurate but also cost more Stamina. Is Karryn going to be cocky and push her luck to keep her combo string going, or is she going to play it safe by healing up?
- Using Sexual Skills consecutively in a row makes the next non-petting Sexual Skill deal give more Pleasure but also cost more Stamina. Using the same non-petting Sexual Skill on the same person consecutively also makes it deal much more Pleasure but also make it cost much more Stamina.
- This actually is a change that wasn't done last week but a couple weeks back. But since I'm listing a bunch of changes I might as well show off this one. Some Titles have had their passive effect changed. Basically, certain Titles now require you to equip them for just a moment in order to obtain their passive effect for your current playthrough. These equip-to-get effects are basically for Title passives that give plus (and now MINUS) Order, or Bar Reputation / Visitor Center Reputation / Visitor Center Fame / Visitor Center Notoriety.
Anyway, I ended up spending an hour writing out this post so I'm going to cap it here. I did the basic implementations of tooltips a few days ago but I'm still super excited about them, and starting this week I might finally be able to start using them for real while I design the big overhaul that I have been thinking about. See you all next week!
