Sarkath
Active Member
- Sep 8, 2019
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Yeah, the pace helps a ton. Early game LT feels like you're basically spamming the same action an awful lot to get the bars to move.It's sort of madlibs-y still, but not as bad. Because its quicker and more to the point, it doesn't wear out its welcome as fast, at least in my opinion.
Getting rid of all the madlibsiness would be pretty goddamn difficult. I imagine having different text for different states of arousal would probably help. Basically anything to add a bit of variety.
And that's the beauty of a proper design: as you said before, if you design it well you can change it without impacting anything else.But I still want to have the option for both fully written sex scenes, and a quick option for people like me who get more into the game-y part of porn games lol
IDK, it's not great. But it's an easy starting place. I'm going to doom myself to the same placeholder hell Inno has lol
That's one of the positive things that LT has going for it: the fact that you can do simple evaluations within a block of text to allow for subtle dialogue variations. It's really curious why it isn't used more in situations like that. It might be yet another feature that were implemented a bit later on in development and none of the old stuff was retrofitted to make use of it.I really wish the personality traits were used more in LT. It was one of those "to-do" things that just never got done. But there's so much potential there. And it's not actually *that much* additional writing to add a bit of flavor in. Specially if you're using a simple system that allows for easy interjections into your script.
Its implementation is pretty janky (like, it uses a full-on JavaScript engine behind the scenes to handle expression parsing…AGH) but it does the job well enough. I think its biggest problem is that this system is bolted onto an XML-based dialogue engine. Granted, putting story text into a CDATA block is better than trying to hack it into a JSON object, but schema-less XML is fucking cursed.
I've pretty much relegated myself to having to write a simple language to deal with this in my project. I've experimented with YAML a bit to define story data since its probably the closest you can get to a human-writable data format, but it's just straight up bad. It's like they set out to make a better JSON only to realize that making a markup language actually requires a lot of difficult decisions.
Pulling in an existing language (JavaScript, Lua, Python, etc), sandboxing it, and wrapping some story functionality around it is tempting, but my goal is to stay in my lane and get the hell out of the writer's way. Something like Twine/SugarCube would be perfect but it's not really an embeddable system.
And hey, it wouldn't be the first time I've done something like this. It's kinda fun!
The combat system is one of those things that I wish I could put off indefinitely, but nay. XD As I mentioned a while back, my project is going to be a planet-hopping sci-fi romp, so I'm going to need two combat systems. It wouldn't feel right to me using the same system for both ship combat and ground combat, after all.For me, the hard part is figuring out a good combat system. I'm not sure what I'd really want out of LT's combat system at this point. And I'm not at all sure what I'd make for a combat system. Even before I was working on anything myself and I was just trying to come up with some way to make LT's combat interesting, I've come up with dozens of ideas and ruled them all out for various reasons. Usually because I don't think they'd be fun under heavy repetition.
I get what Inno was going for with LT's combat system, but I'm not convinced that a turn-based, combo-based combat system is really tenable for this sort of game. Unless you spend a metric ton of time on it, it always feels like you wind up with a tiny handful of exceedingly effective actions that the player just winds up spamming until they win.
In terms of overall functionality, CoC's system is the closest to a traditional RPG combat system and is likely one of the best ones in the genre, but there's a certain stigma behind making yet another CoC clone.
As much as I love Flexible Survival, its combat system is kinda bad.
Tales of Androgyny's combat system is kind of a marvel, but it's a bit too complex for my liking.
This is yet another one of those cases where taking a modular design approach is absolutely wonderful. It gives you the opportunity to easily prototype a system and quickly torpedo when it inevitable doesn't work out.