Others No Trace Of Luck [Development Thread] [Godot]

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Thanks everybody who has followed and played up to this point. I've decided that I'm pretty happy with the current version and have submitted it as the v01 release to f95 and also released it on itch.io

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Thanks for participating in the pre-release. I will continue to post updates and other news here as usual.

 

[lagaard]

I've got some ideas I'm going to play around with for the new poker system. Primarily I'm thinking of the following:

• No more chips. For a few reasons
  • 1: Creating a poker AI that plays the game 100% optimally and perfectly is easy, especially if you give it unfair knowledge of the player's hand. But most people playing this game don't want to play against a 100% optimal AI. Most people probably want it to be pretty easy. And it's hard to make an AI that is the right level of difficult to be fun. But difficult enough that the player can still lose and be stripped.
  • 2: Strip poker doesn't traditionally have chips.
  • 3: Getting rid of chips means I can also get rid of: raising, calling, and the potential chain of "raise, call, raise, call" which again, exacerbates the AI problem.

• No more Texas Hold 'Em
  • The current system in the game is texas hold 'em. 5 community cards and 2 private cards. If I get rid of chips, this game doesn't really make sense anymore. You would just be dealt cards, and then have nothing to do.

• I will swap to traditional Five Card Draw poker
  • You are dealt 5 cards
  • You can discard 0 to 5 cards
  • Whomever has the worst hand, loses
  • I'm pretty sure this is the variant that SPNATI uses

But there will be some modifications to the overall system

• Each player will have a pool of lives. Eg: 6 lives
• When you lose 1 hand, you lose 1 life
• Certain lives will have designated events (usually stripping) eg: Life 5, 3, and 1 might each result in loss of a piece of clothing.

Why I think this system is better:

• The current chip system would not really work for an extended strip poker game. It would just take too long.
• This new system has some strategy but is overall mostly RNG. You can pretty much bullshit your way through it if you don't want to play it.
• Right now I have in-match dialogues that trigger based on how many chips you have, but this doesn't really work, since you can conceivably lose all your chips in a single hand, skipping all dialogues.
• Working multiple players into this system may be feasible. With the current system, multiple players is just too complex.
• The AI is simple, it will just play optimally.

I don't have any personal problems with these suggestions, as I always lean to the focus of strip poker is on the stripping, and not sliding around chips back and forth. And yes, traditional five card draw is what SPNATI uses as its well, really easy to understand.

As for the AI's intelligence, SPNATI does use some 'personalities' here, with some opponents actually do play poorly - or they maybe try to go for really risky hands for no good reason. Could always include that, just to reflect how some opponents are probably better/worse/riskier/whatever then others.

A "life" system seems easy enough, and it could still just be clothing at each step. With only the major articles needing an art change, potentially. All depends on how the display looks, I suppose.
I did briefly notice in the intro that it seems the dialogue was tied to chips, so you can end up stacking a bunch at once for sure.
It also goes against the intro with the girl saying she's only going to 'play one hand' with you, and actually can go several as a result. But that's just a minor nitpick in the grand scheme of things.

As my mind wanders to 'lives', if you don't always want clothing off each time, lives can always be flexible things. Covering up, as an example is a way to 'extend' the situation without having to take something off.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Working on the new poker

Icons will probably change but currently the blue circle indicates a loss with no event, and a heart indicates that when that life is lost, some event will play. Events can play for both the player losing and the CPU losing.

 

[lagaard]

A simple looking UI, but it looks workable. Will have to see how it looks in action, or at least, a better idea of how the events are and such to really judge it.
But it looks fine to me, and the concept seems alright as well.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

With a little bit of work, I managed to make it so I can keep both the old poker system (Texas Hold Em) and the new poker system (Five Card Draw) and I can swap between them interchangeably.

In general, I think I will utilize them in the following ways:

• Five Card Draw
  • Strip Poker
  • Story-based poker matches
• Texas Hold 'Em
  • Playable as a way to bet and earn money in the game
  • Certain other non-strip poker matches where I think it makes sense / I want some variety

The Texas Hold 'Em variant doesn't really respond well to integrating a lot of story into it because:

1. When somebody loses, it's over. The Five Card Draw variant has the 'life' system which allows me to extend the match as long as I want and trigger events in consistent, predictable ways
2. The issue I mentioned before where it's very possible to lose (or win) the entirety of all the chips in a single hand. Which makes it hard to trigger dialogue in a consistent way.

Since I'm keeping the old system, I gave the UI some love:

---------------------------- OLD -------------------------------------------------------- NEW ---------------------------



And here is the new Five Card Draw variant. Lives with stars in them indicate they have an event that occurs.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Unrelated to poker, I wanted to make a post on the latest updates to my image creation process. Previously, I would generally try and coerce the AI Model into producing the image I wanted, but AI lacks in a lot of key areas. In particular, it struggles with significant contrast differences, struggles with saturation, and sometimes hues.

So, in an effort to improve my game, I have started experimenting with some manual image modifications in photoshop after generating them with AI.

I am still learning how to do this and how to make an image that looks good, but here's an example of the sort of thing I'm doing now.

On the left is what the AI gives with minimal modification. On the right is after my manual enhancements.



Default -------------------------------------------------------------Enhanced

 

[you4tl]

wow, it makes a big difference. do you have to redraw some of it, or is it more adjusting curves and that sort of thing? do you have to draw separate masks to adjust different areas separately or is it a full frame thing?

 

[lagaard]

With a little bit of work, I managed to make it so I can keep both the old poker system (Texas Hold Em) and the new poker system (Five Card Draw) and I can swap between them interchangeably.

In general, I think I will utilize them in the following ways:

• Five Card Draw
  • Strip Poker
  • Story-based poker matches
• Texas Hold 'Em
  • Playable as a way to bet and earn money in the game
  • Certain other non-strip poker matches where I think it makes sense / I want some variety

The Texas Hold 'Em variant doesn't really respond well to integrating a lot of story into it because:

1. When somebody loses, it's over. The Five Card Draw variant has the 'life' system which allows me to extend the match as long as I want and trigger events in consistent, predictable ways
2. The issue I mentioned before where it's very possible to lose (or win) the entirety of all the chips in a single hand. Which makes it hard to trigger dialogue in a consistent way.

Since I'm keeping the old system, I gave the UI some love:

---------------------------- OLD -------------------------------------------------------- NEW ---------------------------
View attachment 4479225 View attachment 4479223


And here is the new Five Card Draw variant. Lives with stars in them indicate they have an event that occurs.

View attachment 4479231

This really is reminding me of that one poker VN that had the occasional strip poker match in it, whose name I cannot remember (and its abandonware). But I have higher hopes for the strip poker in this, thanks to the 'lives' thing! That game I can't remember the name of, had the issue of the girl got to buy back in, but you just were instantly stripped naked if you ran out of cash once.

And only one of the matches justified it (with the girl saying that's the rules if you want to play against her, she sells one by one. If you lose, you take it all off at once).

On paper your new strip poker setup sounds good, I'll need to see it in implementation though to really see how it ticks.

On the AI image side of things, the enhanced does look pretty good.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

wow, it makes a big difference. do you have to redraw some of it, or is it more adjusting curves and that sort of thing? do you have to draw separate masks to adjust different areas separately or is it a full frame thing?

In this image, I drew 3 masks. One for the background, one for the character's skin, and one for the dress. In the background, I increased the blacks & reduced the whites to try and get rid of the grey tone over the whole image. For the character's skin, I reduced the white (to try and get rid of that grey) and slightly increased the red. For the dress, I only increased the red, to make it pop.

I could probably spend a ton of time adjusting it and making it perfect, get rid of the garbled AI text in the background, etc... but the more time I spend on one image, the longer it will take me to produce content for the game. So I want to keep this extra editing minimal.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

On paper your new strip poker setup sounds good, I'll need to see it in implementation though to really see how it ticks.

Good news I'm ready to publish the latest build. There's no new content compared to before, so there's not really any reason to play further than the poker match. But I actually shoved a lot more changes in here than I thought I'd be able to do:

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With all these changes in, I'm officially working on adding new story content, I think my underlying game systems are good enough for now.


Changes

• The new poker system is in, with small changes to the dialogues in the existing strip poker sequence with Boa. Like I mentioned, I did keep the old Texas Hold 'Em system functional, but nothing in the game currently uses it, so you won't see it in this build.

• A lot of general clean up of the story, I did big changes to the storyline in the last release, and there were still some dialogues referencing events that I removed from the new build.

• Some CGs from the poker match are now unlocked as wallpapers in the phone

• Slightly improved the dialogue box
  • The 'narrator' box background is now darker, so it is easier to read the text
  • I increased the font size
  • I fixed some issues where the 'next' button became unfocused and make it so spacebar stopped allowing you to advance the dialogue and you had to click the button manually

• I removed the "What is your name?" prompt from where it was before. It was very buggy in that location. Now, you set your name when you click 'Start'. Also added basic controls & age warning when clicking start

• I added a few animations for the character art to make the story feel a little more dynamic.
  • A "walk in" animation
  • A "walk out" animation
  • A "zoom" animation

Here's the 'walk in' animation:

 

[lagaard]

Good thing I haven't gone to sleep yet then.
The new poker module seems to work just fine, and while the first match against Boa is very short and minimal, I think I already like it a lot more.
I noticed there's some variations on it as well, like she has different dialogue if she wins first, compared to if she wins after you've won a hand.

So already some strong potential there for sure. I suppose the first real strip poker thing will be against Lisa, who I'm deeply curious as to how she'll be handled. She'll probably end up being a bisexual option, but the fact she has a girlfriend and admits it, is already a lot more then most games bother trying, so...

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Good thing I haven't gone to sleep yet then.
The new poker module seems to work just fine, and while the first match against Boa is very short and minimal, I think I already like it a lot more.
I noticed there's some variations on it as well, like she has different dialogue if she wins first, compared to if she wins after you've won a hand.

So already some strong potential there for sure. I suppose the first real strip poker thing will be against Lisa, who I'm deeply curious as to how she'll be handled. She'll probably end up being a bisexual option, but the fact she has a girlfriend and admits it, is already a lot more then most games bother trying, so...

Thanks for testing and for the feedback, I think this new poker system gives a lot of flexibility to do some good strip poker scenes.

I won't give any spoilers on Lisa's story right now but the next content release will definitely progress her story

 

[lagaard]

Thanks for testing and for the feedback, I think this new poker system gives a lot of flexibility to do some good strip poker scenes.

I won't give any spoilers on Lisa's story right now but the next content release will definitely progress her story

Looking forward to it! Think the first proper strip poker match available will be the real test now.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Working on some art for the new character

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

All the art is done for the new update. Working on scripts now.

This piece of art won't be in the game, but I really liked how it turned out, so I turned it into a meme

 

[kinzle]

All the art is done for the new update. Working on scripts now.

This piece of art won't be in the game, but I really liked how it turned out, so I turned it into a meme

View attachment 4486507

Picture is good but the fingers are reversed lol

 

[lagaard]

All the art is done for the new update. Working on scripts now.

This piece of art won't be in the game, but I really liked how it turned out, so I turned it into a meme

View attachment 4486507

What will the next update have? First 'proper' strip poker match?

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Picture is good but the fingers are reversed lol

Lol fingers are hard, this one at least doesnt look as bad as most of the other ones

What will the next update have? First 'proper' strip poker match?

No strip poker in this one, I am still getting the story rolling, introducing characters, etc... A proper strip poker sequence (not a short demo like Boa's) will take a lot of work to produce so most likely it will be it's own full update when it happens. I expect I will give it a try 2 updates from now. However there may be a partial/short strip poker sequence (similar to Boa's) in the next update, depending on how the story plays out.

 

[lagaard]

No strip poker in this one, I am still getting the story rolling, introducing characters, etc... A proper strip poker sequence (not a short demo like Boa's) will take a lot of work to produce so most likely it will be it's own full update when it happens. I expect I will give it a try 2 updates from now. However there may be a partial/short strip poker sequence (similar to Boa's) in the next update, depending on how the story plays out.

Alas! While that's true, I can still say alas for I look forward to seeing how it will be handled! But true, I guess it cannot be just rushed exactly. And just because there's a setup for Lisa to learn of strip poker, doesn't mean she'll actually go for it yet.
Or that she'll research it that fast.
You are introducing characters still as well, after all.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Here's the latest update, this contains about 50% of the content I want to add to the full release. I am able to re-submit to f95 on Feb 4th, so hoping to finish the remaining 50% by then, which is also when I'll release the update to itch.io

It should be compatible with existing saves

This update contains primarily text-message content. Some images, but nothing super sexy, overall a good story update but probably not worth diving into yet unless you're just curious about the next portion of the story or want to test.

Download:

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One preview image, exclusive, this version of the image is not visible in the game (though a filtered version of it is):