Others No Trace Of Luck [Pre-Release] [Development Thread] [Godot]

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Alpha Release 0.0.1

After 3 months of sporadic work since the last update I posted here, and a big final push over the past week, the promised update is here. There are many changes which I will list below. After this release I plan to get back into regular, smaller releases like I was doing before.

Download here:

You must be registered to see the links

I know not many people will play this release, but if you do, please share your feedback as I take it seriously, thank you

Feature: Dating

Progress through a date with your sweetie - Lisa doesn't want to date you, she just wants to learn to play poker. If you want to get in a relationship with her, you're going to need to do some serious convincing!

Progress through dates by asking her questions about herself, answer questions about yourself, and ensure not to stray too far out of her comfort zone. Play your cards right (literally), and before you know it, she might open up the idea of something a little bit more serious!

Dates consist of many branching paths of dialogue, many different possible ways of success, some special CGs, and of course, a valuable source of information in regards to romancing your girl.



The dating system has been fully refined and fleshed out. I consider it complete for now. I only have one small visual addition planned.


Feature: Poker Overhaul Part 1

The first of two major overhauls to the poker system has been completed and implemented. The old poker system was a complete wild west. You had a royal flush and your opponent had a high card of 2? Fuck you, you lose anyway.

No more of that! The back-end logic for poker has been completely re-written and now features:

• A hand-evaluation system that is almost always accurate. Which is close enough for a porn game.
• A full win-chance evaluation system which fully simulates every possible hand and draw of poker to evaluate yours (and your opponent's) exact chances of winning. In the future, this will be revealed to you if you have the correct equipment.
• 3 difficulty levels, allowing the game to thematically tune the difficulty (and rewards) as you progress through poker
• THE WIN BUTTON IS PERMANENT. After some long thoughts, I have decided I will keep the instant 'Win' button in the game forever, so you can bypass poker at any time if you don't want to play it.

Poker Overhaul Part 2 will feature an overhaul of the visuals, though this update does include some visual buffs as well.




Feature: Phone Update Number... 10?

I have once again improved the phone in several ways. At this point, I'm pretty happy with it, though I do have some ideas for some more fluff that may or may not be added in the future.

Animation Overhaul

• A pretty poggers slide-in animation on each new message
• Notification icons indicating which apps have activity
• A dial-up style loading animation on photos sent in the messages app

New story telling capability

I now have the ability to add sub-text to a phone message, giving you omniscient knowledge of what the character on the other side of the conversation is doing:




Feature: Music & Sound Effects

There are like 10+ different songs, which change depending on the scene. As well as a dozen or more sound effects depending on what you're doing.




Feature: Durable Saves

After corrupting my own saves many times during development, I implemented some safety features around saves to ensure they continue to function as I release more updates to the game.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Today I am doing a speedrun.

Starting from 0, I am going to see how long it takes me to create and script the 2nd date sequence. I have put a lot of work into my tools that I use to build this game, hoping it will make additions to the story quick and easy.

Starting from nothing, I will do all of the following:

1. Create new character concept (including designing the outfit, concept, etc...) for the scene
2. Generate all of the character art
   1. Multiple poses
   2. Multiple emotions
3. Touch-up, photoshop, and modify all character art & import it to the game
4. Create the entire script for the VN scene
5. Create new event CGs for the VN scene
   1. CGs for the setting
   2. CGs for the character in the setting
6. Create all the CGs for the date sequence
7. Create the entire script for the date sequence
   1. All topics
   2. All sub-topics
   3. All thresholds / mandatory story points / etc
8. Create the post-date sequence
9. At least 1 new wallpaper unlock
10. Compress all pngs to reduce file size
11. Stretch goal -> at least 1 new song

I just got off work, it's 6pm, and I hope to have it done by 3am at the latest, so about 6 hours.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Well It took much longer than expected to concept the new character and get the style right. I also made a mistake by generating her with a logo on her shirt, and I made the decision to try and keep the logo semi-consistent between images. This took a long time.

However, character art can be re-used all throughout the game, so it's fine that it took a little longer than expected today. Here's what I did get done:

1. Base character concept created and style finalized
2. 27 individual pieces of character art generated and touched up. I spent a long time ensuring the design on the shirt is mostly consistent between every image. Additionally, I had to manually recolor the eyes in every image.
3. Of those 27 pieces of art, I have completed 5 of them fully (editing out the background, turning it into an actual 'sprite' i can use in-game). The other 22 I will have to complete later. This is probably 3-4 hours of work

So the speed run kind of failed, but not because of my tools, but rather because it just takes a long time to make a new character concept and create a lot of high quality, consistent art for it.

Say hello to a preview of your new character below (see that logo on her shirt? That took a long fucking time to make consistent on 27 images!):



Also yeah, she's a bitch, so I hope you like bad girls.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Preview of the next scene, still work in progress.

Current status:

1. 23 distinct pieces of character art have been completed and fully edited and loaded into the game
2. About 20-30 other CGs created and prepared for the next story sequence.

Currently working on:

1. Writing the script (the actual text)
2. Writing the script (the game script for the date sequence)

Here's a preview:

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Alpha Release 0.0.2

Hey all, the next release is here.

Download:

You must be registered to see the links

In this update:

1. The next date sequence has been *mostly* completed

By *mostly* I mean all the images and dialogue are there, but the reactions from certain dialogue options are still placeholders / mostly random. So don't give too much weight to them.

I have decided that the date sequence, as I had created it before, was not fun. Getting denied for questions at random was mostly just annoying and disincentivized asking anything other than the core plot point questions. So in this date, every question has a 100% success rate.

I plan to re-work the date system a bit in the next update to make it more engaging. Instead of being denied for certain questions, you will get 'business' points by asking core plot questions. Once you have enough business points, you can 'redeem' them for guaranteed success on a particularly risky question.

Additionally, I'm exploring the idea of offering up special wallpapers / special CGs if you successfully ask certain questions / successfully complete certain optional parts of the date.

Here's a formal list of what I hope to get done over the next 4 days (I have a few days off work, so can contribute a lot of time to the game)

• Small rework to date system to make it more rewarding rather than punishing
• Introduce the 'Poker Hall' system, which will serve 2 functions:
  • Serve as a setting for certain pieces of story progression
  • A plan where you can challenge NPCs to poker and earn money.
• Introduce a 'Store' / 'Items' system. These will serve a few functions
  • Certain items can be used in a date to help you get success asking particularly risky questions
  • Certain items can be used in poker to help you win
  • Certain items are necessary for quest progression
• Money System, for purchasing items from the store. I don't know how I will work money in currently. You will get money from poker / the poker hall, but I may also create a 'job' type system. Not sure yet. Don't know how much time or effort I can put into a full on job system.
• Stretch - The 3rd (and final character in the Alpha) will be introduced as part of the Poker Hall.

Image 1: The new date sequence which was added

Image 2: Preview of the finalized character art style for character 3 (this particular image will not be in the game, but this is the style and general design I have decided on)

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Preview of the beginning of the rework to the date system.

Here is my current plan:

• The 'business' bar (blue) is filled by asking most questions.
• Once the 'business bar' is sufficiently full, it can be redeemed to ask a 'love question', eg: something more risky, "what is your cup size?" etc...
• Once a love question is redeemed, the business bar will deplete and the love bar will fill.
• The Love bar will have stages, after passing each stage, a special event CG is unlocked, known as a 'Date Memory'. The amount of stages may vary per date, or it may be 3 for every date.
• Failing certain 'quiz' style questions "I told you my favorite color before, do you remember what it is?" will deplete the business bar.

Also

• The 'bonus' system is removed. The bonus system previously gave extra chance to succeed in a 'risky' question if you had previously failed it. This system is not needed anymore. Failing is guaranteed if you don't have enough business points, otherwise success is guaranteed.

The bonus system is removed:

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Really good progress so far, pretty happy with it, there's sound too in the game.

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Alpha Release 0.0.3

The previously mentioned changes to dates are now implemented. They're pretty raw right now, and the dates themselves need some clean up because they weren't scripted for this new system, but it's mostly functional.

Download:

You must be registered to see the links

My next steps are the following:

- rework dates to make sure theyre consistent w/ the new format
- lisa partner-ask on relationships only gives blue
- most of lisas relationship ones are impossible
- additional wallpapers for lisa
- rework ashe date to set up emojis, love events, cgs, etc...
- rework early game to:
- replace old ashe art w/ new ashe art
- replace gambling scene w/ new art

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

Latest Update

Further refined the new date mechanism, it's really shaping up well. I would consider it more or less complete.

Next, I need to update the 2nd date to abide by the rules of the new system (it was created before I did this rework)

Added several new features

• Ability to lock topics behind date or Business Bar progression.

• Unlockable 'Memories' which occur as part of the date. Some memories are unlocked by simply filling the Love Bar, and others are unlocked by reaching specific parts of dialogue within the date.

• The reaction emoji is now in a static location, rather than being a particle effect. I did this because:
  • 1: It was kind of hard to actually perceive what the reaction was when it was spinning and falling and exploding as a particle effect
  • 2: With the Love Bar and Business Bar having particle effects, there was too many particle effects happening at once

 

[NoTraceOfLuck]

After some extensive testing of the data system, I felt that I needed to make some changes. The reasoning for the changes are:

• In the old system, the 'Luck' and 'Intensity' meters did not do anything. I had a plan for them, but as the design changed, they became pointless. So I've removed them and reclaimed the screen space.
• In the old system, you could never lose. The date system really was just more visual novel without any real gameplay. You selected each option as they became available and that's all you needed to do to get full progress.
• In the old system, I assigned tags such as 'Friendly Talk', 'Deep', 'Personal', etc... These were mostly just random and pretty forced. They made development harder and I didn't feel like they actually added anything to the game.

Here's what I wanted:

• If you fail quizzes, there's a chance you can lose and need to restart
• Make it more visible where Memories are available, so that you can find them more easily and get full progression more easily.
• Make it more visible that new dialogues will become unlocked as you progress.

Noteworthy Changes:

• Changed: Date Controls
  • Date controls are now condensed down to 3 options: Talk, Flirt, [Discuss Date Topic], and Small Talk
    • [Discuss Date Topic] is specific to that specific date in the context of the story. In the example below, it is 'Poker Training' because this particular date involves talking about poker training.

• New: Comfort Meter
  
  • The comfort meter is a new addition which shows how comfortable your date is.
  • At high comfort: Gain access to new dialogue options under the 'Talk' and 'Flirt' category
  • At low comfort: Loss access to dialogue options
  • At very low comfort: You fail the date
• What is comfort?
  • When you ask a standard, normal question, the comfort meter will increase.
  • When you flirt, the comfort meter will decrease.
  • When you get quiz answers correct, the comfort meter will increase.
  • When you fail quiz questions, the comfort meter will decrease

• New: Locked Memories / Locked Dialogue Indicator
  • When a particular topic has memories (CGs) that have not been unlocked, this is displayed. So you know if you're missing out on some new CGs
  • When a particular topic has dialogue options that you cannot access yet (comfort meter too low, business meter too low), this is displayed. So you know if there are more dialogues in that topic to watch out for.

• New: Complete Indicator
  • When a particular topic is complete (nothing new in that topic) a complete indicator is displayed, indicating that you've completed that topic

Note this is just a mock, the functionality is not complete, it will take me several days to make these changes functional.


See the complete mock here:

•