Week 11 (9/21/2024):
Another week, more work, I don’t think there's a real theme for this week. I'm at the point where I'm trying to finish up my check list and I think I’m making pretty good progress.
Streamline:
I decided to streamline how events work when talking to a love interest. The original system was made from testing and pushing RPGMaker’s eventing/scripting system to see what works resulting in some spaghetti code where if not dealt with now would have been a real pain in the ass later.
Daily Reset Event:
Make it so some events/variables etc reset at 12:00 at night, this is mainly so the player can’t do some brain dead gameplay of spamming stuff with a love interest or farming a material and breaking the in-game economy. There's a quote that “players will optimize the fun out of a game”, so i’m just trying to avoid that.
School Exam Minigames:
Just some fun minigames/plugins I added to the schools, there are two teachers on the second floor of the school in Cassiopeia Academy, you can take a test and get rewarded BP. The first is a “Who’s that pokemon” Style quiz and the second is a Type matchup quiz, both self explanatory. I’ll have a more battle-related facility next week, so I don’t want anyone to think this is the ONLY thing you can do here, these are just meant to be silly fun things you can do here to kill time.
General Store:
The general store is a store in Lyra town. Like animal crossing where the Nook shop has new stuff every day (at least in new leaf, that's the only one i played) there is new stuff to buy in the shop and it refreshes daily, the shop is also slightly discounted as well. You can talk to the cashier to also get your normal pokemart stuff. The shop also can exchange BP for gifts. I think I mentioned this in another blog but gifts all have their own specialized moods that make them prime for gifting when the Love interest you're gifting to is in said mood (though all will be happy to get a gift no matter what, you just get bonus points for lining up the mood with the gift correctly). (Moods of LI’s reset daily). You can spend 230 BP for 10 random gifts or 23 BP for 1 random gift. This is just so you can save up on random gifts over time for any specific occasion when needed. I also had some fun writing the cashiers dialogue, I might make a event for her later in another update, probobly not a fully blown love intrest but maybe some side quest for a sex scene or something, definitely not for 1.0 though, I'm already biting alot more than I can chew.
Pokemon Center BP:
In general I like the idea of BP returning random things, you kinda gotta work with the scraps luck gives you. You can roll for the following: Berries, usable items (So potions, ethers, revives etc.), held items and pokeballs, each have different prices for BP cost. I think it’s a fun system, though I won’t really know till’ people test it out. I think it will have a good gameplay loop of playing/battling for BP then exchanging that BP for items that should make your battling better, which then loops back into getting better items. It still needs some work for sure, I’m playing with the probability code and stuff to make it not frustrating which is really most of the work im doing when it comes to this system, when your dealing with randomness in games there is a fine line between frustration and fun, it's definitely the top priority to finalize next week since I feel like i’m so close to making it feel good. But yeah, the framework is there and I'm feeling pretty good about it. BTW I totally get being kinda skepticle of the system but I do think its got potential, if it sucks, thats fine, I can easily change it to a more traditional BP system in another update.
Mood Character Portraits:
I already mentioned moods, the player needs to be able to read the mood of the character their talking to as that's a pretty big part of the romance system i’ve coded so I got started on making some art, here is the Mom characters portraits:
That's about it for this week, soon enough I think I’m going to get to the point where coding and eventing are done, and when that happens it’ll be time for art, sex scenes etc, I want to get coding and eventing done by next week, but if i'm being realistic it’ll take at least 2 to 3 more, we’ll see though maybe if i really go on that grind i can get it done. Speaking of art I’m not fully sure of the artstyle I'll do, most of y’all will have seen the character portraits in pixel art. I think that’s fine for portraits but I think the sex scenes themselves should be drawn, I do wonder if I can pull it off. I can draw pretty well IMO but when it comes to drawing on my IPad the slipper surface compared to rough drawing paper is so weird, I can't get used to it. I have ordered a “Paper-like” screen protector for it so hopefully that helps, we’ll see, worst case scenario the sex scenes are also pixel art, which i’m pretty confident in my own pixel art ability to make that look sexy.
Pictures