- Jun 17, 2017
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Having peeked under the hood, I understand the logic behind needing to exit to the main map each time, if I'm understanding the random event generator correctly.
Something that could be done to reduce the daily clicks a bit would be to incorporate the 'exit location' part with the rewards display. Via a 'stay or go' menu choice popping up at the same time that rewards are displayed.
Another thing that might be possible would be to add a 'jump to location' sidebar with thumbnails for the store, school, town hall etc. along say the left margin, to sorta kinda bypass the main map. The 'random event check' could be handled when you click on said thumbnail, taking you to the random event instead with a 'while you were on the way to the store...' or whatever message to let you know what just happened.
Along with this 'location thumbnail sidebar' you could highlight location thumbnails that have a quest event at a certain time of day in a different color or with an asterisk or something to make you aware that say, you 'should visit the Church during late noon' if it just happens to be late noon atm. This could reduce a bit of the 'click through' a bit.
You could also do this with the main map location icons. If something important quest wise is tied to say the Church, you could highlight the church icon in another color or something to remind the player about this. Of course, the player may have other goals atm, but the visual reminder would help jog their memory at least, or give them a reason to look at the journal to see why the location is highlighted. You also might be able to add a 'mouseover text' function that tells you why the location is highlighted at the moment...
Something else that would be helpful would be to combine the rewards message into a single click. As it stands right now, if you get a stat and affection reward, that's two clicks. If both could be displayed in the same message display... this might require a bit of thought due to how rewards are 'called', or not, I just mod the code I didn't write it...
The goal here is to reduce the number of clicks to do things.
As for the grind, you already know my thoughts on this. Double rewards, adjust time limits accordingly. As for contract costs, again increasing income will reduce the amount of time to hit those targets. If a player is going to get there eventually anyways (i.e. no clock ticking) might as well reduce the number of clicks to get there... and if there is a 'timer' like there is for the first couple of contracts, yeah you can reduce the time limit to compensate for the increased rewards.
Another thing that you could do would be to overlay the current affection levels for each girl on the main romance screen, along with the current target goal. I.E. display say 32/40 in the upper left corner of the gal's thumbnail on the main romance screen. That way you don't need to click on each girl separately to see the relationship levels. The main reason to click on a girls thumbnail at that point would be to see the gallery, so that's still useful, but otherwise the info you need would be readily displayed on the main romance screen.
Another thing you could do along these lines would be to put thumbnails for the other girls in the left margin of each girl's romance subscreen, so that you could just click on the next girl you want to see instead of having to 'go back' to the romance screen. You could also overlay the affection levels with each thumbnail here, to allow players to not need to go back to the main romance screen, and just go back to wherever they currently are once they have scanned the affection levels.
You could also put some sort of reminder on the main romance screen or sidebar icons showing their contract status, i.e. maybe add a '$50,000' or 'owned' text at the bottom of their pic or icon as appropriate.
One thing that has bothered me personally is that the time of day isn't always displayed. This probably should be added to the margins somewhere. Same for current money, having this info in a corner somewhere on most screens (the ones where you have location choices to consider) would be helpful. Also, my 'kludge' for allowing a player to see his current stats in my mod could be handled a little better, maybe incorporated into the journal screen or something. I just went with the 'easiest' route.
So, as molitar has pointed out, yeah anything that can reduce the number of clicks needed per day would be helpful. Hopefully I've given you a few ideas here. I'm kind of 'over' with modding these days, but the mod I did for this game was pretty simple to do. I like the story, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.
I get that drawing up the art takes time too, so I don't mind waiting a bit for storylines to progress from update to update, as this isn't a complete/finished game yet. I am enjoying the changes you've been making to the 'background art' to help unify the theme a bit. Just don't drag it out for five years like some other game (DMD...)
As to the question r.e. which games I think handle grind pretty well, they aren't really similar games to what you are doing here. I spent a lot of time modding Brothel King a couple of years back to try to streamline the gameplay a bit, and the BK team ended up running with a few of these ideas. I don't play very many ero games these days as I'm focused on other things, so I'm sure others can point to some good games with a good balance in this regard.
Hope this helps!
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