I know you don't wanna spoil too much of your story but will the guys have any comments degrading her, or whatever they think is on the other side, that she can hear through the wall/ hole and react to? I personally think the scripted parts of the minigame for the first time she did an action with each guy and we got more thoughts and feelings were the better parts of On Edge.
Any plans for uncircumsized cock?
I agree that the "reaction text" stream during the mini-game were one of many things that the inspiration game did very well, adding immersion and bringing the character's thoughts into light. I've already got a very similar mechanic built into my replica of the minigame, and while at this stage it's just showing debug messages, I do plan to use it in a way like you described.
Regarding dick details, I haven't finalized artwork in that area.
Actually, I haven't finalized art in many many areas
. Progress is admittedly not super fast - it's a long road and I'm treating this as a hobby project, not a "job", or something that I am trying to rush out and start begging for support. I'm still enjoying the process and I want to keep my promises, so I just keep adding bits and pieces and try not to have any "zero" days. RealLife (boo!) does have a nasty habit of getting in the way, however.
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Speaking about game design - I've been a little lacking in traction for a while... I started with a burst of energy, writing a bunch of unconnected scene ideas and dialogues, and then building a 80% replica of the minigame. Then I spent a while doing enough AI image work and image editing to be confident I can do the artwork parts. After that, I enjoyed the sidequest of doing some music and the intro sequence.
But for all that "progress", I've come to realize that a I've been a bit stuck with regards to how to progress the actual gameplay.
One thing I *don't* want is to just make it a K.N. clickthrough between mini-game stages. It is *my* opinion that for *my* enjoyment a game needs to have a certain amount of player effort required, otherwise the rewards (porno scenes) are hollow and not much different from just looking at a CG rip.
I do think that RPGM games often take "effort" waaaay too far - running all over multiple map screens to gather resources and/or repeatedly talk to NPCs is just boring grind. The original OnEdge game was especially bad for this - why the fuck do we need to run across 4 maps to talk to the miner and the farmer and then sleep SIX fucking times to build up their excitement to max? (I guess I can hold back the criticism a bit - perhaps it would have eventually been "tuned" better if the dev had not abandoned it)
Anyway... what I'm saying is that I want some gameplay outside of the mini-game. (And that while I'm also desperately trying to control the scope creep, but that's a hard battle LOL)
Adding gameplay - that implies a few things:
* a "main quest" with tasks/steps to accomplish, that both reveal the story and provide success points that "level up" the available content.
* And if there is a quest with tasks, then the player needs to be taking actions to cause the progress by completing tasks.
* And actions need to occur in locations, otherwise it's just a "click options on a text menu style game", which I also don't want. (the pathological example here is "Labrats" - some interesting ideas but so so much repetitive menu clicking)
* So now I need to build graphics and systems to allow FMC (female mc) to visit at least a small number of locations on the ship, to trigger the scenes which show story content and complete quest steps.
Sooooo... these last few days have consisted of messing around with making a map and the Renpy code underneath to allow travel around locations. This involved both making some basic artwork, and then lots of research.
Finding and reviewing various Renpy tutorials / reading more general game programming textbooks / de-compiling other Renpy games to examine their systems.
The goal is to understand enough about the coding side of the internal quest/location/time loop systems to make a start without either over-complicating the design or backing myself into a corner where I need to do a lot of rework. And before anyone declares me marked for death, I'm also focused on is avoiding the problems of "sandbox" design. Towards that end, I am specifically planning to have both "go here to make progress" markers and hints on each next step in the quest flow. There will be NO reason to go look in empty rooms unless the hints tell you to do so - no secret items, no "NPC X is here in the morning on Tuesdays" stuff. To my mind there is no value in forcing the player to click around all the locations every time interval just in case they miss something - that's not interesting gameplay at all.
Damn, this turned into a massive wall of text. Anyway, I should post some art....
- Juliette in the Lab, doing some brainy stuff.
