Progress Update! - Tons of Design Changes
Hey everyone, it's been a while! Danko and I have been hard at work, but the update is still going to be another two or three months at the soonest. In the meantime, I'd like to give you guys a rundown of a few of the major changes and upgrades we've made to the game's design.
As usual, these systems are subject to change and what you see in this post may not be exactly what you see in the game when the next update is released. But it should give you an idea of where my head is at, and how I'm approaching the design for this game.
Relationship Progression Changes
Last time, I talked about dropping the
Affinity stat and replacing it with two new stats that would track how kind or commanding you were. This was a step in the right direction, but after drafting a few outlines for Jinx's route and playtesting the new system a little, I realized I was adding too much semi-mandatory grinding to the game.
So I thought of a different system. My first idea was to bring back the
Affinity stats and then introduce a two-stat reputation system. You could work on your relationship with each girl individually to level up their
Affinity, and then your actions would level up your
Kindness and
Command reputation stats. Then, once you leveled up one of your reputation stats to a certain level, you could unlock perks that would give you new abilities like being able to tell the girls what to wear, etc. But then I noticed a different problem.
Consider how this plays out. You're targeting a heroine, and you've got three stats to worry about:
Affinity, Kindness, and
Command. You raise
Command by giving orders, you raise
Kindness by being kind...but how do you level up
Affinity? By...being kind? But that's what the
Kindness stat is for. I realized that
Affinity and
Kindness were serving the same purpose, so I decided to make a change.
From now on, each girl will have an
Affection stat. And the player himself, Cleric, will have an
Authority stat. The
Affection stats are raised by interacting with the girls and just generally being a nice dude. But the
Authority stat reflects how much respect you've earned as a member of the Titans. You can raise your
Authority stat by doing sidequests to earn special perks. Each perk gives a special bonus like earning more money from massages, or the ability to use the security cameras. After earning a certain number of perks, your
Authority will rank up! This will unlock new quests, new dialogue options, and new ways to earn more perks.
One of the earliest perks you can get is earned by working at the clinic built into the first-floor lobby. By working extra hard and helping as many people as you can, you'll earn respect from your teammates and from all of Jump City. But remember that if you decide to work hard during the day, you might not have the energy left over to heal your teammates after they return from a long day of fighting crime. Depending on who's going out on patrol that day, you might decide to save your energy so you can give some special care to someone who's caught your eye.
Keep in mind that this doesn't mean that we're cutting content. You can see in the post right below this one that the roadmap includes a main route and two side-routes for each girl, and that is still the plan. The girl's main route will have both
Affection and
Authority checks, but the requirements will be relatively low. One of her side questlines will have much higher
Affection requirements, and will focus on becoming more loving and intimate with the heroine. The other side questline will have higher
Authority requirements, and will focus more on the physical part of your relationship.
Massage Minigame Update!
Most of you probably weren't aware, but the previous massage minigame was pretty heavily intertwined with the old 3-stat system. But now that I've streamlined those stats and made some fundamental changes to the game's progression, I decided that the massage minigame needed an update too.
In the old system, each possible action in the h-scene had requirements for
Affinity,
Love, and
Slave. Meeting at least one of these requirements meant that the heroine would let you do that action without any problem, but if you didn't meet the requirements, you would have to try and get her super horny so that she'd want you to do it anyway.
Gentle actions would increase the Love stat and dominant actions would increase the
Slave stat. But this system meant that each action had to be designed so that it was either very gentle or very dominant.
But with this new stat system, we now have a lot more freedom. So I've made some changes, including scrapping the old 36-preset-action system and replacing the
Energy stat with
Comfort. Now each of your hands are controlled separately, and you'll click directly on the portrait to perform the action you want.
The minigame's core loop is like this: the heroine starts the scene with a certain amount of
Comfort. You click around different places on the heroine's body to heal her there. Comfortable actions will raise her
Comfort meter, and uncomfortable actions will lower it. Whether or not she's comfortable with it which is based on her
Affection stat. Performing uncomfortable actions will drain her
Comfort, but if you perform the same uncomfortable action enough times, you'll have the chance to change her mind about it using your
Authority.
But be warned that trying to change her mind and failing can have big consequences. Trying to perform an action that she's already asked you to stop will come with MASSIVE penalties that can potentially stop you from seeing her again for multiple in-game days. Remember that all of these girls have enough firepower in each of them to destroy an entire city block, so it's probably in your best interest not to piss them off.
So, I hope this sates your curiosity about what we've been working on! There's even more exciting stuff coming that we're playing close to the chest, so I hope you guys are looking forward to playing the next update when it comes out. Remember to join our
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