Just some early feedback for this build:
Brokers feel a lot better now. Not sure exactly what backend work was done but with a reasonable amount of girls I'm likely to have at least a 3 star and sometimes a 4. Even got a 5 yesterday. Still think they need a couple more rewards for variety but I can't think of any.
Rather than generate random traits based on the list, it selects two random girls in your entire girlpacks folder and mixes their traits together to get your match.
This might be -too- good though, and I'm keeping an eye on it. I've balanced things around 3-stars being often but not common, and it seems 4+ stars are happening in that slot.
More reward types means less resource rewards, which can be a way to solve this, but I'd want a compelling, scalable, repeatable reward. Tough problem to solve, honestly.
Is Attention Whore working? The openness jumps are clearly there but all the zooming in the world doesn't seem to do anything to her popularity.
I'll look into it.
UPDATE: Found the problem. The system was correctly checking an internal variable to see if the girl in the booth corresponding to that internal variable matched the girl with the trait. However, I'd forgotten to include changing the zoom to change the internal variable. Woops.
Further, I'd forgotten to filter for the situation where you'd never changed the zoom at all but somehow still had the zoom window open, which might have possibly caused outlier errors that were unforseen.
Some girls are still not spawning with specialties in Normal.
Damn it Normal Mode!
*gets the sander*
UPDATE: Now, every time you're done work, it checks every girl without a trait (working or not), and just hands her one. The game is tired of fucking around with these girls.
I need some clarification. Hot Teacher/Life Coach and other 'offwork' traits are only supposed to work in standby correct? Not in back stage positions? Life Coach only gains openness when on standby and I think the other girls only get trained if that's the case. Like, once they're a secretary all their training benefits are lost in favor of the backstage positions benefits? At least until they're removed and put back on standby. Is this correct?
Offwork traits should be working in the Backstage slot. But I thank you for calling my attention to this. I had made the alteration to Hot Teacher, but I'd forgotten to do so for Life Coach. That has been fixed and it should now do the intended behavior.
Theme nights don't feel strong as an investor ultimate but are a fun gameplay mechanic. Maybe just have them every 7-10 days as a regular thing instead? Maybe have Gespote nights, and Connection Nights, and Coaching nights as well? (Obviously more rarely). I only saw hair color ones but my testing wasn't deep.
1) It should be available every three days because two days is too often, and anything more than three days and it'll take me hours to cycle through if I'm in testing/changing mode (because I run a day, stop, code, run a day, stop, code). Three days feels like you can work around it and get your roster ready because--
2) There is absolutely no randomness to the Theme Night. What it does is it looks at each girl and does a comparison of that girl. If the first girl has the same bustType as 3 other girls, it sets the tentative value at 3 and assigns her bustType as the theme. Then it checks hair and body. It then goes to the next girl, and compares her to the remaining girls (but not the first, that'd be redundant), and if she has one of those traits that beats the first girl, the theme and value change to her. And so on.
So, there's no randomness, it just means the first girl in the internal list has hair and nothing else can beat her. If you remove her from the list and put her back it can change the theme. This is one of the reasons I added a button to go directly to the staff list, so these traits can be checked.
Happiness, of course, ends up being integral to cash, reputation, and influence generation anyways. Connection generation isn't affected but outside of Crown Jewel mode, it's already good enough.
Overall, good stuff here. Some nice clean improvements and fixes. It's becoming hard to imagine any more large scale gameplay improvements--dare I say it but the game is starting to feel complete. Disgruntler, of course, may have other ideas.
So far, mechanics have been mostly added with respect to the question "What does the game need?" angle, with a few "Oh this would be cool" things in there as well.
However, I'm finding it harder and harder to find 'needs' that a new mechanic will fill. Most 'needs' now are in quality of life. So now, any 'cool' mechanic I think of has to go through a filter of 'does the game need this?' and most of the time... it does not.
I'm actually somewhat surprised at how much work Investors and Girl Traits have done (from a design standpoint) because now if I want to implement a new mechanic, I can just ask myself if it should be an Ultimate or a Trait. Some mechanics are best as a 'sometimes' mechanic.
Not all ideas I've had have been hits, either.
Classes, for example, don't 'feel good' for me. In Normal Mode, it seems they're used to get Traits, and that's it. I'll probably be making a change here--streamlining. Sometimes a mechanic just doesn't work out.
Classes were originally going to be the start of a whole Mall mechanic where you'd have a place to sequester girls, and have them do various tasks which give them assorted bonuses over time. Brokers, as you can probably tell, were a part of that larger system as well. There was also going to be items the girls got through Shopping, which would confer abilities. This was going to be a very large scale thing.
So what happened?
Traits and Investments happened.
Traits were originally intended to work as a part of Scramble Mode. Scramble Mode was always the big picture goal when I started--it was the thing I wanted to build for myself, and it was the reason I took the project on to start with. But, as you probably remember, Scramble Mode had some problems in development I had not anticipated (though I learned a lot from them). The Traits system, however, was already in place. So I needed a way to make them available in Normal Mode. Classes needed a bit of something to make them 'feel good' and so I hung Traits onto them.
Traits, however, were now doing 'work' that the items were intended to do. Which, was fine. I like Traits. I love Traits. It's something I'm very proud of, and any time I get an idea for a new Trait and code it in, it feels great to do. I like playing around them.
But if I have Traits, why do I need Items?
And if I have Investments, Items will feel too 'small scale'. Changes on individual girls don't matter as much as the broad picture. The 'random variation' that I wanted Items to do was now being done by Traits and by Investments.
So Shopping never got any dev work done, and it never will. Maybe in an alternate universe, you'd have enjoyed sending your girls off with their hard earned cash and having them come back with some cool new bonus.
But it would not fit in VCHH. It'd be 'too much'.
But that takes me back to Classes. It's a mechanic that was supposed to be the foundation for a whole other thing... and it doesn't feel good. In fact, after Scramble Mode, going back to Normal Mode, and dealing with Classes to get Traits just doesn't feel... right. To the point where I just don't enjoy testing Normal Mode. And I've come to realize it's all because of Classes w.r.t. Traits.
It's not something I'm proud of, to be honest. So I'll be looking at changing this. Sometimes streamlining and removing 'depth' is the right call, and in this specific case, it's the right call.
And the game is at a point where sanding the rough edges is now the correct course of action, rather than building on new shelves/rooms/I dunno metaphors are hard.
phlore101 : Found the mute button problem cause, fixed it.
UPDATE: Regarding client wants disappearing when a new client appears:
This originally started because of a starting behavior I was unhappy with. All the booths would start saying 'Waiting' but I didn't like that, because this wouldn't be consistantly done throughout the booth game. Only the booth that is next to be populated should show up. So I'd set it up that under certain conditions it should remove 'Waiting' except for the next booth--by turning the field off.
The problem is how the code sets that text field. There's three different scripts that change that field, each changing the text field whenever conditions specific to that field change. It doesn't take into account the bigger picture of all the booths, each piece of script only sees what's local to the script.
Now what this means is that if one piece of script changes, the others don't know about it and the text doesn't update according to intention, as well as inconsistancy in presentation.
So in the dev build, I'm adding a bit of code that dynamically updates and checks what the field should be and sets it there, every frame. There's a lot of cases where I've done this in the code, so this is nothing new for me. This should make the behavior consistant, at all times, and so things should look better over all.
UPDATE: For the streamlined Classes system:
1) They still exist. There will always be an option to suck up 100 energy over 5 days to get your girl stats. I don't want to take away the option for girls who need stat boosts to catch up. The new goal for this is going to be as a catchup mechanic for girls that are behind (which is a common thing in Scramble Mode, so this solves two problems for me)
2) While the bonus for training will be reduced to 1 points in stats per day, there will be a proc-chance based on your Backstage Trainer's skill (it's 50/50 at 100% proficiency) for an additional point. A perfect trainer will guarantee the proc. In addition, your Backstage Leader will introduce a proc that can boost Openness for training girls. Again--catch up mechanic (something the Lounge is not the best at, if I'm being honest.) This threshhold, by the way, is set at 0 for your first level club--this is not going to be useful in getting you past the 20 openness Nicole Mission. It's only to get them up to the tier of Openness you need for the current level club's sex act tier (without accounting, of course, for Enthusiasts, Over Achievers, or Investment bonuses)
3) This will only occur under a specific threshhold, because while it's intended to be a catchup mechanic, I do not want this to be something that hits your higher end girls. This threshold scales with your Club Level, and hopefully will make taking on new girls feel less bad.
4) The use of a girl's funds to do this is an unnecessary complication. The funds stat is going to be altered to be a 'lifetime earnings' stat, which actually helps make that one annoying Investor quest a little easier to fulfill.
5) The Investment Ult that allows you to train under Brokers is changed slightly so now it just automatically trains all the girls for no energy. Because you no longer need to make a decision on if you want to take the energy cost or not on that girl, and there's no consequences for doing so, training will then be automatic and no longer require your input.
6) A trait can still be acquired through training, but to aid in early game's flow, in Normal Mode, working a single shift is sufficient to earn a girl a trait, if she doesn't have one set in her JSON file's "Power" field, which is a third option for getting a Normal Mode girl a trait.
