Paper prototyping and the plague
Added 2018-08-11 05:36:06 +0000 UTC
This is the part where I'd like to announce a new release, but instead I'm announcing that I've spent the last 3 weeks wrecked by viral tonsillitis. Woo! I hate to perpetuate the 4chan stereotype that adult game authors are ne'er-do-wells and flakes, but I haven't found a way to project manage away being a one man project that's one man down.
I did get one thing done during my convalescence. I started on paper prototyping Fleshcult 2's lair mechanics. My idea is that instead of assigning beasts and concubines into pairs, you'd assign minions into the lair's various rooms: mana extraction rooms, tease rooms, recreation rooms, transformation labs, and the like. This would be accompanied by text snippets with concise descriptions of any sexy situations there.
Each minion has stats for lust, health, and homesickness/happiness, and each 'slot' in the rooms has rules for how these get modified. For example, if you've got a concubine and a beast in a mana extraction room, you might drop an apprentice into the room's Voyeur slot to scrub off their accumulated lust, so their lust doesn't max out and damage their happiness.
How did it play? Well, there's definitely strategy to it. Maybe too much - I want to leave enough player attention spare so that I can deliver sexy text and images without the player being overwhelmed by numbers. I think next time I'll go for two stats per minion because I'm not sure that the two different welfare stats are paying their way. Also, I found I was shuffling everybody every turn, which is way more micro than I'm aiming for. I think I can fix that just by increasing the stat capacities so that everything happens more gradually.
Comments
Nice
2019-02-02 17:33:54 +0000 UTCIt will be great to see 1$ tier with no benefits for people who have too many pledges, but they still, want to share one more )
Nikita
2018-08-22 19:03:16 +0000 UTCPerhaps you can vertical slice by only selecting a couple out of your handful of possible stats to simulate, and add additional stat tracking as your game develops - testing at which point stat management becomes grind management? Or alternatively you could expand the existing trait system you had (either by adding traits or by adding effects to existing traits) similar to the way that soldier traits work in Metal Gear Solid V Phantom Pain works by having some traits that mean you effectively don't have to manage a character (Daemonic submission, Cultist, Leader...) and some that mean that you have to carry out character management (Homesickness, Too Human, Highbrow...) for a specific stat. The second method means that whilst you do have to carry our management, we aren't doing the same puzzle every time for every character - if that makes sense. Regardless, cheers for continuing! I was an Offbeatr supporter originally :D
ExDee
2018-08-11 07:35:22 +0000 UTC
