$5 - Apartment Etiquette and Suggestion Scene Overview

Good evening and salutations my fine patrons!

For this update I thought it fitting to just lay out a few things about the upcoming scene...as well as a little bit of detail about what the above arting is in service to.

Apartment Scene Overview - Spoilers ahead!

There's 3 ways into the next scene, you enter the apartment alone, you enter it with Yuzu, or you enter it with W-L14.

For each of these, depending on how the hospital visit went, your designated harem thrall may also turn up. How you deal with your current guest, and how you deal with your harem thrall, largely determine what happens in the apartment scene- In a way it's a culmination of all the choices made up until this point.

If you go into your apartment alone, expect a little more with your Housedrone, or time spent sorting through your project data.

If you're entering with Yuzu, it's likely about establishing terms of employment. The details would require a secretary, but you could still have some conversation and do some stuff together, see how malleable she is.

If you enter with W-L14, you can get a bit of an early start on some apartment modifications...so long as you're not incurring too many contract violation fines. XD

Something else that is important in the Apartment is being able to start setting some Etiquette rules for it!

Apartment Etiquette

You should be familiar with this, as many people have it in real life! Specifically, are you taking your shoes off when you go into someone's house, or not? So it is in life, so it shall be in your apartment!

However, as you'd expect, in Thrallworks there will be different rules for different folks, and you get a slightly larger spread of options.

• No Rules

• Shoes off

• Barefoot

• Naked

• Indoor Sheathe(?)

Obviously, the higher levels may make certain people too squeamish to enter, or they might offer you a compromise. It's entirely possible some people just won't come around to the house if the rules are too stringent for them, but this could also change as relationships to.

Also, the rules are different between Free Staff, Assets and Thralls. Afterall, thralls don't often wear sures, so for them it's more of a 'lewdness' or 'suit variant' setting.

Assets

These were mentioned in the last scene- these are members of staff who in one form or another end up without their own free mandate for action and can be called up by their Asset Holder to do work for them as they like. This isn't like a Bondsbody as the person still has their own possessions and the like, and they are paid well for their services.

Like bondsbodies though, they do wear a sheathe, though it ends at cuffs rather than makes a full coating, and it's legal to wear things over it when not on-call.

So yeah, come the next couple of weeks I'll be writing up the scene and....huh? The title image?

This? Ah right I should explain

The Suggestion Game

This is art that I was starting to make for the 'Puppet String' CG's in one of the Yuzu choices in the prior scene, but while making it, I realized it was an excellent opportunity to test out some of the training mechanics to be used un the thrall lessons later on, so that's what we'll be doing!

Each character has a bunch of fixed stats, such as how malleable they are, their base susceptibility to hypnotic effects, mental rigidity, response-types and so forth; and a bunch of flexible stats, like their 'mental mode' (how they're currently processing things), suggestibility and agreeableness.

The idea here is that you will pick particular methods to advance her 'suggestability' to unlock higher levels in the scene.

For instance, you can open with an authoritative surprise induction or a more guided hand-fixation, and when you make this selection, you enter into a 'runner' style minigame where you weave through barriers to keep up a good flow of cadence while the text plays out below.

If you miss too many you start stumbling your words and it either takes longer to get through a scene section, or you have to wrap it up early. If you hit enough and get some bonuses along the way, then you might even be able to end the spiel early to move onto the next part.

I'll actually be cutting this part of things out (as well as the straight-route toward it) and putting it out as a bit of a public demo I'm hoping to have done in around a week, so look forward to that.

I also think, given how involved this mechanic is, that I might peel back on the other two suggestion options of chicken and memory play for the moment and maybe put them further ahead. There's plenty of opportunity for such things with Yuzu after all...

Squeezey Bits

Beyond that, I'm also working on reducing the filesize of the Unity project so it's more manageable for everybody; we're already in a really chonky GB range and if I keep adding to that then it's just not going to be a feasible game to download, eh? Someone who is good at image compression has recently gotten in touch with me and I'm looking to see what I can do there, but I also wonder whether I should lower it from 1920x1080 to something more like 1280x720 like a lot of visual novels are at. Can't say that sits right with me though. In an ideal world I'd be able to offer the smaller one public and the 'HD' to patrons, but I'm not sure how efficient or feasible that is. Something to research!

Anyway, that's this update! Expect a more sensibly-sized download for the next one and-fingers crossed- a lil' more puppeting to do...

Enjoy!

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Reorientation WIP (Updated June 27, 2024) Password: ClickClackHeels

Orientation Demo (Updated Apr 28, 2021)

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