HoHH Notebook Functionality - Replays

Right, after talking about the notebook itself last week, time to look at some functionality it allows – scene replays.

Scene replays and gallery functionality are pretty important for H games. Players will have favourite characters and scenes that match their tastes, and will want to call them up again as easily as possible for… ahem… reasons.

Currently House of Hellish Harlots is a little poor in that department. There is the mulligan token system, where the player can request a favoured harlot from The Madam, but that will only put her in the following round rather than take the player to her right away. This was because I wasn't sure whether the final game would have this functionality rather than it being test functionality. This left the implementation somewhere awkwardly in the middle. My preference would be to take it out eventually, but not until all harlots are added. I think it's still useful as a tool to enable players to get to new harlots quickly right after they're added.

My idea is to have the replay functionality put in the notebook. Not only would the player be able to see information they've learned about a harlot, but they would also be able to replay favourite scenes. The unlock criteria is fairly simple – the player just needs to have gone through the scene in the game.

This is also fairly easy to track as the notebook is already doing that as part of determining which information is displayed in the notebook.

The basic replay functionality is fairly straightforward and already implemented in the proof-of-concept demo. Once you've seen a particular ending or path, that path will then be available to see again from the notebook.

One thing I wanted was for the replays to not interfere with the base game. There is a "replay mode" flag. The game doesn't autosave while playing through a scenario in Replay Mode. This means the player can duck out of the main game, replay a favourite harlot scene, then duck right back into the game where they were before.

The other thing I wanted is for the Replay Mode to be a strict Replay Mode. The player should not see anything or learn any new information on a harlot while in Replay Mode. While a lot of harlots use hidden stat checks, some give the player choices that sometimes matter. My thinking was that the player should not be able to make a choice they haven't already made in the main game. You can see the implementation of this in the demo. If the player chooses to replay one of Sapoonis's paths, the option to refuse to massage her breasts and leave early is greyed out and can't be selected.

This is the easy stuff and I've already figured it out and implemented it in the demo. From here on it starts to get a little complex.

If the right conditions are met, some harlots will drop hints on other harlots. I'd like to make more use of this as part of the clue system I mentioned last week. There is an RNG element to this. The harlots that do it have about 3 or 4 harlots they can drop a hint on and which particular one is selected at random. I don't want the player to be able to see new information in Replay Mode they haven't seen while playing the game, and this should include those hints. This probably isn't too hard to deal with – keep a record of which hints have been shown and have the replay only pick hints that have already been seen.

This then drops us into thornier territory of what a "replay" is.

The current implementation is not strictly a replay. It makes use of the Harlot Tester functionality I implemented to test harlot scenarios individually. A test "player" is created and the scenario runs as normal, but with redirects on leaving the room (either through Game Over or leaving normally).

The Replay Mode does the same, but with some player stats changed in order to get the desired end or path. If a stat is relevant, it will be fixed to whatever value triggers the End/Path. If it isn't, it will be set to a random or neutral value. This means that rather than see an exact replay, there will be minor changes. The replay "player" will turn up with a different gift. There are also minor text variations for some player dispositions that aren't important enough to track, so those might be different.

Also, while a harlot might have a single Bad End, there are usually multiple ways to trigger that Bad End. It could be through the harlot's mechanic, or an ailment, or because the player ran out of semen, or because they brought the harlot a Black Rose to force the Bad End. I don't think it's feasible to give 4 different replay options to the same Bad End. The current system keeps track of what caused the Bad End and so uses that one for the replay. If the player has triggered the Bad End multiple times, the replay prioritises them in the order of harlot mechanics, running out of semen, and finally the Black Rose "surrender" option.

The question then is, is this important?

I don't know on this. It might be just a minor 'huh' moment to have the replay turn up with a different gift or have slightly different text because this "player" has dominant rather than submissive disposition.

It might have more of an effect with Bad Ends. If someone is turned on by the thought of a succubus increasing the drain to force them to come even when empty, they'd rather have the replay do that than the one where the player brings a Black Rose to "beg" for a Bad End.

It's this aspect of the Replay Mode I'm still undecided on. I have some ideas:

- It's not important, so go with what I have now.

- Have a separate options screen after the player selects the Bad End replay so they can fine-tune what caused it (bad stat check, lack of semen, Black Rose, etc).

- Create a simple copy of the player's current stats when they unlock the Replay and assign those values to the Replay "player" when replaying the scenario.

The last one is the more complete option and one I'm tempted to try out. It wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. I think I could also give the player options to fine-tune it in that if they trigger the same unlock on a later playthrough, when they come to replay it the game will give them the option of replacing the existing "replay" with the new one.

My main concern there would be bloating the save file, but as the data saved would be a fairly small object (maybe 20 numerical values), it might not be an issue.

Those are my more detailed thoughts on the replay functionality. The basics are very straightforward. Handling some of the variations might be trickier.

What are people's thoughts?