HoHH Notebook Functionality - The Notebook (pt1)

Given that the proof-of-concept (hopefully) seems to be working okay, I thought I'd talk about the features I'm looking to add to HoHH. First up will be the notebook itself.

HoHH is intended to be a sort of roguelike. As a player, you (probably) won't complete it at the first attempt. You're also (probably) going to die a lot. The meta-progression is learning about the various harlots – which ones can be safely visited, which ones should be avoided with current stats, and what choices to make if choices are offered. When I didn't think there was a way to store this, it was going to have to be down to the player to remember. Now I can store that information and it also gives both a nice monsterpedia and a progression system.

The progression system part is pretty nice. As the player unlocks more information on a harlot, they get closer to "100%ing" her. This gives some nice additional goals on top of just escaping the House for the first time. (As there are planned to be 5 end-"Queens", the player will have a lot more content than just escaping the House once).

The question then is what pieces of information go towards 100%.

Originally, I was going to treat it as similar to how I handle the Portly Gentleman's scoring – various choice decisions scored in an array and then simple code to display that information or ????????s depending on if the player had uncovered it.

The bits of information to uncover are fairly straightforward:

- the harlot's faction.

- liked gifts (if relevant).

- disliked gifts (if relevant).

- how much semen they drain.

- what stats they require.

- the different outcomes (if they have them).

It's similar to the Portly Gentleman scoring, but also includes Bad End information as well (which isn't tracked for the Portly Gentleman for obvious reasons).

However, as I was coding it for the three example harlots, I did notice there could be an issue with grindiness. HoHH isn't an RPG where the player is slaying the same monster 10+ times. Neither do I also want to force the player to suicide a run 4-5 times just to grab every piece of information on a particular harlot.

For this reason I created two separate arrays of notes and addendums. Notes are scoring facts. They're hidden by ????????s on the notebook page and count towards the 100% Addendums are additional pieces of information. They are not hidden by ????????s and while they modify some of the notebook text, they don't count towards the 100%. You might have noticed this while playing around with the demo.

This is because I value your time and don't want to repeat the mistakes of games in the past where some items gatekeeping 100%s are hidden behind painfully low drop rates.

I want there to be a puzzle element with some hidden facts that might be tricky to uncover.

I don't want to force the player to visit every harlot with a black rose or an empty semen gauge just to tick boxes for notebook progression.

My current thinking is to make black rose and out of semen ends not part of the 100% progression unless a particular harlot handles them differently. The Bad End will be part of that progression, but how it was achieved part of the addendums, so the player is not forced to trigger it in multiple ways just to uncover every last %.

If you play around with the recent demo, you can see how that is implemented. Triggering the Bad End will have it show up in the notebook with an addendum on what caused it. Triggering it again in a different way will modify the sentence in the notebook but not change the overall progression %.

The same also applies to gifts. If anything is hidden by ???? it's relevant. However, a lot of the harlots have a lot of different gifts and gift categories they respond to and might have a minor effect on the scenario. I don't think I should expect the player to try out every gift to unlock everything. Finding at least one removes the ????, and the presence of others is indicated by "there might be others". This is just to let the player know there are other gifts that might be relevant but they don't have to uncover them all to 100%. (If they do find them all, the "there might be others" text goes away to let them know.)

That's my rough feelings for that particular elements. What are people's thoughts on it? Do you want the game to encourage people to be full completionist, or be merciful on that aspect?

I think I have this part roughly figured out with the notes and addendums system. How to handle the hidden information that determines the End is trickier. My first draft of this post was a little on the long side, so I've broken it in half. I do want feedback on how to handle the hidden information and I don't want to bury it at the bottom of a 2K word post, so I'll post it tomorrow for people to go over and leave their thoughts.