House of Hellish Harlots - update 29th Feb '20

This week ended up being a bit of a digression.

I started on writing massage lamia's scenario and hit that awkward spot of not having her character quite nailed down again.  For a change of pace, I decided to get around to finally implementing repeat visits and Portly Gentleman scoring for Pix Decipula and Couchelaxa, and...

Implementing Repeat Visits is surprisingly nightmarish.

I wanted the option for players to be able to go back and see certain harlots again in the course of the same playthrough.  For some harlots this would be to unlock new scenes, for others it would be to pick a different option than last time.

However, I want the interactions within the House to sound as natural as possible.  This means tweaking the harlot's dialogue to reflect she's 'serviced' the player before.  It also means making sure the Portly Gentleman isn't a mug.  He's not going to pay more than once for the same information. (It's also relevant to another variable I'm not going to talk about yet as it concerns progression and an overall end goal for players to escape the house).

In coding terms, this turned out to be a lot more awkward than I anticipated.

It did make me wonder if implementing Repeat Visits is worth the additional overhead.  They're a very small part of the game.  They don't come up very often and most players might not even spot the changes in dialogue anyway.

It ended up being one of those, well I've come this far, might as well finish up getting everything in place.  So I tweaked the Portly Gentleman's scoring code to better handle repeats, updated the harlot testing framework to speed up testing, fixed some potential future snarl-ups, and finalised a process so I wouldn't have to tie myself in knots for every future harlot with repeat visit functionality.

I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out.  Pix and Couchelaxa now have their scoring and repeat visits implemented.  I even got a little cute with Pix.  Even though it's not possible now, if a player's stats change between visits, she will notice and comment on it.  These are minor things in the whole scheme of things, but I hope they will contribute to making the House and it's occupants feel more like a living breathing thing than a static boardgame.  I want players to always be noticing new things with every run.

The more important thing is by keeping the option for repeat visits open, I can do additional things with future harlots.  This might open side quests, etc.

One of the examples of this is Suffocatrix Mamilla.  As with Anna Boa, her repeat visit will be a slightly new scenario.  I'm also planning to tie this in with the ailment system.  The first visit to Mamilla will likely result in the player picking up the "Boob Fixation" ailment.  Visiting Mamilla while having the "Boob Fixation" ailment will result in the player picking up the "Enslavement" ailment.  Visiting Mamilla while having the "Enslavement" ailment, will be the last time the player visits her...

Although, in this case, this will likely be a non-lethal Bad End.  Mamilla takes good care of her boobslaves, but they won't ever be leaving the house.

I think it might be fun to have a few harlots like this.  Sometimes Mamilla will randomly reappear and end a player's run because they didn't treat their ailments.  Other times players will want to to follow a harlot's "quest line" to see what the ending is like.

Overall, though, this was a more coding and mechanics-focused week.  Looking back over the month, I think I've done enough tweaks and changes that I probably should wrap them together as a v0.010 release and put it out for patrons to test.  I don't really like doing the mechanics-only releases.  They're important to make sure I haven't broken anything, but I think people get excited when they see a new release only to get deflated when it's just an NPC, or a lot of changes under the hood to make future development a little easier.  I was thinking in future, I should at least add one harlot to these releases.  In this case I might be able to add Boobella.  I also do want to get the release out next week, so I'll see if I can squeeze her in.

I've already caught up with the scoring and repeat visit implementation I was not able to finish in time for ver0.009 (Mamilla, Pix, Vete Piege and Couchelaxa).  The ailment system is partially implemented (this release will be a good preliminary test for it).  I want to write and add the additional repeat scenarios for Anna Boa and Mamilla, as that will mean I'm caught up with all the extras for each harlot.

This will push the NPC_Nurse + 3 harlots back to mid-March.  I'll see if I can put a proper roadmap out tomorrow or Monday setting out my plans for the next few releases.

The shorter summary is this month ended up being a little weird.  Getting scoring and repeat visits properly implemented was a little harder than I thought it would be (but should now be a lot less painful to implement for future harlots).  Initially, I was only going to work on the semen-recovery functionality of NPC_Nurse and add ailments later.  Instead we're likely going to already have ailments in place for her to cure.

Thanks for your continued interest and support.

- manyeyedhydra