Gameplay Element: Enemy Essence

Hello everyone!

Now, when Maya defeats an enemy, there is a 25% chance that they will drop the so called "Enemy Essence". This will replace the current "Quartz" placeholder, becoming the proper currency of the game.

There will be 3 ways in which to acquire essence:

1) Defeated enemies drop essence based on their maximum health divided by 10. For a simple example, the poor starfish there have 80 max HP, so they drop 8 small orbs/pellets of essence. Small orbs equal to 1 essence, but there's also medium sized (10 essence), and huge orbs that give 100 essence.

2) Maya can get naked on purpose and then... give the enemies a good old "hug"! Unlike the above method which relies on chance, purposefully engaging with your favorite ero scenes is guaranteed to reward essence to Maya, perhaps even with a neat bonus!

But there are two dangers to this method, the first being the health drain that naturally comes from ero grabs, but also a new stat called "Lust", which will increase while Maya enjoys herself in the debauchery. Having too much lust might cause all sorts of fun side-effects on our poor heroine.

3) Lastly, essence will be found inside special chests that I will hide through the stages. Those will be in secret locations and/or hard to reach areas, which will require expert usage of Maya's skills and items.

The idea is for players to be able to choose their preferred method to farm essence, either through combat, ero scenes or exploration. For instance, a virgin run can be done by gathering essence via non-sexual means. Or, you could do a slutty run... hey I don't judge!

I generally don't like much grind in games, so I'll try to design this new system to be just a light/mild grind, at most. I will be tinkering and fine-tuning all of the percentages and values until I reach a sweet spot where I as a player would feel comfortable. It's an ongoing process and I'm still figuring out how I want to go on about it, and once this feature is properly implemented I'll want to hear feedback from players and adjust accordingly where needed.

This chain of features that I'm implementing right now is in its halfway point:
dress layer swaping -> enemy essence gathering -> Haruna's shop and Farina's guidance

I'll try to get the whole enemy essence process done by this month (and thus make a new version release at the end of it), to then move on to work on Haruna's Shop next month.

Best Regards,
Mega