Dev Diary #22: Event Types and Date Building

Hey, it's Zanzo!

Let me fill you in on the latest developments (ha!) regarding Date Mode!

As mentioned before, it's all a bit stressful right now for Cucu and me with important other jobs and Deadlines, but it's all coming along quite okay nonetheless. I got to 95-98% with both of Mayus remaining XXX Animations but mixed up the expiration date of my license so that I wasn't able to put on the finishing touches and export it yet. I will renew it one of these days, but that means I could either do some more animations as long as it's valid - which will slow the coding down again - or I "waste" quite a few bucks for like an hour or two of actual usage... Pretty dumb, I admit I fucked it up xD

So let's not waste time here :P

I came up with a system to actually make Date Mode a bit challenging without setting a hard limit for turns you can make or making it all too random and punishing. You will now pay a slowly increasing amount of affection for each turn you make, while each event you already triggered is replaced with the "Wheel of MISfortune", that gives increasing penalties with each turn. That way you have to keep moving towards the end of the board, but you're still able - with the right amount of tactical finesse - to take the occasional step(s) backward in order to pick up a few more affection points.

These mechanics are already implemented, if only in basic, non-visual forms, i.e. the Wheel of Misfortune being more like an "instant Randomizer of Misfortune" ;)

Cucu also outlined a lot of possible events and dialogues for the Date with Mayu, which I have partly already fed into the prototype in order to get a better feeling of what it will play like later. I think we're on the right tracks! On top of that, several general types of events have been added - all dummy graphics as always - like affection gain and loss, turn cost reduction (star), info & multiple choice dialogues and also gambling/random/minigame/whateveritwillturnouttobe-thingys.

You can see all of it here:

Note that the small dots mark positions without any events (for now), while the bigger dot to the left is something that hasn't got it's own icon yet. For a little bit of insight, the values on the top are:

- t: the turn you're in

- tcr: turn cost reduction. 1 means full cost, a star would reduce it to 0.9 (=90%) or for example

- tc: the actual turn costs. In this case, the next turn would cost 10 affection. A full affection bar could be like 500 affection for example, but the numbers are all temporary and will be properly balanced in the process

Okay, I think that's enough for now, gotta get some actual work done D: Hope you enjoyed the update!

x
zanzo