Collecting Refactoring Dividends

Last week I detailed a major cleanup of the Lab Rats 2 code, which took the main game file and split it up into organized files and folders. The purpose was to make development faster, and that work is already paying dividends. Since that post I have polished off the last needed additions to the Clarity system, and updated plenty besides.

Clarity is a new resource being introduced into LR2 with the next update. This resource is generated any time your character would be aroused, and is needed to begin research into new serum traits and create new serum designs. This addition to the game meant that I needed to read through all of the existing LR2 content and hand out Clarity when it would be appropriate. It took a fair amount of time to scan through it all, but I took the opportunity to add a few new options to some existing events and to update some events that haven't been touched in a while.

Handing out Clarity in events was only half of the work. Properly releasing Clarity every time your character climaxes is just as important. Lots of events and actions have branches that result in climaxes handed outside of the full sex system. I tracked all of those down and added the necessary mechanics to handle them properly. Some of those events now called for a few extra climax options or the option to avoid cumming at all (to try and get a bigger multiplier for your Locked Clarity later), so I wrote and added those where necessary.

The final part of the Clarity system was a reason to corrupt more than one girl, especially more than one at a time. Each girl now has a Novelty score, starting at 100%, associated with them. This Novelty acts as a multiplier to the amount of Clarity actually generated when they make you cum. It's lowered by 5% each time you cum, to a minimum of 50%, and naturally increases by 1% every day. Novelty also increases by 5% when you break a taboo with that girl. This encourages you to corrupt multiple girls in rotation to maximize your Clarity gain, or to use serum to corrupt one quickly enough that the taboo break boosts offset the novelty loss from fucking them repeatedly. Masturbation also has a Novelty score associated with it, which encourages/reminds the player to corrupt girls early in the game.

While adding the Clarity cost to researching new serum designs I took the chance to implement a mechanic that has been needed for a while: serum limitations. In previous versions of LR2 it was possible to give girls as many separate serums as you'd like, assuming you had a way to give them to her at all. Once you had a reliable way of delivering serum the more expensive multi-trait designs were obsolete, except for saving the player a few clicks. Girls now have a "serum tolerance" of 2 serums active at once. For every active dose above this limit the girl suffers penalties to her Sluttiness, Obedience, and Happiness. This let's simple serums stay more efficient, but you need to advance your research to be able to pile on multiple traits at once. In the future I will be adding ways to increase this serum tolerance score (and increase the skills/stats of a girl in general).

There have been other changes, including a bunch of UI updates and tweaks, but this post is long enough and I have more work to do before the release!