v0.39 Planning - Bringing a little Clarity

Regarding 38.1: After meeting and talking to everyone in the game, I have found zero posts in game on Dikdok and Onlyfans. Only Lilly posts on Instapik. The new content in 38.x does not appear to be functional.

NuTrix

With the great work you're doing on reviewing the core concepts of the game I got to thinking about some of the feedback a few weeks back on the sluttiness cap and I wanted to put my thoughts into a useful overview, so here goes. ===== Assumptions ===== The Sluttiness Cap determines the point at which a position becomes boring and receives half arousal. This is distinct from the Sluttiness Requirement which determines the minimum sluttiness to access a position. The sluttiness cap exists for three reasons: A. To throttle the growth rate of temporary sluttiness (and therefore corruption) B. To discourage endless repetition of the same position even if it offers the best energy economy. C. To encourage players to use 'wilder' positions. In these goals the Sluttiness Cap serves fairly well. ===== Design Conflict of the Sluttiness Cap ===== Core to the design of LR2 is the idea of sexually corrupting other characters. Based on LR1, a fully corrupted character is intended to be an extremely sexual creature, eagre to please and be pleased. Fully corrupted girls in LR2 might be willing to do anything, but the more corrupt they become the less _eagre_ they are. A fully corrupted girl will deliver the player a screen full of 'Boring' and 'Comfortable' on the position screen and the player will constantly be told 'the_person wants to spice things up' and 'Position boring. Arousal gain halved'. This doesn't create the image of a sexually liberated and adventurous individual but rather one of someone who is difficult to please and not really interested in sex at all. For all the players character's efforts they are told the girl no longer finds them sexually exciting unless they create a truly extreme situation. In previous feedback it was suggested that a position or two should be 'exempt' from the sluttiness cap, but the real issue here is the volume of feedback. Even with an exemption or two, 'Boring' and other negative messages will be far more common on sluttiness 150 girls than on sluttiness 0 girls which is contrary to the core design goal ===== Suggested Fix ===== I have every faith in your ability to come up with an elegant solution, but I include this so I'm not just offering problems without considering a solution. One possible solution would be: The sluttiness cap is no longer used in calculating arousal. Instead a little temporary sluttiness is awarded each time a girl orgasms. This amount can be increased by: 1. Don't repeat positions in the same session 2. Using wilder positions 3. And especially by focusing on positions she likes. Mechanically it could look something like: round((the_person.sluttiness_requirement*0.08)*((2+the_person.get_sexy_opinion(the_position))/2)*(0.75^Times_Orgasmed_in_this_Position)) The result would be that no temporary sluttiness will be gained from positions someone completely hates and the most they can get from a single orgasm (anal or piledriver with a +2 opinion) would be 11 points. For missionary with no like or dislike the player would get 4 points. All this meets all the design assumptions of the Sluttiness Cap, doesn't conflict with the core design goal and has the happy side effect of making girls quite different in how corruptable they are. A girl who hates most sex acts will be very difficult to make ground with (prudish), while one with multiple sexual interests will be a far easier target. I haven't addressed a few issues like 'what happens if multiple likes overlap', 'groping has a minimum slut requirement of 0 and would never provide corruption' but if I tackle every edge case this will be even longer. ===== Accompanying UI Tweaks ===== For this to work you'd also need to change terms on the position menu. The words 'comfortable' and 'boring' should go. Positions should have a wildness rank (either a term like 'Hot','Crazy' ect or a literal number) so players aren't left to guess whether against the wall is considered wilder than deepthrought. After this could be a tag that is either 'willing if commanded' or 'unwilling' but, again, no 'boring'. I'd also recommend adding an extra colour to your sluttiness hearts (I'd recommend this anyway tbh, it confused me a lot when I first started playing). Currently situational and drug induced sluttiness is either yellow or red which is confusing since it behaves differently to both of these. If you make Situational/Drug induced sluttiness orange its then pretty clear: Yellow: Fixed, only changes by corruption Orange: Situational, will only last as long as the context that caused it. Red: Temporary, and the only kind that can become core sluttiness. Anyway this is heaps to read but I think its an important point and if you do change something core like this is best to do it sooner rather than later and since you're working on the exciting new Clarity system it seemed like a good time to revisit that earlier feedback about sluttiness caps.

On a totally different note... In def wants_creampie(self), I think your modifiers might be backwards. For example with if the_person.on_birth_control: (script.rpy around line 3262 - I'm still using 36.1, but I haven't seen a bugfix note about this) "effective_slut += -20" was probably meant to be "creampie_threshold += -20" This affects all of the special role modifiers as well (an incestuous family member is currently LESS likely to allow a creampie than one who hates incest).

This is a great idea! Your 100% that the current gameplay loop is that you don't worry about corruption until your business is all set and when having sex interactions with girls the focus is way more on making them cum, than on you. That said Eschew Shame is right above: maybe avoid making the sex the _only_ way to progress your science because it takes some of the fun out of it if you're only doing it because you have too. There's lots of ideas in the pot already but rather than gating new designs behind clarity you could do something like: 1) Increase the side effect chance of all drugs 2) Designs made with Clarity don't have side effects (exc. perhaps Nora's design). Not only does this makes the Clarity route 'faster but not mandatory' but it also provides an alternative to 'make small talk with girl purely to increase drug level'. I don't think the current drug level increase method is bad per se, but for something you currently have to spend a lot of time on, it doesn't provide much variety.

Idea to play off this, "Frustration," the more worked up you get, the more post nut clarity you get, but the worse you do at tasks until you get rid of your blue balls. Also, I'd love to see a storyline where you convince Ashley that the only solution to her porn video problem is to make a porn video and post it online. "If you make it and post it yourself, then you have control again."

Aaror

Join the Lab Rats 2 discord, there is a guy on there who does a bugfix for the game. There are also some cool mods. Vren can't officially endorse them because he wants to retain full ownership of his game (which I get) but the mod community is great!

Aaror

With clarity affecting research, I would suggest a point system to invest in current research using clarity. Something like 5 points of clarity accelerates research progress by an amount determined by your stats, while 10 would trigger a beneficial trait option along with a side effect like the random event already in the game.

IgnusObscuro

I'm on board with this change. You hit it right on the nose: the first thing I do is build my economy, and once I've done that, I'm free to corrupt the girls at my leisure (which mostly involves holding off on my own climax until they're sufficiently corrupted to want it). Adding Clarity as a resource will definitely mix things up. I would advise caution with respect to the following considerations: * If Clarity is required for research, then sex effectively becomes mandatory - and there are few bigger turn-offs than being required to do something. In lieu of that, I would suggest drastically slowing research and then making Clarity a coefficient on research speed. In that case, you would still be able to do research the old way and have a "no sex" run (options are good), but it would take much longer. * I would encourage you to be watchful for bottlenecks with the new Clarity system. Currently, the only bottleneck is money: if you don't research and sell cost-efficient serums, you risk running out of cash. If Clarity is not balanced correctly, it will add another bottleneck, which might create too many no-win scenarios. Other than that, my only suggestion is to do a really thorough bug-fixing pass, either before or after you implement Clarity (I'd recommend afterwards -- I know what it's like to ride the wave of inspiration, and I wouldn't want to suggest that you disembark from that wave). No complaints here -- this game is in active development, after all, and bugs are to be expected -- but I find that most of the new features you've implemented recently are not working (yet!!!!). How can we offer feedback on features we cannot test? :) Regardless: you're doing outstanding work, and the game shows more promise than ever (particularly with the new clarity system!). EDIT: Bugs with .38.1 include multiple bugs with Internet events (exceptions when attempting to flirt or buy nudes; purchasing nudes leads to a generic clothed picture; and comments on Instapics do not show any effects); sex standing up is apparently not vaginal; and when mom attempts to seduce you out of going on a date, the date continues after the sex scene.

Eschew Shame

So, untill wersion 0.39 will be redy. The game is unplayable bacause of bugs .... :/

Adam Król

In 0.38.1, I have found only two girls besides Lilly who mention Instapic, but no Instapic posts by them. I have not seen any Dikdok or OnlyFans girls. Are these events not turned on?

NuTrix