State of the Game - Alone in a Crowd

Hey all, time for another State of the Game post! I have no real surprises to talk about tonight, as in the past few weeks I've completed pretty much exactly what I listed out in my last post, along with a few changes to move Romance Scenes from 'debug mode' to being tied in to the scenario sequencing. To go into the updates in a bit more detail, however:

• Solo Position: There are two ways for a character to end up 'solo' during romance scenes. The first way is to not be assigned to a particular spot when selecting a position, with all leftover participants becoming 'soloists'. It's even possible for only a single person to be assigned to a position entirely, in which case they're also going to be limited to what actions they can perform on themselves. The other way is to specifically select soloing as the position, in which case everyone in the group will start doing their own thing, until the next time a position is selected. Solo acts include things like dancing, dirty talking, and taking care of things manually (which can also often be done while in a group position as well).
• Position Requests: I've set up the system where after a certain number of turns an NPC may request to have a specific pose in a specific position. If you agree and swap to it, they'll get a bonus to arousal, while there's no penalty for sticking with what you like. In fact it may not always be ideal to switch, as the goal isn't to maximize arousal, but rather to keep it within the peak 'finishing' zone. I currently have things set up with a diminishing requests calculation, where once things get going NPCs will request position changes less and less often. I haven't yet set up the system for Top-type NPCs making position changes on their own, I may tie this into a game option for players who want more or less control during these scenes.
• Flavor text updates: I've now written up at least five different lines to go with every action type, including separate sets for when actions are performed by a character on themselves. Additionally, I've expanded the number of climax-associated lines, with many situational cases for which body parts happen to be involved. I've also set up something of a 'slang randomizer' to add a bit more variety within those sets. One thing I'd like to come back to and add later is trait-based dialogue, for when characters are performing actions they particularly like, but this is an area I'm likely to come back to later in general. For the moment, I think there's enough to work with.

For a short demo video on the current behavior, I've uploaded one here. As usual, all graphics are placeholders.

For now, I think I'm about ready to wrap this up and move on to more boring stuff. As mentioned previously, I still need to set up some basic functionality and GUI such as a start screen, options, and save/loading screens. The real item that might take some time is setting things up for dynamic character portraits now that I have some art assets. In particular, I'm going to need to go back to my character creation system and add quite a bit more functionality there. Additionally, on many screens I intend to add small character face portraits. I'm not going to actually add those in right now (since the GUI overhaul phase is now right around the corner), but I do need to set up the system for creating them. As far as art goes, Harian and Human portraits are currently in progress, and things seem on track for portraits being done before the first release.

In general I'd say I should be able to wrap all that up before the end of the month and start looking at how I want to do the final GUI designs, but I'll probably have more to talk about there in the next update. So til then, thanks again for your support!