DragonDares

Status update #1: March 2019

Added 2019-03-25 04:05:00 +0000 UTC

Hello friends, fans, and patrons! Welcome to the first monthly update! This month has been... interesting.

SUMMARY

Over the course of the month we've seen the following:

Dragon Dates went digital via Tabletop Simulator! But playtesting found serious problems, so the rules are being reworked. Lots of new cards and mechanics.
We've started producing the first visual novel for this patreon. Because we're still developing the rules for Dragon Dates, it won't be one of the Alpha Modules. It's being produced in conjunction with ChiggedyChoo, and will be enf-themed!
I've spent an inordinate amount of time leaning to use Blender. I don't have much to show for this, but what I've learned is going to be extremely useful for current and future projects.

Read on for more details!

DRAGON DATES

The last month or so has seen some pretty big moments for Dragon Dates! We discovered some serious problems with the game that'll take some time to fix, but we're on the right track. Most notably, the physical build is no more.

(RIP, physical build.)

During the last Steam sale, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Tabletop Simulator. I quickly realized that I could port Dragon Dates with just a bunch of elbow grease and the right software.

Because TTS is online, we can now test the game with more playtesters and iterate on it much faster!

(Long live Dragon Date TTS!)

Unfortunately, these playtests uncovered some problems. The game's underlying math functioned well enough, but play sessions went way too long for a strip game. We couldn't quite figure out why, and there was a lot of discussion about what might be causing it.

After a few more playtests, we found that there were two issues holding the game back.

First, rounds took 3 turns to unfold, and that was when you won or lost a suitor card. The loser removed an item of clothing. Because sets of turns would run about 18 minutes, a game long enough to be a strip game would run anywhere from 2-4 hours. Naturally, this is a serious problem.

I started by trying to reduce the number of turns, and added some new mechanics to compensate, but this didn't work very well. Those new mechanics will likely show up in later versions of the game though, as many of them were interesting in their own right.

A new point system allowing you to buy clothing directly from your opponents based on the quality of your outfit seemed to do the trick. Though, this caused some new mechanical wrinkles that'll need to be ironed out.

(Entirely for realism reasons, I made little tokens for remaining clothes.)

One of my playtesters, Scironex, found that the shopping mechanic we were using caused problems. The number of decks, and the risks of buying cards made turns take a long time.

In the end, it wasn't fun to play so it had to change. But, shops were up until that point a core mechanic of the game. And winning and losing Suitors serves no purpose in the current version, thanks to my new point system. I have some ideas, but it'll need hundreds of new cards. Phoe and I will be very busy designing and producing everything needed for the next version!

When that version is done and it's fun to play, we're planning on releasing it to patrons, then to the general public! Anyone with a copy of Tabletop Simulator will be able to play Dragon Dates with others!

All that said, this created a snag in developing any of the Alpha Modules: I can't develop a renpy game around a card game that's still missing so many pieces. The rules aren't done enough to translate into something I can test, let alone actually make a functional game out of.

So I'll be developing other renpy features in the meantime, and with that comes a new project to test them on!

SLIME SCHOOL (working title)

Collaborating with my primary card artist, and overall insanely skilled and creative person ChiggedyChoo, we're making an appropriately ENF-themed visual novel starring a few of his characters.

It's a story about a Bird and a Slime, and their lewd (and embarrassing!) antics at a certain Academy for individuals of the Viscous Variety.

One of her students accidentally "poofing" Professor Cherry's clothes away sets in motion a chain of events that gets Principal Sofia's attention, and changes this School for Slimes forever...

To say much more would be to spoil it, but these sketchy little panels from the original doodle comic Choo did speak for themselves:

(this doodle comic will be included in the game in all its glory as a bonus feature)

While it's hard to tell before work is well underway, I expect this to be fairly small, likely running no more than 30 minutes. Most of the development time will likely be spent learning to make polished assets, and developing some parts of the custom camera and panel system. Expect to see more on this soon!

BLENDER TRAINING

Despite this being where most of my time went in the last month, there's not too much I can concretely say about it. I spent a lot of hours learning and exploring the various features of the open-source modeling software Blender.

I've found more uses for it than I can possibly count, including reference, sketching, background building, and character design.

But, the most exciting feature, one I hope I'll be able to implement, is ANIMATION. Having experimented with Blender and Renpy AND having read the documentation for both pretty thoroughly, I believe it might be possible to create polished animated sprites and backgrounds for my VNs with far less effort than I thought possible.

(first 2d rigging test, if this doesn't look good it's because I spent like 2 minutes on it)

It'll naturally depend on a lot of factors (like the amount of funding, the results of my test runs, and actual time spent, etc), but early results are promising!