Saturday, August 13, 2016

Truth is, I'd rather not spend time dealing with anything unrelated to pure game design, but in reality I have to deal with multiple obscure problems, like learning programming, working in graphical editors, advertising, managing resources and interacting with others, heck, even figuring out how to make this blog better. I mean, making up of a decent, working system is already pretty time consuming...



Anyway I wanna make one more post based on feedback. Basically, I'm going to focus right now on optimization of playing experience. Mainly, I discovered a way to add tooltips to the game (css is a bitch to me though) and put icons, so at least population page and help sections should become way more comfortable than they are now.

After that I gonna address the top 1 request feature: way to raise girl's stats. Originally I wanted something like obscure date system - you'd spend time with girl and eventually hit milestones which would allow you to boost her willpower related stats. This would make for great balance - given enough time and involvement you would be able to buff your favorite girls, while not really giving you easy way to buff everyone. Well, naturally, without someone doing multiple chains of date-like events, this is not going anywhere, so I'll have to figure out another way.

There's another issue related to writing. Basically, I'm thinking to sticking very brief sex scene descriptions akin to those which are currently shown at 'threesome actions'. Some may know that other interactions have pretty detailed scenes, and it's sad to scrap those, but let me be honest here. Firstly, consistency is pretty terrible, because my personal writing is crap and there have been a few different writers working on them eventually making less and less of appearance. On the other side, we have monster girls with unusual bodies, requests for PC modifications and possible male slaves. It's just unreasonable to try to fill all possible modular texts which could occur in the scenes, when one scene takes from paragraph to a page. On the other hand it will give me easier time to fill up all potential scenes on my own and make them have more obscure options like titjob or tailjob, mentioning siblings and relatives and so on. This is until I find a person crazy interested enough to work entirely on all scenes. This is also not related to sidequests and other unique interactions though, maybe what's done would make its way there.

Now, to answer some more specific questions/suggestions I got from survey:

The players character could be enslaved if say he gets into dept or is incapable of maintaining the slaves.
I really don't know how I could put it into the game in any manner other than a gameover. And that wouldn't make for huge difference, so I'm not even sure why bother.

Let me choose which ages I want to see in the very beginning of the game (so my starting girl can be smaller)
There's literally a way to do this. You need to choose 'settings' during parts where you create your girl.

Add the ability to change slaves age. 
Already there. Youthing/maturing elixirs.

The addition of an "advisor" girl (similar to the Head Girl from Free Cities) could really help people by warning the player or making suggestions.
There is a headgirl, but I don't really relate to the 'warning/suggesting' part.

maybe a way to marry one of your slaves
Certainly. It's just bit of a long way until then since I wouldn't be satisfied with simple 'is your wife' mention in the profile.


12 comments:

  1. I'd like to start by saying, I'm not normally one to comment on porn, even on blogs about games like this one, since there's a lot of porn out there, I just accept that if some of it's not for me that's it, but I'd like to say what you've got here is really good for what you've done so far.
    Ever since I played corruption of champions I've been looking for a text based story with combat and stats, and less furry, gay, rape on defeat, three things that are really not up my alley in various degree's, and three thing's the game is pretty much built around from what I saw.
    But I'm commenting because I have some suggestions, or at least inquiries.
    For one, I see you mentioned having scene's involving relatives. I'm not just seeing what I want to see right? You actually have plans(maybe not any progress though) on capturing family members and training them together? If so would it be like Free cities were it's only limited to threesome's, or will there be multiple members? You did say the scene was be kept simple so I'm wondering how hard it would be to just plug in a few more names during a scene.
    I was also wondering, you've got some girls in the game that can always be found (The orphan and the wolfgirl) are there any plans on giving at least girls like them personality? Their own little sidequest stories, or their own reactions to event and unrelated sidequests and so forth? I'm particularly interested in finding and enslaving the Wolfgirl's family.
    I've also always liked the idea of having a harem in these types of games, but they seem to always focus on training and selling your girls as fast as possible, even in the case that it lets you keep them the game seems to steer you towards sharing your girls at the very least(whoring them out, if not flat out selling them) in order to make any reasonable amount of money/progress. Will there be a way to play a little more "selfishly"? Not that I'm saying I have anything against the slave trading part, but looking back to the orphan girl for example, if you want to train her you've got to send her off, and for the sexual proficiency it seems like you're basically paying someone to bang her for you( You do leave a lot to the imagination and that's what I imagine.)
    Leading into another question, do you have any plans on letting the PC train the girls himself, at some kind of cost obviously, like taking extra time, or using energy so you can't spend a day doing other stuff, but saving you money. It could fail, and more frequently at higher levels of training if your PC is inexperienced or something.
    Lastly I have a bit of suggestion, perhaps as you advance in the story and become a better Mage, (and hopefully have a larger hand in battle's) you could have a mansion that more or less takes care of it self with some obedient slaves in charge and you can go on multi day expeditions with a small squadron of battle slaves(read three-four) and maybe an assistant if you have one to prolong everyone's health/energy/stress and increase the chances of escaping with a slave even if they fall in battle. On the expeditions you could capture slaves in bulk, pick out your favorites for your self, and sell the rest. During expeditions you'd have to manages the slaves you capture, and more importantly your time, You could spend energy regaining mana(feeding back into being more useful in battle)you could even get your obedient slaves to join in to get you larger amounts of mana. The cost would be energy which means less adventuring during your expedition, if your slaves are busy you could get ambushed, and if your slaves don't get off they could be aroused during battles.
    Well anyways this was a lot, so I leave it at that for now.

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    1. Firstly, when I mentioned family members, I actually mainly referred to the children. Finding other family members may be bit... opportunistic, but some quests may bring that.
      Cali actually have half-done quest for her which will probably get into the game in next few versions. It does not involve enslaving her family though (at least yet). There's also Dolin's sidequest right now in the game, which has some more personality to her(I believe).
      I don't have any specific plans for multi-person squad(meaning not gonna happen on axma, it's already hell of a performance). Anyway that is pretty far away on the possible features list.

      And yes, I do believe that keeping girls for yourself is just as (if not more) desirable, as selling and whoring them so 'vanilla' relationship approach won't ever leave the game.

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    2. Ok different guy here, but for family members you could have them sold together or attack them when you find them. For example two sisters were out gathering berries and then you attack and captured them.

      Who's Dolin?

      For the keeping girls it's possible I do it on my play throughs, but it takes forever in the game until you start making a lot of money. For gold you need them to be trained for public entertainer. The rest are put in store or forage. Also it's important to get a girl to be a chief. It drastically lowers how much food is used at higher service level. So thats how I do it, but lately I've incorporating the use of selling bandits to the slaver guild. You can do it without selling anyone, but it just again takes forever.

      So quick question about the world is there any other government besides the mage guild, like a royal family. Just want to know since I kind of want a princess as my servant.

      Speaking of servants are there any other girls like Emily or Cali that you plan to include in the game?

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    3. Dolin is the gnome from Shaliq and involve particular sidequest around her rewarding player with some spells (can be found outside of it randomly), which is about closest one to to be completely finished and in the game.

      Government and royal families are not necessarily same thing. I would indeed like to see some things with it though.

      Yes, I do plan to add more unique girls with their relative sidequests, but right now those require lots of writing attention, so they will have to wait for some time.

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  2. So I was debating on what to put on the survay, because a lot of the critiques I had were ultimatly subjective to my own preferences. What you asked here I can answer a little better.

    1) Raising a girls stats. I'm against the dating system you describe; I'd rather use my magic or alchemy to raise stats like wits and courage and use an interaction system to raise charm. Battles should raise courage and bravery, too.

    2) Writing. I actually don't see many problems with the writing as it is, and personally I prefer shorter scenes and exposition so I can get back to playing the game.

    personally I'd like to suggest something; something like a of 'personality selection' for the MC that reflects in dialogue (specifically, a way for my character to stop thanking a slave when she swallows). I prefer playing a more bandit-style character so my preferences are going to be differant from what you seem to want to write :P

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    1. 1. That's a bit of disperse approach, which is pretty troublesome in balance terms. Right now raising any of the stats has potential of increasing overall willpower greatly (hence increasing pretty much everything) so I keep possible options really limited and capped. Not sure why you don't like date-like system.

      2. Arguably, small scenes will be more on spot with vagueness on how you treat slaves, so that may help your approach.

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    2. I don't like the date system because I'm an evil bandit :P It's just really hard for me to get into a world where slavery is normal, so I guess i just immediatly go to a lawless mindset

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  3. Most of my major problems with the game aren't related to the content or writing at all, they're interface issues. Like the fact that you can't see your current gold, food level, tiredness level, number of slaves, or any of your other stats except at specific screens. So, for example, you don't know how many times you can influence your slaves unless you manually count down, which is just a needless pain. It would really help if the sidebar displayed stats like that.

    Aside from readability, the interface really isn't optimized for use at all. Mana is one of the game's most important resources, one that has a lot of uses all of which burn through it extremely quickly relative to how slow you collect it, and actually collecting it is another needless pain in the ass. It takes three clicks to get from the main menu to vaginal sex with one of your servants, and another two clicks for every time you want to repeat the action. This doesn't sound like a lot but taking the text animations into account and considering that you'll be going through this process multiple times every time you build up your mana pool, it ends up just killing the momentum. I confess that I'm not a master in this game and I might be missing some far more well-designed way of building mana, but for one of the game's fundamental mechanics it just feels poorly optimized. I don't want to be another guy saying "copy FC", but if you want to make vaginal sex with servants a workable way of building mana then you should totally copy FC and put a shortcut on the main mansion screen for fucking servants with one click. Or you could set it so that the PC automatically expends one Tiredness Point every turn to fuck a servant for passive mana regen, or even just an option to fuck a servant three times to bring seven clicks down to three, my point is that the interface could be easily improved.

    I could go on with a dozen other issues with the UI (I have too much time on my hands), but I think you get my point. This game is just frustrating to me because I can see plenty of things I like in it, but actually playing it is a pain for what seem like easily-correctable reasons. I hope you get around to overhauling the interface someday.

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    1. I'll just tell you, that interface and optimization is my main target right now. I do wish I knew CSS better, or axma being more flexible, or there was decent programmers to help me out or even move onto different platform, but right now I just do what I can. Maybe I'll be able to add another status window, but that may not be possible on axma. Learning CSS in the manner of trials and errors is pretty slow, but at least next release should make it better at least in some parts.

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  4. A few comments.

    -I truly am loving the game. Spending way too many hours on it these last few weeks. I really only play normal games so start cash strapped and seem to only get poorer these days. But, still, it is holding my interest.

    -Economics
    Currently it costs about a 10+ days Shop income to buy a girl from the Slave Market, and slightly less than two days Shop income to refresh the offered slave.
    Meanwhile selling a recently captured girl from beyond the portal seldom exceeds 2 days income. When you factor in recovery times and food costs, Combat Hunting for girls becomes a zero-sum affair.

    It seems the typical servant and master consume 10 units of food so. Unskilled Foraging earns ~20, Survival 1 raises that by about 60%. So foraging yields about the same food that 5 gold would buy. Workinh in the shop earns 10-20 gold. So 1 unskilled girl Foraging feeds herself and 1 other, but working the store she feeds a minimum of 4 people. Foraging or Hunting therefore serve Zero purpose other than to confuse players.

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    1. Actually I believe I raised food price at market in last version.

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    2. Yes I am using the current 20 food for 5 gold pricing.

      An untrained girl at the shop earns 12-18 gold most days. So call it 1 Girl at Shop earns the equivalent of 60 food a day, versus Forage or other means.

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