The Next Week's Development

A post or two ago, I mentioned that the next release was going to focus on polishing locations and adding alternate location events for characters of different races/perks. This addition isn't going to come alone, since a few other features need to be present in order to accomplish this. In this post, I'm going to cover a few of these new additions required to get to that point.

Tags

This is something I've been tinkering with for a long time, and is vital to the next update. It's a simple concept - text will be tailored more around your character. It might involve your Elven ears, hair color, virginity, or even the clothing you are wearing. This means that events and encounters will be much more tailored to your character, helping

Like I said, I've been messing with this for a long time. The database of tags is basically complete at this point. I just need to rewrite bits of everything to accept the tags, which is more time consuming than difficult. I can't continue forward without having this complete, so now is the time to hammer it in.

Currently, the smallest entries are things like hair color and skin color, since those can typically be filled with one word, i.e. "Your auburn hair" or "soft, obsidian skin". In contrast, the clothing entry is the largest, since there are 10 different sets of clothing in the game with varying degrees of removal, i.e. a short skirt can be removed by the character, pulled down, ripped off, or panties just pushed aside.

The Journal

Sort of a staple in these sorts of games, the journal is a page you can access from the stats menu that recounts the actions you've taken throughout the game, while also describing your character. This will give you a good option for tracking everything throughout a game.

I'm still working on the specifics of how things will be delivered. Right now, I'm experimenting with different methods of delivering the information. I'm thinking that it'll be read less like a block of stats, and more like an actual diary/journal that someone might keep. Stats will have a bearing on how the journal is written. A character with a higher mind might write in greater detail, whereas a character with lesser mind might have simpler descriptions or thoughts. More intelligent characters might have journals describing themselves as unsullied, or have more upsetting thoughts about being raped. Less intelligent characters might just shrug it off as a thing that happened.

Fun fact: Early in development, I considered having the mind stat correlate to how easy it was to become upset. An intelligent character would get upset more easily and find it harder to look past everything in front of her, while a less intelligent character would care less about consequences and be easily entertained. I never implemented this, because there isn't yet enough of a bonus to having a high mind score at the moment outside of making extra cash at locations that would be more oriented towards intelligence than sex work or labor.

More Character Customization

In order to populate the journal with all of the required information, character creation is going to be made a little more in-depth. Character creation now includes some basic character descriptors, such as hair color, name, and skin tone.

At the moment, these additional options have little to no effect on the actual game.

Next Update?

I haven't been able to post/update in a while due to personal reasons, but that's all in the past. Because of everything, I also have a free week next week before I have to return to work, so expect a marathon of posts and progress for a bit before rescinding to the typical weekend updates with occasional weekday spillage - I fully intend to make up for lost time. I plan on releasing a major version somewhere during the middle of all of this, including the above additions, along with more that I'll be posting about as they're completed.

For a vague schedule, I'll be spending the first few days completing features, followed by a day of catching up on the bug tracker and polish before releasing the next update. After that, I'll spend another day fixing anything reported before spending the rest of the time working toward the next update.