0.4 Development Update 3 (Patreon)

Hey folks! 

We’ve hit the full time goal! Yay! Big thank you to all you beautiful people. Not having to worry too much about rent and food is quite a big deal. And now I can spend a portion of the rest of my savings on upgrading my PC so hopefully I’ll be a little more productive, too.

That said, I believe that the extra money should go towards making the game better, so while we’re moving towards the next goal, I’d like to do a big feature poll. I have a number of ideas. 

First of all, hiring an additional writer. I do struggle with some aspects of writing, you may have noticed that my dirty talk game is definitely not on point. And I think it would be great just to have more small talk in the game in general. It’s all good when there are new events to explore, but once those dry out all the girls turn into cardboard cutouts with just a few lines of dialogue. Just being able to talk to Rae about the relative merits of pancakes and waffles, telling Cait something about our world, shooting shit with Naomi, stuff like this will make the game feel much more alive, I think.

Second, and this is a kind of a long shot, but I would love to be able to have all the sex stuff voiced and, erm, sound-ed? Well, you get what I’m saying. I think that good sound adds a huge amount of hotness to the sex animations. I honestly don’t know if it’s feasible, but if there’s enough interest in this, I can try commissioning a few people for voice/sfx work, and then if it all sounds good, we can try and voice the entire game. Or at least the sex stuff. I mean, this being a porn game and all.

Third, and this is when things get a bit iffy, I could try searching for another artist to work with. I really doubt this is going to work out, to be honest. My workflow and toolchain is super janky, lots of custom tools, self-made plugins, that sort of thing. The kind of knowledge/experience that’s needed to make it all work is very difficult to transfer, and it will require me to spend time on teaching the other person instead of working on the game. Might still be worth it, I guess.

And finally, I think it could be cool to spend the money on something not directly related to the game, but nice. Like commissioning a series of paintings of the characters. Maybe even a short graphic novel, that sort of thing. That all is off the top of my head, there are probably lots of cool things like those that could be done.

And if you have other ideas, I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. I could very well be blind to some obvious improvements that could be done with a simple cash infusion, so leave a comment, and I’ll add all the feasible suggestions to the poll.

Update

Now, update. Still working on it. Renders are getting done, although I had to adjust environments a bit more. But this week I hit a new roadblock with the scheduling system.I think it’s an interesting enough topic, so I’ve done a little write-up on the problem for those of you who are curious about the technical side of things. If you aren’t, scroll right down to see some more preview renders. I hope that the v0.4.0 will be done real soon, so next time I’m posting stuff, it should be the alpha version download links post.

Now, technical stuff with some helpful illustration. Big thanks to @Hats from our Discord server for providing me with art for those, check out his Insta at @kleelehorgen. 

Let’s start with a quick overview of the scheduling system.  All the in-house girls have their own base schedules. So far, I’ve been able to make those schedules strictly separated. You won’t even see the girls in the same room, and while this is completely unrealistic, it’s super easy to work with, no conflicts, nothing looks weird, nothing feels too weird.

In addition to that, girls have schedule overrides tied to the story or personal event chains. Due to the nature of the game I often need the girls to be in an exact spot to start the event properly. And now there’s a map screen in the game that shows where all the girls are, so I can’t really fudge this too much. Would be weird if the map shows that Naomi is in the attic, but then her event triggers in the living room. That’s when the overrides save the day. Plop down a special mini-schedule that says that she must be in the living room until the event is done, and she will be there.

 So far so good. Base schedule, overrides, it mostly works fine. I’ve had some schedule conflicts appear, but those were easily resolved. But what happens when there are multiple active events at the same time, and each one of those tries to push its own overrides? The override system allows for multiple override schedules to be active concurrently, so if, say Cait is supposed to be in the shower in the morning for one event, there’s nothing stopping her from being present in the kitchen in the evening for another. And even if there are multiple overrides competing for the same time slot, there is a priority queue, so the most pressing event takes precedence. So with that all the scheduling for a single girl is basically sorted out.

But I’ve had a few multi-girl events planned before, and many more are coming, and that’s where the trouble starts. The group dinner event is very straightforward in that it just pushes all the girls into the kitchen, and it sorta works because it’s the only one event of that kind right now. All the other events concerning multiple girls either start with you (or someone else) gathering others, or they just arrive in the middle of the event. This is all good, but some events need to start with the girls already there.

Well, you say, just add the synchronized schedule overrides to each single girl, plop down the highest priority, et voilà! 

And you will be right! It will work, at least, for a time. But as soon as I start adding more and more such events, it will stop working. Imagine this: one event overrides the schedules of all the girls so they hang out in the living room in the afternoon. But then there’s a super important event going on with Rae and Cait that needs them to be in the library, waiting for you to surprise them in the middle of a very intense study session.

So Rae and Cait are  now in the library, and Naomi is in the living room, alone and wondering where’s everyone. There’s nothing for her to do there as the event can’t be started without the rest of the girls. I could just a fallback, as in, plop her down there with a one-liner ready, but that means that I’ll have to make quite a large number of additional sprites and scripts and triggers for all those fallbacks. Mind, this is not the worst thing ever, so I’m still considering this, but there are other drawbacks to this solution. Girls being displaced, not being able to start some regular events and repeatables while the conflicting event is active, all that jazz.

Alright, so the next logical step is to do a conditional override. This is what I’ve been trying to do for a few days this week. Add an override, but make it so it only triggers when all the concerned girls are on their base schedule. And it nearly worked, but then it really didn’t. The thing is, this override is attached to a single girl’s schedule. Usually, the overrides work like this: if there’s an override for a time slot, it’s put into the occupation slot, and that’s it for this slot. If there isn’t an override, the base schedule is used. 

But the multi-girl conditional override needs to wait for all the girls to update their occupations, check if everyone is using their base schedule, and then update all the girls’ occupations if the check is passed. Alright, so maybe if we encounter this conditional override, we store it for later, do a full sweep of schedules, mark the girls that have their schedule overridden, and then do another round checking the conditional overrides. But then when there are multiple conditionals, there might still be conflicts. And one personal schedule override will prevent any conditionals from triggering even if they have a higher priority, and I sure can imagine a situation when there’s a group event that is so important it takes priority over any personal issue. And there are so many new transient state variables and conditions, the code becomes very confusing. I’ve been trying to make it work, but it didn’t, so I abandoned this approach.

Then I thought about a thing. Why am I mixing personal and multi-girl schedule overrides at all? I just need a separate list of multi-girl conditional overrides and store personal override priorities to make it work. So I do one sweep of each of the girl’s personal schedules, mark override priority if there is one, and then go through the multi-girl override list. If each single girl in the list is using her base schedule or a personal override with a lower priority, then this multi-girl override sets their occupations, and all is well. There could even be multiple active multi-girl overrides at the same time, like girls being in pairs in different rooms and the like. So this is what I’m going to try. If it all works out, then the biggest technical hurdle of this update is behind us.

Hope this was entertaining enough for y’all so you’ll forgive me for all the delays. No, not really? Aw. Oh well. Teasers, then!

Teasers

Again, sorry for all the delays, and see you soon!