Dev Blog #1 (Patreon)

First of all, I want to thank everyone for your support. Without you, I wouldn't have been able to get this far. I know my content changed dramatically during this year, but I believe I've gained new and valuable experiences each time that allow me to work more effectively.

Now I want to talk about the NPCs Schedule. In most games it doesn't change without a good reason, and that makes sense. Imagine that you came to turn in a quest in Skyrim, and the character who gave it to you went to another city to visit a friend.

However, I plan to redo the code for nps allocation (because I don't like it at all). And along with that I want to experiment with the nps schedule and make it more fluent. But at the same time I want it to be determined not by random, but by some kind of logic. You can already see the seeds of this when the protagonist's wife takes the initiative in the morning, when her arousal is high enough, or decides to stay in bed longer when she's tired.

It would be nice to increase the influence of these parameters on the scenes, as well as to add new ones. For example, the protagonist's wife could also get bored and ask the protagonist out on a date herself. Or go to the club with her best friend. Similarly, I want these parameters to affect the NPCs schedule. For example, make the wife's girlfriend visits the main protagonist's mansion not on a certain day, but when she gets bored, or when she wants to do evil things.

Of course, it is important to keep a balance, between a permanent schedule and a random, otherwise getting certain scenes can become frustrating. You can see the seeds of this system in the wife's schedule, when she can stay in the afternoon at the bakery or leave it. However, there is no scene there now, so it is not as obvious. But, when the events are added there, the randomness of her location there may upset the player who wants to get that specific scene.

There are several ways to mitigate this effect. For example, add to the phone the possibility to contact NPC and ask their location. Or add locations for all the places where these NPC can be found (a beauty salon or Jenny's apartment for the wife).

Why do I even want to add a system like this? To me it looks like an interesting way to organize the pressure on the protagonist. For example, to make the visit of his wife's friend unpredictable. Right now, she only visits the mansion on Thursdays. But what if he runs into her in the hallway on his return from work? What if she decides to have a sleepover with his wife? Or conversely, wants to take his wife with her. Would he let her do that or would he confront her?

I wanted to do a poll to get your opinion on it initially, but then I decided to implement this system for one or two characters first and only then let the players decide if they like it or not.

In any case, I'm open to any ideas and suggestions.