Pred Scene Overhaul Demo! (Patreon)

Hey everyone, the pred system overhaul and tutorial are complete and ready for testing! Like the first release of the prey scene demo, there are a few things that very likely still need tweaking balance wise, but I figured it would be better to get it into your hands as soon as everything was working rather than doing any major rebalancing on the new elements just based on my own experience. I also made some fun aesthetic additions to prey scenes in this version of the demo build!

Here's an overview of the pred scene changes:

• Completely overhauled how your prey's health works. Previously, they only had 4 total HP and each turn there was a chance for them to take 1 damage, where the current acid level and your actions would influence the odds of taking damage on a given turn. Now, they start with a minimum of 24 HP (tougher prey will have more health), and rather than rng playing a role in taking damage it gets chipped away over time by stomach acid and your actions
• To go along with this, your prey now directly takes damage each turn based on the current acid level
• Increased your starting stomach health to 32 (was 25) and you now gain +8 per Oral proficiency level (was +3) [Although this is very likely an overcorrection that will get toned back down a bit in the next balance pass ^^;]
• Each level of Oral Proficiency now also slightly reduces the stamina cost of all your actions
• Your prey's Frustration and Exhaustion now factor into damage calculations rather than being purely used to determine their behavior in some scenes: Frustration is risk/reward and increases both the damage your prey deals and the damage you deal to your prey, while Exhaustion reduces the damage your prey deals to your stomach
• Stomach Power has been completely reworked to function the same as your predator's stomach power in prey scenes: it acts as a lingering buff(or debuff) to damage that you deal with your offensive actions
• A lot of logic behind the scenes has been corrected and reworked so that the sidebar will actually give you useful up to date information on more than just your stamina/health, you no longer get “fake” turns where your stomach health is below 0 but the game is waiting for you to pick an action before registering that fact, and the intended flow of scenes where you’re reacting to/countering the action your prey just took is actually accurate in all situations. (Not gonna lie to you, I discovered in this pass that like 50% of pred scene functionality wasn’t actually working as intended this whole time, but because the way prey chose actions worked properly and their health loss was previously so rng dependent anyways it looked like it was behaving correctly most of the time without rigorous testing and went unnoticed ^^;)
• Stomach Resistance now properly buffs/debuffs the damage prey deal to you. It functionally did nothing before due to an oversight
• “Nearly dead” messages have been added for both sides of the struggle when your stomach/your prey’s health is very low
• Relaxing while your prey is resting will now restore a small amount of stamina (5% of your maximum) (previously, there was no way to ever gain any stamina back as a pred)
• Health restored by massaging in relevant circumstances has been increased and is now boosted by your Oral Proficiency. It has also been moderately reworked to be a strong defensive action that will block a significant amount of damage if your prey is struggling.
• Ignoring your prey when they brace now reduces stomach power for subsequent turns (previously there was really no reason not to just ignore them whenever they did it)
• Squeeze now directly deals damage to prey if they weren’t braced due to changes to prey health, and directly reduces the damage they deal this turn by a small amount if they were taking an aggressive action
• Crush has been nerfed to be more in line as just a stronger, more expensive squeeze. No longer skips the prey’s turn in any situation and has the same effects as squeeze, just stronger (though if your prey is inactive, it does still deal ~25% of their health worth of damage on average)
• Shake now has universal effects based on acid level on top of its effects based on your prey’s current action, dealing damage and raising your stomach power as the acid rises but also weakening your resistance.
• Cleaned up/tweaked a lot of things behind the scenes to make it easier for me to work with the system and give myself a few more options to take advantage of in pred scenes

If none of that made much sense to you, hopefully the tutorial will clear it up! This demo build is still not the full game, it is a small test zone where you can jump directly into 1 of 4 scenes of each type of varying difficulty from the game to test out the changes to the system, in addition to the new tutorials. Please give me any feedback you have after trying it out, things are still in flux here!

Download link:

https://mega.nz/file/Se5jRSZR#FI6obWrARUSjqD_HHRPbuQdYDnBJoqfi8kus_zGewYc 

Also, here's the very brief changelog for the tweaks to the prey system since the last build:

• Similar to the “this is it, one last push!” notification for when your predator’s health is nearly gone, a simple message will now trigger when you are dangerously close to running out of health (5 or less) as an added reminder of urgency. Note that this message won’t appear until you have at least 2 resilience, to reduce the odds of it overwriting the normal 25% health threshold message (though it will always be reflected in the sidebar as your health status changing to “Nearly Food”).
• Added a new immersive background effect for prey scenes

Next up will be the player-prey anal system, then I'll be moving on to the final week 1 update that will implement these new systems into the proper game, along with various other improvements! Thank you for your patience with this part of the update cycle, I'm eager to get through all of this so I can get started writing for Week 2!