Encounter system - early prototype (Patreon)

You're probably wondering what I've been doing after the release, well, this time I didn't jump straight into making the scenes (although what I'm doing can be used in chapter 2.5), I want to have everything written down before I start working on them, and I'm also trying to find a way to make better use of the resources I have.

About the encounter system

As you can see in the image, what I've planned is a little mini-game at the beginning of the paid interactions, it's nothing complicated, just a dialogue tree where you have to measure the target's responses to win them over. This UI with all the visual cues of the girl's status is integrated into the mc's retina at the beginning of the game. This is of course done by Rea in order to help you get money, as she doesn't trust you to be able to seduce anyone.

There is a lot of work to be done and there are still things I need to learn before I can integrate them into the game. First of all... I need to do the encounter sprites for all the girls the MC has interacted with so far, and that alone would take a lot of time... so I won't do it all at once, I'm going to spread the work out between chapters 2.5 and 3.0, and launch everything along with chapter 3.5. That's for the actual gameplay aspect of these, the sprites can be used way before that, as in chapter 2.5

About the sprites

This idea came to me when I was trying to be smarter in the way I work, I can't treat this game as a normal render-based game, making CGs for everything. With these close-up sprites I can make a CG without the need for another pair of CGs to set the mood. Drawing the same thing from multiple angles with little variation burns me up, so I made these to have something to lean on. Also, I may lean more towards profile poses to possibly reuse some of the drawings (these are easier to animate). This way I can save energy for the moneyshot.

You'll also notice that this drawing of Emily isn't exactly traced... Well, since it's supposed to be part of a set that can be used in other chapters, I gave it extra care and redrew it almost entirely, I hope you like it. I'll use them for chapter 2.5, minus the enhanced vision.

Gameplay aspect

As I told you earlier, it's not very complicated in the technical aspect, every encounter is scripted, and depending on the result you can get more credits or make the next scene develop differently. That's the first "update" the player gets. Later I could add x-ray vision, a lie detector, maybe a pheromone spray like in the Deus Ex games... all that would obviously depend on the context, but it would make each scene way more fun...

So, what do you guys think?