A sneak peek ;P (Patreon)
Content
This is a sneak peek at the servant menu and the throne realm! Missing from this image is the option to collect rewards. So far the system seems to work well; I can see changes in the game being reflected on the server and vice-versa.
To make sure players don't overwhelm the server with tons of changes I'm adding some limitations.
- Servant settings and customizations can only be sent to the server every two hours. You can change your servant any number of times, but these changes will stay local if two hours hasn't passed yet.
- You can only collect rewards once every six hours. Rewards will build up, up to a cap, in between collections.
- You can only receive a new visitor once every two hours. Whoever is there will stay and hang around in the meantime, so players should always have a visitor present as long as they are online.
- You can buy the item a visitor has once, and while you can have sex with them as much as you want (assuming the player they belong to allows it), only the first encounter is recorded by the server, so each player can only contribute one purchase and one encounter to each visitor each time.
- Only a certain number of player profiles will be actively in the pool for being summoned as visitors, so when we reach a certain number, old servants will be bumped off and become inactive.
- Only a certain amount of data, and a certain number of reads and writes are allowed per day globally among all players. If we reach this cap, the server will essentially shut down until the next day. This actually could be a problem since an online game uses a lot more reads and writes sequentially and per session than, for example, a wiki; the server solution I'm using really isn't designed for this... ;P
All of these numbers are subject to change, and I could relax some of these restrictions by paying for more server space and bandwidth, but I'm not going to do that during the alpha period.
At launch, this feature will be a bit barebones, but over time I want to add the ability for servants to develop different personalities, with each personality type having unique dialog, including unique encounter dialog. One of my inspirations for the design here is Dragon's Dogma (the game, not the anime), which featured "pawns" that players could share online, so if you're familiar with that system, I want to make something similar, except simpler and with lots of sex.
I'm also working on designing a "favorites" system that will make players more likely to encounter visitors they've previously added to this list, as well as designing some way for players to share their servants more directly with specific players, probably with some sort of "invite" code.
In short, this is just the beginning of my plans for this concept!