Fortnightly Progress - 4th September (Patreon)

Doing these every other Monday now rather than Thursday. Seems like a sensible move to me in terms of timing. 

• No Haven

The first Quality of Life update for No Haven in 0.982 had it's public release and the reception has been great. Thank you so much, and I'm so pleased that went over well. 

I thought I'd talk here this time about an element of game design prompted by a comment on the stream last night. 

One goal I had was to make morale something that should always be relevent. You're living relatively rough out in the wilds to hide away from the authorities with some disreputable and/or unreliable people, and so it's not always going to be smooth sailing with you needing to give them suitable someone(s) to work their frustrations out on to keep them happy.

Now the problem was is that due to the nature of this project people understandably got used to morale generally not taking much in the way of negative hits when things was going well, also that those frustration disposal mechanics were one of the first things done, and so when I did get round to implementing what I had planned it did not go down at all well. 

Some players really hated that they were taking morale hits from dilemmas without them having enough control over the mechanic, and so now as a result of that I'm toning those down by diluting the negative dilemma pool in the upcoming update to make them less aggravating. 

In an other area I felt players weren't always engaging with the intended mechanics were the auctions/fulfil requests. I had originally planned to make it so if you weren't selling off enough over a set period of time you were going to take escalating global morale hits. 

This was obviously a terrible idea :D

So instead I later added Distinctions as a mechanic which people loved. It's the carrot approach rather than the stick. 

Getting back to morale I had been stuck about what to do, and yesterday that comment simmered in my mind so much it basically woke me up this morning well before my alarm. Outrageous I know. 

Do you know how odds floors work in NH? No reason why you would as it's one of those mechanics that is entirely hidden in the background. When the odds calculators does their thing to determine the final odds there's some hidden modifiers that no matter how good what you're bringing the chances can't be below. It's unlikely to have a Disaster odds below 12% in the Deep Mountains (2% base +10 for the region) due to the floor for example and that gets even worse if it's not a (Common), and even more so for a (Rare) or (Special).

Getting back to making morale more viable, or at least what was designed to counteract the effects of poor morale, is there's going to be three separate trackers based on your guy's and gal's experiences on Finish Day. 

There will be text at the Dawn of the new day after reporting on the weather reflecting this if any of them are more than then number of people you have. If met this will reduce the floors down to the absolute minimum of 1% Fail and 1% Disaster if the best of the three trackers succeeds for Assignments started on that day (not counting certain specific Assignments like Recapture where they can both be 0% already). They'll need to be making use of some very high values to get it though.

I've added a full break down of the floor mechanics including these new addition in the Glossary like I did with Wounding and Removals. 

While I was there I've also changed it so if a Disaster % odd is below the floor it won't first reduce the Critical % first and instead will bring down the Fail % first and then Success % to get it back into the proper limits.   

• The No Haven Conversion / Picarto Streams

This is continuing to go great.

Okay, I did have one absolutely brain breaking issue with the formatting on Scouting the City. I just could not get it to work, and sunk about three hours over two streams into it. 

I did find a solution in the end, but oh man there is no reason why it should it's almost aggravating that it works. It's literally just taking one of the tables, and putting it somewhere else without making any other changes. 

Ah well, if it crops up again at least I'll know how ot sort even if it makes no sense whatsoever. 

But with that out the way Scouting in all five regions entirely works! Now, I can do Assignments in every region and generate new ones when they're done. I've not just started but completed several Assignments on the Coast, Forest, Mountains, and City. 

Currently the plan is to keep doing that for awhile and try to hammer out as many of the potential issues. I'm hoping to at least be able to put up a tester version for the Discord where you can do a quick start and run assignments by the end of the year. 

• Commissions

July+August - Dominance Training : First part is done. Artist is more active again, and thinks they can do some work on it tomorrow. 

May+June - Whores for the Whore Makers : Seen two sketches. Off to a promising start.

May+June - Clandestine Insinuations : Need to chase up the artist as they said they were going to start last week. 

July - Diminuitive Domination : It got done, and turned out great. 

As for the most recent commission poll Antiques Dealer took it easily. Yep, still surprised but no complaints here as it's something I've already done all the writing for, and I think it's good stuff. Already talked to an artist about it as it came up when we were discussing something else. 

The regularly scheduled Alternative Commission Poll for this month should be up on Thursday or Friday. 

As always I hope that was worth the read, and thanks so much for your patience and support!