Powerups! (Patreon)

Well, I had an enormous 6+ page thing written out for this, but it all got wiped because I'm on my family's laptop, and touchpads aren't very nice. (Page refreshed then the browser closed, lol.)

So I'm going to try to re-write as much as I can from memory, etc.

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Today I've got three powerups; all three fall into the Offense category.

(There's four total categories for powerups; offensive (red), defensive (blue), utility (green), and negative (black). The colors correspond to the auras around them, not the colors of the powerup itself.)

Each of the powerups is not the actual object; you're not actually picking up say, a horseshoe, or a clover, or a helmet or a sword, etc.

(As to what they actually are, well, we'll just keep that secret for now. ;) You'll find out eventually, though.)

Each of the powerups can stand on their own, but there are certain 3-powerup combinations, like the three above, that form a "set", and in that "set", you get a special, fourth powerup, called a "set boost".

(The player will be notified through the UI if they're picking up powerups that belong to a set.)

Powerups in a set are also thematically based, like one set might be about "flowers", another set might be about "sports", another might be about "luck", like this set. (This theme also generally represents the way the powerups interact and work in some way, as well.)

Powerups in a set are also based around having one powerup representative from North American culture, one from a European culture, and one from Japanese culture, as the highest density of players will be from one of these three regions, and so each of the sets should have at least one powerup that is culturally recognizable for players in those areas. (Singular powerups will feature cultural references to things in other places, like Australia, Africa, China, Mexico, so forth; we don't want to leave anyone out!)

Finally, said cultural references will be mainly about PUBLIC perception of said objects; for example, two of the powerups in today's set go into this a bit, so I'll cover those specific references when we come to them. (There is a plot-based reason we aren't going by pure factual origin of the powerups, and instead are going by cultural perception.)

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So now, to get to the actual powerups.

First off, the theme for these powerups is "Luckiness" or "Lucky", and they're all in the "offensive" category, as a reminder. So, starting from the left;

#1 - Omamori 

An omamori is a Japanese "charm" of sorts that is said to offer protection or luck in a wide, wide variety of categories, from college exams, to romance, to money, and everything else in between. Despite it being for "protection", we put it in the "offensive" tier as it not only fit the "lucky" category, it's also one of the few "universally Japanese" items we could use to represent Luck that wasn't actually heavily culturally based somewhere else, as the maneki-neko is generally more about money nowadays than it is luck AFAIK, and is more something a business has anyways than something that someone would possess.

The boost it gives is "Talia's charge shots now have a 20% chance to pierce through a single enemy, doing 25% of its damage to the next enemy." This goes with the setting of "luck", again.

#2 - Horseshoe

The horseshoe is here to represent North America, particularly the Wild West, and it's also seen as a lucky item here, as well. it's also in the offense category due to the game of Horseshoes, and this is an example where we're stretching things and going with the cultural recognition rather than the historical recognition, as Horseshoes was derived from a game in Greece, rather than truly originating in North America.

The boost it gives is "Talia's regular shots now have a 25% chance to do 25% extra damage if they hit the target in the head." This references the new specific hitboxes we'll have for enemies; hitting them in the head will indeed produce a different result than hitting them elsewhere.

This will also inevitably bring up a question for when it comes to enemies that DON'T have a head, like say, some of the tentacle monsters in the Earth level, as to whether the powerup works on them; the answer is that no, it won't. Some of the powerups will ONLY work on certain enemies, and you'll need to take that into account, which is why we allow the player to drop and switch powerups at any time with any powerup(s) that are nearby. (There's only one exception to this, the "negative" powerups, and I'll get into those in one of the upcoming posts.)

#3 - Four Leaf Clover

Finally, the four leaf clover represents Ireland and thus Europe. Now, this particular one is REALLY stretching it, I'll admit, as it's particularly known in Ireland itself that the SHAMROCK is the the "clover" that represents Ireland, and in reality the four leaf clover isn't particularly Irish unto itself. Again though, this is public global perception, AFAIK, but if those of you in Ireland or near it feel this is just too far of a stretch, we might change it to another lucky item from somewhere else in Europe.
The boost it gives is "Every regular shot that Talia fires has a 4% chance to do 4x damage." Admittedly, this is another reason I wanted to use this, was for a neat powerup setup like this, with the repeating numbers, but again, we're still open to modify things during development. Additionally, "regular shot" here means her non-charged shots, specifically.

The Set Boost for this Set

If you manage to get all three powerups above at once (remember, Talia can only hold three powerups at once, and can't hold more than one of the same kind), then she'll get the following "Set Boost";

"All of Talia's shots, regular or otherwise, now have a 10% chance to hit for 3x damage."

As you can imagine, this combined with the other effects can cause Talia to dole out quite a large amount of damage if the player's lucky enough, hence the set's theme and so forth.

In a few more days I'll do another powerups post, and then another sex animation for the next post, and so on back and forth until I've ran out of powerups and sex animations, which will still be quite some time!

(Just a reminder too; http://www.patreon.com/hentaiwriter is where we'll have small games at, and one's coming out in just about two or so weeks!)