Prerelease Post 6 (Patreon)

I gotta say, it doesn't look good for this dude. Alright, so like I said in the last post, renders are winding down. Still have about 10 renders to do, it's crazy how it always seems to be about 10, like I had about 10 more 50 renders ago... but I'm almost done. Really. I'll just have to render out a few more bust images for Dope, and the face busts for Billy and Timmy which I never did. Those will render out stupid fast, 2-3 hours for everything, so that won't really be a holdup.

MZ wise, work is basically done and I just need to do the final touch up stuff. I want to wait for renders to be finished before I playtest the game and put on the finishing touches though, so I'm not really doing much in MZ. Maybe I'll map out the forest behind Dope's house. We'll see, on to the post (only one left after this!) which will be about *Drumroll* Relationships! Yaaaay!

Alright, so I'm still fine tuning the details of how I want things to be but I think I have the relationship system worked out much better this time around. I don't think the old system was bad, it just wasn't fleshed out and I wasn't sure of the direction I wanted it to go either so there's that. However, after much deliberation what I've come up with is reworking the basic relationship stats, tweaking the party events, and overhauling the sex system. Let's dig in!

Relationships are about the details!

Every recruitable/romanceable character will have 2 primary stats: Friendship and Love if female or Respect if male.  In terms of differentiating the two, Friendship is the stat that will be looked at for non romantic situations. Let's say you want to recruit a character for a mission, their friendship level will determine if they go with you or not. Love will obviously be what determines your romantic options and it'll work exactly how you probably think it will. The higher the love, the more you can do. Simple shit. 

Respect is a bit more obscure but will be needed to get characters to do numerous things throughout the game. It's really hard to nail it down to a specific thing, for example, there will be characters that you need to convince to work for you or they'll be character's you'll need to convince you're strong/capable enough to do jobs. Respect will be needed for that. Honestly, pretty much the same as how it was before. Or at least how it was planned. 

However, relationships now have levels, 4 in total, and actions will be dependent on the relationship level. Relationship levels are dependent on the primary stats. You have to max at least one stat (Friendship or Love/Respect) and complete a leveling up event for said stat to level up to the next level. Stats range on a scale of 0-100, with one level for every 25 points. There will be events for both stats. Nothing major or complicated to do though. Usually it'll just be a simple event that's meant to show the characters getting closer.

Along with all this will be a stat I partially introduced but never fully implemented, Bond. Bond isn't really a primary stat as it doesn't directly control any options, but it's too important to be considered secondary as it will influence a lot of things. Bond is basically how "close" a character is to Dope. Whenever you interact with another character you gain Bond and it automatically drops for EVERYBODY every night. It doesn't do anything by itself, but you want to try and keep your Bond high with everybody you like. If a character's Bond is high, they might even send gifts or give other random perks. At the same time, if it's low, in the negatives, it will slowly begin to greatly impact your relationship with characters. As Bond falls, primary stats will also start to drop, although not past the starting level cap. Characters may refuse to quest with you or ignore you outright. At extremely low levels, primary stats can regress levels and bottom out completely, however, this will take time. Characters will have archetypes, and depending on the type they will react differently at low/high Bonds. Whew, that was a lot...

Party events? What party events?

One of the most interactive scenes in the game, that I feel like most people didn't even see, was the party chat scene with Blaze. I liked the scene in of itself but the event wasn't really immersive. I never really like how it played out but I didn't know what else to do as schedules were looking very unreliable with the dynamic time system. Now that I've changed to a static time system and can implement schedules much easier I see no need for the party chat system. I won't be throwing it away completely but I am reworking it conceptually.

For starters, "party chat" as it was is gone. Instead, characters will follow schedules and you will be able to interact with them and do different things depending on the location of the event. In terms of the actual scenes, they'll be overlays and with my new system of doing renders they should be highly customizable on top of fast to render. The debug event with Fire will give an example of what these events will look like. 

Party chat won't be completely gone either, instead I'll be reworking it into the camping system that I'll be setting up for questing. I think I've already gone over this but stamina is now a preserved stat and sex acts will pull from the same stamina pool as movement and other things. When questing/exploring there will be "camp" locations at various points where the player can rest and regain their stamina. At these camps the player will be able to talk with the members in the party and do other things like the old party chat system.

Along with camps, dates will also be an event that has elements of the old party chat system built into it. I don't really want to talk to much about dates though. Just know I plan to have a lot of fun with them.

Ain't no sex like new sex!

Is that how it goes? I feel like it's a bit off... Hmmm. Heh. There were several issues with the old sex system, one thing being there wasn't much of it, but another was that it was kind of all over the place. Honestly, it'll still be kind of all over the place but I plan on having 4 basic sex types.

• Scheduled Event Sex (Quickie): This will probably be the most common type of scene, at least early on, and will account for any of the BASIC sex scenes you can do at scheduled events. Always takes same amount of time/stamina. Not interactive.
• Scheduled Event Sex (Full): When choosing to devote your full attention to a character at a scheduled event. Will be the last part of any scheduled event to be rendered. Takes a variable amount of time/stamina. Interactive.
• Dates/Sex/Special Events: More than likely, every other event that isn't a scheduled event will fall into this category. That your dates, most quest scenes, and whatever other special scenes that end up happening. They'll work the same as "Full" scheduled events. 
• Sex Battles: These events will take place in the battle screen and will be initiated in a number of ways. For instance, all(most) dream scenes will be sex battles. Will be scripted, timewise. Takes a variable amount of numerous stats and is obviously highly interactive. There was only one in the old game and I dunno how many people actually made it to it. It turned out decent tho.

Alright, I could probably go over more but this is enough. Assuming you actually read all this, you got the idea. One more prerelease post and the release is imminent! Stay tuned!

On a side note, I have no idea how I'm going to work this out for the M version. *sweats* Patreon, y'all got too many rules mang, too many rules!