State of the Game (Patreon)

Evening, all! The holiday season is coming around, but I've still been keeping busy with building the code foundations for Carnal Voyages. As before, allow me to begin with the disclaimer that IMAGES ARE EXTREMELY PRELIMINARY AND DO NOT REPRESENT FINISHED WORK. I am essentially working my way through the game's introduction sequence, creating new systems and mechanics as I go, with the goal of having most of the game's essential code working by time I finish the tutorial. Going through the sequence then, this past month I've implemented:

• Setting your gender preferences.
• Naming your first ship.
• More functionality for the dialogue system, including the ability to possibly affect your relationship state with NPCs via dialogue choices.
• Setting up the system for generating minor NPC crewmates, in order to partially staff your first ship (this one took a bit of time).
• Started on the ship info panels, which will display ship information and allow you to assign crew to specific ship stations.

Since I spent most of the month on character generation, I'll cover a bit more on that. There is still quite a bit of what's essentially 'data entry' type tasks left to do there - I have to admit, I'm not super looking forward to coming up with possibly several hundred alien NPC names so everyone's not named Steve and Sally, but I'll get to it eventually. I've also only coded up a handful of personality and job traits, and there will be a lot more to add there. These traits will play a large part in creating the most effective crew you can - different ship stations will have traits that provide a benefit or a detriment to that particular station, and ship tasks (short term assignments for various resources and such) will have bonuses as well. This is on top of whatever effects a particular trait itself has - speeding tasks up, increasing odds of successes, improving rewards, faster xp gain, and so on. A crewmember's traits will be randomly assigned when they are recruited, however higher ranked crewmembers will have more traits, and it may be possible to 'train' crew towards certain traits with future ship upgrades.

As for my current task, implementing ship info and assignments, most of this will not be strictly necessary for the tutorial - the intro sequence will require only a bridge crew, not a full complement. However, I am still aiming to get as much of the system working for the first round as possible, so I don't need to come back and redo things later. In particular I'm working on setting up a building blocks system for ships - each ship will have a number of compartments, and each compartment will have a number of crew stations. As your character progresses you'll begin to have more options in what sort of ship you'd like to command - ones heavy on offense, defense, diplomatic capabilities, more of a balance, and so on. This will be largely reflected in the number and kind of ship stations each craft has, allowing you to stack more crew bonuses in that particular direction.

Once this is done, or at least made passably functional, my next tasks will be to get your ship to its first assignment and then completing it. This will mean setting up a map and travel time system, time-based ship tasks, and then perhaps the really interesting bit - the combat system. While much of the (non-sexytimes) time spent in the game may be in more of a management mode, I expect most of the (non-sexytimes) excitement to be in the encounters, so I'm going to want to make very sure that my design is actually fun to play in that area.

I regret that I don't have anything sexier to show off, but we're probably still a few months away from the 'make things pretty' stage, let alone starting on game art. Still, rest assured that I'm keeping hard at work, and I'm thankful for all your continuing support! I don't currently have any polls or such planned for the near future, but folks are always welcome to swing by the discord server or drop a comment if you'd like to discuss the design of our next game or features you might like to see.