State of the Game - Encounters in the Stars (Patreon)

Evening all, and welcome to 2022! I'm not quite going to do a whole 'year in review' thing tonight, as the accomplishments of 2021 - the completion and launch of Carnal Coup - are fairly straightforward, while the schedule for 2022 is still quite murky at this stage. Still, I do have a fair bit to discuss concerning the more immediate timeframe, and I'll see what sort of forecast I can give for the future.

December has been quite productive with setting up more of the foundation for Carnal Voyages, with a lot of new code being written. To give an overview, this past month I've worked on:

• Implementing the system for navigating your ship layout and assigning crew to ship stations.
• Setting up the system for star system maps and travel times.
• Setting up the Duty Assignment system, where you can assign crew to various tasks and earn various reward currencies.
• Implementing a number of additional character traits (which will be important in combat encounters).
• Started on the GUI layout for space-based encounters.

I believe I talked a bit about ship stations last month, so I'll start off with the travel system. There will be two kinds of maps in CV: star system maps, and a galaxy map. When you're within a star system there may be a number of different points of interest - the key one of course being the main species homeworld each system is based around, but also other potential points of interest such as stations, colonies, or other ships. They may have different tasks you can do at each, people you can talk to, or trading that can be done. Traveling between points will take a certain amount of in-game time, as will the tasks you can perform, but as your missions will be reliant on stealth against the larger GPU military you'll only have a limited amount of time in a system before the heat gets too high and you need to move on. From the galaxy map you'll then be able to return to Figura for re-supply or upgrades, or move on to another GPU system to do your work there until things have cooled off enough for you to return to your original target. In the introduction sequence you'll have one destination option, a special training ground in the Figura system, and of course you'll be free to spend as much time in the Figura system as you like.

The duty assignment system is probably where I spent most of my time this month. While the GUI is still far from pretty, it's quite a bit more complex than pretty much anything I set up for Carnal Coup with the amount of info and options that need to be dynamically displayed. The open assignments available during the introduction sequence will be fairly simple ones, but as the game goes on there be a lot more going on there. To briefly summarize what duty assignments are about:

• Duty Assignments will come from a number of different sources. Some will come from a common pool, while certain ship compartments may add some, along with your current ship location, current special crew members, and other possible options. Some may be common, while others may be more rare.
• Duty Assignments will provide you with a number of different rewards. The most common will be upgrade currencies you can use to improve your ship, and XP for the crew assigned to the tasks, while others may reward you with new crew recruits or unlock story content.
•  Assignments may require more than a single crew member to complete, and the traits of each assigned crew will have an impact on how the duty completes. The primary factors are assignment speed, rewards, and success chance, and traits can have both positive and negative effects on all of these. If an assignment's success chance goes over 100% there will be a chance for a critical result, with improved rewards. Failure meanwhile means you get nothing, and may lead to even worse results when I get to coding them.

My current task is setting up space-based combat encounters. There will be three main kinds of encounters in the game - space combat, ground ('away team') combat, and peaceful encounters, or perhaps better called 'seduction' encounters. Mechanically each will function mostly the same, but there will be a few differences in each. For tonight I'll just focus on the space combat, and I'm sure I'll have more to talk about for the others next month. In space combat your crew is represented by a single entity, your ship, but your combat actions will be defined by your bridge stations and the crew you assigned to each. Each station will provide options like Fire Weapons, Repair Damage, and so on, but they will take a number of combat turns to charge up and activate. While this is happening your bridge crew will provide you with various Command options based on their personality traits - these commands will allow you to do things like apply bonuses to action strength, speed up charge times, put debuffs on the enemy ship, or even do things like add chances for random resources to appear after taking actions. This will play out in the style of a card game - your bridge crew's traits provide the 'deck' of possible commands, and each turn one or more will be added to your current hand. While I'd love to include a visual to go along with this, the GUI for this section is still a bit too early to show off even by my ugly design-phase standards.

So that's my current state, where do things go from here? Well, for the big picture view, here are the remaining systems required to get through the introduction sequence:

• Space Combat Encounter
• Ground Combat Encounter
• Peaceful Encounter
• Interactive, procedural 'romance' scenes
• A crew management interface, including viewing info and setting up rank promotions
• Various game interfaces such as options, saving/loading, etc.
• Creating and applying GUI design graphics.

And I will of course be looking to write up at least one non-procedural scene before I do a first release, under my rule of thumb that every good h-game should have at least one scene in the first five minutes to show you what kind of game to expect. There may be a bit more functionality required for the overall game (particularly the interactions at Watch Station like upgrading your ship), but I don't want to put off a first release too much longer than necessary. My goal will be to do a release of the game's intro sequence as a sort of demo, and then get into writing for the plotlines for the first few GPU species once we return to regular updates. Incidentally I have not yet decided which species I will do first, and I'll probably be doing a poll on that later this month. As far as a scheduled date, however, well...assuming several weeks for each of the major tasks on the list, we could be looking at perhaps an April timeframe at best, but it's far from concrete at this stage. We will get there, eventually! For now, my goal is to have the various encounter systems pretty much complete by the end of the month, and perhaps have started on the romance scenes.

So, wrapping up this rambling about game design, I'd like to thank you all again for your support in 2021 which helped us get Carnal Coup finished up and released, and I'm hoping you'll continue to support us in 2022! It will still take a while to really get going, but I'm confident that by this time next year you'll be enjoying a game that's far more ambitious than Coup, and hopefully far more fun as well.

Have a happy 2022!