Thrallworks Update #46: Identity Management and Stat Talk (Patreon)

Hello all, and I've got a bit of something-something to discuss with this one; Identity Management, and other such stats!

I was working on assigning stats for Keller in the Intro, and realized what I'd come up with wasn't working, so I spent a few days coming up with a new stat system...which also didn't work.

If this were a patreon where we talk about game design it'd probably be an interesting story worthy of a topic of its own, but to make a long story short I spent yet-more time thinking about it and so have approached things from a different angle, by sorting out L-D19's mental stats first, as well as taking the opportunity to mock-up the Thrallcentre- another screen which deals with Keller's projects, their corporate licence and side-ventures. We'll go into those some other time when it's more pertinent, but for now lets focus onnnnnn

Identity Management!

Some of this will be available in a minor capacity in the opening of the game, but it's really something that will kick in once the Instruction is properly underway.

As you can see, there are 'Fields' in her head, each corresponding to a label or similar collection of important things, which you can teach her about or change her reasoning over. For this example, we've gone with her 'Name', which is L-D19, with the subset of 'LD'.

(This list of Fields is probably not exhaustive; I'd like to get other things folded into it that form the totality of her identity such as accent, gender, phobias, ethics, etc. but for the time being and for the visuals of it, it is pretty satisfying, and it would probably do to limit things to the stuff that she values the most anyway.)

Stat: Influence

You use Influence as the stat to change her mind on things, as you'd expect. This will be a set total, generated by how many lessons you have with her, how persuasive you are in general and how much she likes you.

Assigned Influence stays in a place either passively, or if being used to educate her. The idea would be that you don't get a *huge* amount of influence in one go compared to the amount of stuff you can put it in, so be practical with what you want to develop with her-- or else, structure her lessons in such a way as to generate a huge amount of influence, at the expense of skill development. Etiquette and Guidance lessons are good for generating influence (and creating Trance Blocks, which we'll get to in a minute).

Importance and Association

Importance is how highly L-D19 regards this particular subject; Association is how closely she jives with the current subject matter.

In this case, she values her 'Name' quite highly, giving an outsized boost to the effects that her name provides, both good and bad. However, her slight Association with her name 'L-D19' does not give her additional Stability, so things like stress from activities or CMS trigger use or the like hit for their full effects.

You can assign Influence to these things in order to progress or regress them as you see fit; though they will also go up or down by a passive amount based on the effects of other aspects of her identity (and this one itself). Sometimes you don't want her with high importance in a topic in order to more easily increase importance in another area (not *every* concept is equal in importance, afterall), and want to lower her association with a particular concept in order to be able to swap it out and build up a new one.

Considerations

Considerations are the things L-D19 knows or has thought about that impact how she feels about whatever the concept-field it is, whether it's ultimately positive or negative, and thus how well she associates with it and therefore with her situation as a whole.

Considerations can be factual, abstract or social, and spring up from in-game scenes, conversations and interactions, along with differing thinking behind the same issue - if she loves being a Thrall, then she'd be a lot happier with a Thrall-name, for instance.

Some Considerations you can also create out of whole-cloth, like this one you can make with a bit of CMS research and some deft Pleasure Control Unit tinkering-- though equally, if you stop the program on this, it'll get removed from her Considerations- and might bum her out a bit if changed without explanation.

Different thinking creates different effects, and you can expend Influence in order to re-educate L-D19 to have a different opinion on the same thing; how difficult it is to re-educate depending on how much thinking she's already done on a topic, either through you educating her or through her own self-aware reflections.

In order to prevent overly negative effects from affecting a field's output in the meantime, there may also be opportunities to 'Trance Block' certain Considerations. These are suggestions you can implant during Guidance lessons and similar, which can nullify effects or even help speed up education-- though you only get a handful of Trances and they do need to be re-inforced, so use them wisely.

Trance blocks aren't infallible either; events can happen every day that test the suggestions they are under (looking into a mirror, for example) and depending on the suggestion's strength, it might fail and the Consideration be unleashed with some additional destabilizing shock value and a worse opinion of you to boot.

You can also set up Trigger Blocks for some of these Considerations, using the CMS to divert to a different thought instead, but these are both harder to set up and there is a stability penalty each time it is challenged, which can cause unforseen issues.

Anyway, that's by and large what I've been working on for the last two weeks regarding Thrallworks-Main content. I think for the next update I'll see about finishing up adding what completed items there are for the Thrallopedia, and discuss to you all how Keller's stats in contrast will work. I hope! Man, he's been a pain!

Enjoy!

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Orientation Demo (Updated Apr 28, 2021)

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Thrallopedia (Updated Dec 01, 2022) Password: SpiralOutKeepGoing

OutfitChanger 1.0 (Updated Jul 28, 2022) Password: ShinyHappyPeople

Pet Demo (Updated Apr 22, 2022) Password: IrresistableTriggers

Dossier (Updated Mar 14, 2022) Password: MarniEvolution

Scene Repository (Updated Sep 11, 2021) Password: FollowMeSinkDownDropForMe