0.7 Retrospective (Patreon)

Greetings!

Now that 0.7 has been out for a little bit, I'd like to take some time and talk about its development. This is gonna be a long one, so strap in!

As I've discussed here before, I've always intended The Proteus Effect to be a real game. It has porn, of course, but I've always thought of it as "a game with porn" rather than "a porn game". TPE is supposed to be challenging, and its challenge is supposed to come from its action scenes (minigames) and puzzles, rather than from typical JRPG combat, which I find a bit boring unless done very well.

Designing the Dungeon

The game's last real dungeon was the flame spirit dungeon. That one had the 'dodge moving flames' mechanic, but I thought I should make something more complex and interesting for this one. I came up with several ideas - some of which I'll probably use in later dungeons - but the one I settled on was the bomb mechanic. I thought it would be easy to implement, but I was a little wrong about that!

I started off creating the boss battle, which was initially very simple. The boss was on a little column, he threw bombs at you, and every now and again he threw one with a long fuse, which you had to roll to his column in order to knock him off it. Simple, right?

I don't know much about game design, but one thing that really stuck with me was Egoraptor's Mega Man Sequelitis video. One of the big things I took from it was that it's better to let your players figure out how mechanics work rather than explicitly telling them. Now, you need to make it easy for them to figure out how it works - that's a bit tricky - but if you just tell them, you'll be cheating them out of the fun of exploration and learning. I've recently started learning about game design in a more formal way, and I can see already that I made a few mistakes, but hopefully I'll be better in the future!

Anyway, having the player figure out the bomb mechanic meant that I needed to make several levels that let the player explore, experiment, and learn about all the stuff they could do with 'em. The boss battle then kinda becomes the 'final exam' to see how much they learned. So I made all sorts of levels, and I think some of 'em were pretty cool!

This left me with a problem - the boss battle I had seemed really dull in comparison to all the 'learning' levels I created. I decided to go back and add in a lot of the cool stuff from the learning levels to the boss fight. I figured if I had all that stuff going on at one time, the player might be like 'wtf', so I broke it up into phases, each of which had slightly different challenges to overcome.

Difficulty

I wanted to make something challenging, and I think I succeeded. There is a tension, though, between making something challenging and making it accessible. Some people play TPE for the porn and some play it for the story. A lot of both of these groups probably don't want to play something really challenging, they just want to move on to the next H-scene or story segment.

I ran into this problem early in the game's development (0.2, specifically). The way I decided to address it was by making 'easy modes', which is supposed to let folks who aren't that interested in the gameplay get through the challenges without too many problems. There is a slight penalty for beating dungeons on easy mode - you'll eventually miss out on a small number of H-scenes - but hey, I figured I ought to encourage people to conquer the challenges with a reward that's meaningful in the game.

I thought I'd done my duty by including easy modes, but it gradually became apparent to me that many folks just didn't know about 'em. 0.7 is considerably more challenging than any of the previous releases, so before it goes public and gets played by a much wider group of people, I wanted to make sure I had some way of letting players know that they do exist. Aside from the fixes, that's why I concentrated on tightening up easy mode and including the little quest into 0.7.1.

Creating the Bomb Mechanic

I'd stitched the original boss battle together with RMMV's eventing system, but it became apparent that I'd need something much more robust to make the mechanic really interesting. I realized I'd need to do something that I'd been meaning to do for a while - create a plugin.

This ended up being an enormous effort. It wasn't that the programming was all that difficult, it's just that the mechanic required a lot of it, and I didn't really know how RMMV worked under the hood. I'm still not an expert, but I've now got 5 plugins and several thousand lines of code under my belt. More importantly, though, I now have a pretty good understanding of the data structures and methods used by RMMV, I can easily do things that would have been difficult or impossible under the eventing system, and it'll be far easier for me to create new mechanics in the future. 

The upshot is that future releases shouldn't take nearly as long to get out. On that subject, you should know that there won't be any more dungeons for at least the next couple of releases, probably closer to 3. 0.8 will be almost entirely quest and story stuff (with an H-scene, of course!)

This has been a long post, but before I wrap it up, I want to say that I was pretty gratified by the poll results! I was kinda afraid that the reaction would be negative, but it looks like most of you enjoyed it at least a bit, and a good portion really liked it!

I'll have more to say about 0.8 in next week's post. I've already gotten a number of things done for it, and this coming week will be devoted to writing and getting renders for the H-scene. 

By the way, I'm now going to experiment with doing promotional images for releases. The one at the top of this post is one I put together for 0.7. I hope you like it! Thank you for sticking with me, and thank you for your support!