I Can Resist Anything Except Temptation (Patreon)

Greetings! This post is fairly long, but before we get into the updates I figured I'd start off with another pic from the forthcoming scene with Ana, Alex and Sami. Alex already knows not to trust a succubus, but it looks like Ana might have to learn the hard way!

Clothing States

Since I last checked in, I've been working mostly on quests, but I did have to take a detour for a few days to write another plugin. Thankfully it wasn't anywhere near as complicated as the Xmog and Character View plugins, but it was still a fair bit of work. I don't want to get into too many details, but during one part of the quest to open up the new H-area, I wanted to make sure the PC was wearing panties. I thought about how to enforce this, and concluded it might be a good opportunity to take care of a problem that's been bugging me for a while, namely the fact that Alex (and other characters) can walk around naked everywhere. This isn't really consistent with the characters and overall tone of the game, and it seems like it would be sort of immersion-breaking if you and Ana show up to a guild meeting wearing only your birthday suits and nobody bats an eye.

I thought this would be a simple problem to solve, but it turned out to be more complex than I'd expected. This is mostly due to my requirements being complex once I sat down and thought about them. Alex and the others should be fully clothed most of the time, but there are some situations where I want to give them the option to wear less/no clothing. But it isn't just that nudity is okay in some regions of the map - whether it's okay or not can change with time of day/point in story, etc. For example, I'm making it so that Alex can be naked in her room  in the guild hall whenever she likes, but s/he can only do so in the rest of the guild hall if the other Bunnies are asleep.

I ended up creating a system with four different clothing states - fully clothed, otherwise dressed but no underwear (i.e. commando), just your underwear, and naked - and the system gives me a lot of flexibility to make the rules governing 'allowed' states as simple or complex as need be. As a bonus, it also gives me an easy way to check how much clothing a character is wearing, which I could use to open up different conversation paths as appropriate. I haven't made much use of that part yet, but I expect it'll see more service in future releases.

I didn't want to annoy the player with a "You're not wearing enough clothing, put more on to continue!" message, so the plugin also tries to fix a character's clothing state automatically if it doesn't match what's allowed. It tries to be smart about it - Val will preferentially try to equip Val's Dress, for example - but if it changes something, it lets you know what was changed so you can wear something different if you want. Here's a gif of it in action - in this clip I unequip some clothing from Alex and Ana, exit the menu, and they automatically put some more on:

I'm guessing a few of you enjoyed making poor Alex into a nudist and may be disappointed by this change. I haven't decided yet, but in the future I may allow Alex to wear less clothing if you've done a lot of H-scenes. What do you think? Is walking around naked in inappropriate places something you enjoyed? Do you think it was bad for immersion?

Equipment slot changes

I haven't finished implementing this part, but 0.9 will also see an expanded number of equipment slots for all characters. The reason for this is pretty simple: since I don't use 'levels', character power is regulated mostly by equipment. And having as few slots to play with as I currently do makes it pretty difficult to balance rewards on my end. So, I'll be adding 2-3 slots per character, probably boots, belt and maybe gloves. I thought about a 'shoulder' slot for a true WoW-esque experience, but I'd probably have to redo all the character sprites to make that happen, and that's a whole can of worms I don't want to open. As usual, I'll add scripts to fix your old saves if you're using them with the new version. It'll automatically add the new default items to your inventory and equip them for you.

The Road Ahead

Despite the plugin detour - and another brief one making more expressions for Sami - I've spent most of my development time working on quests and skits. And I've been having a lot of fun with it! One thing people seem to like about this game is all the quirky one-off characters you encounter, and I've been doing my best to include a fair number of them in 0.9. 

I've added a few more quests to this release, and the final number will be either 10 or 11. The uncertainty is because I have an idea I think would be fun/funny, but I'm not sure most players would get the joke. So, jury's still out on that one, but here's where I'm at on the others:

Completed: 4

Almost complete: 2

Fully planned, not completed: 1

Not planned: 3

'Not planned' means I have vague ideas about what I want the quest to be, but I haven't fleshed them out and planned in detail what's going to happen. Of the 'not planned' ones, one is fairly large, one is small-ish (I've successfully resisted the urge to create a minigame for it,) and I haven't yet figured out how big the last one will be. The 'Fully planned, not completed' one is this release's installment of the legendary quest (i.e., the Ned Danger quest line). That one's going to be sort of big, and will interact with at least one of the others. I'm excited to get started on that one - I kinda want to talk about it, but I don't want to ruin the surprise!

This doesn't fully represent the work yet to be done; there's still skits, but I don't have a definite number of those since they usually come to me as I'm working through other stuff. I'll likely also roll out the reward for past and present Presence-tier supporters - the 'Hall of Heroes' in the recollection room (I've done most of the work for it.) I'm also continuing to add little stuff to the nightclub as it comes to me. But that should still give you an idea of where I'm at. For perspective, here's the other stuff for 0.9 that's already completed:

H-scene art: 31 images

H-scene writing: done (2 scenes)

Character View art: 27 images

Character View feature: done

Transmogrification feature: done

Clothing States feature: done

New party member character design: done

New portrait images: I've done 135 of them (!), but only 75 have made it into this release so far. The majority of those are for the new party member. (I actually did another 132, but ditched 'em after completing the hair retexturing project.)

Hair retexturing (for Bunnies & new character): done 

Conversations: A lot (with Ana, Sami, the Bunnies, the new character, and a whole assortment of walk-on characters.)

And a whole lot of important work on the characters and overall plot, as I've discussed in previous posts. I now have a much clearer idea of where I'm taking this story, and my plan is to move to a 3-month release cycle once this one is out. So, I'm still not putting out a release date, but a lot of the major pieces for this release are done. What remains are 3 big quests, 1 smaller one, adding the equipment slots (a little more complicated than it probably sounds,) and some more skits (not sure how many yet.)

So, that's where we're at. I've been enjoying myself when writing lately, and that's usually a good sign. Stay safe out there and thank you for your support!