Weekly Update/Preview July 17-24 (Patreon)

The tweets this week were kind of backloaded. Several days of nothing followed by several days of something. I don't really plan these things anymore. Earlier on I was being a lot tougher on myself making sure it was one tweet per day, but now it's mostly just kind of whatever. I haven't seen anything suggesting the tweets make a big difference as far as advertising goes, but I'm sure people appreciate them.

As for progress... I dunno. I've still have a few strange bug reports that I haven't figured out hanging over my head. That and being a bit slow on content production has caused a bit of an anxiety flare up. I'd like to say I'm still on target, but I'm not 100% sure on what the target is EXACTLY, so that's hard to say.

In any case, we'll probably have another one of these before the next update. We'll see how I feel (and how I write about how I feel) then I guess. Moving on to the stuff from this week:

Spiral thingy

A trap planned for the upcoming update. Think something similar to the general 'glyph' type traps already in the game. One-off to inflict a status effect. Although thinking about it, maybe it would be good to do some more with it than that. As far as mind control stuff goes, this is the kind of thing people like to see, right?

Actually, that brings up a thing to talk about with regard to mind control and hypnosis in general. As someone who has been hanging around this fetish sphere for a while now, I think there's layers to it, and I may occupy a layer that is somewhat less popular? Being more clear, I'm not actually that into hypnotic inductions. I certainly don't mind them, but I know there are a lot of people out there who really love a long, drawn out hypno scene with all the details of the victim getting all droopy and drooly and falling under and all of that.

I certainly don't MIND that. It can be better than not having it when done right. The problem is that it's pretty difficult for me to put something like that together without feeling silly or overly critical of it. Something like it being difficult for me to feel good about an induction script if it doesn't pass a believability test for me personally, which is especially difficult when I've never succeeded in being hypnotized myself. (Yes I have tried it)

So my brain occupies a space of caring more about the end result of hypnosis, that being mind control. Narratively, mind control can be done through all kinds of vectors, and most of them don't require the huge amount of preamble that is the standard hypnotic induction. That makes them a lot easier to write as a way to get on to the sexy stuff. That's probably why the main mind control spell that the Inquisitor can use is just a "vwoop, you're in a trance" type thing. That does mean that people who are much more into that sort of thing lose out on their particularly favored part of the fetish though.

So yeah, inductions have their place, and will probably come up here and there. I'm just less into them than some people might expect or prefer I suppose.

But where was I with this? I guess uhhhh... Big spiral that does a hypno on knights is good. I like it. Even if it's just a one off thing, getting the Trance status has gameplay implications so it should be meaningful. Should there be more to it than just that? Maybe. I've still got a bit of time to figure out if/what that should be.

Nerd smiles at homework

Just a CG from a scene with Lucette. I just finished writing it up today (actually not quite but it's pretty close). A continuation of the previous scene with Lucette talking to the inquisitor about magic. One thing I haven't decided on is how much importance I should put on player choices in dialogues vs choices expressed through gameplay. This scene is kind of an example.

Say that the player sees the previous Lucette spell scene and during that decides to put Lucette into a trance and lessen her curiosity. Mechanically, that manifests as a decrease in her Drive toward Knowledge in the desires system. However, the difference that choice actually makes can be reverted via gameplay pretty easily. It can wind up such that even though the player made that choice in the scene, circumstances in gameplay cause Lucette to have an above average drive for knowledge anyway.

So do I base Lucette's behavior, as well as the requirements for further scenes, off of the numbers that are meant to model her desires, or off of the choices the player clicked on?

There's good arguments to be made both ways, but I'm leaning somewhat more toward favoring the player's actual decisions. Using only the desire system would probably be more ideal, but also a lot more difficult. 

For players, the desire system is semi-opaque and not immediately easy to wrap your head around. Having it be the main thing that dictates scene possibilities to the point where it overrides more conscious choices they make could be frustrating. It does make the desire system feel a bit less core to the modelling of a knight's thoughts and feelings, but without an infinite time to write scene and dialogue variations, it was never going to be able to fully show all that detail anyway. Being more restricted in what I look at for the purpose of interactive storytelling means fewer variables to consider, which is good for my sanity, if nothing else.

I don't want the desire system to feel entirely disconnected from story options though. Spending a bunch of time pushing a character's desire for pleasure up to her being obsessed with it only for her to not outwardly react to that change could also feel frustrating...

Basically, there's a lot of thoughts to be had about the design and how I use different player inputs/numbers to make the story more interactive. Is the best answer somewhere in the middle? Should story/scene choices have some kind of mechanic where it changes the minimum/maximum of a knight's drives? Have I made this whole thing very complicated? I dunno. This is just where I'm at, but it's just a thing to think about as I keep working on more scenes I guess.

Better lookie lookie

I probably should have set up a better way to capture a gif than this. The framerate + twitter compression makes it kinda unclear what happens when the image is clicked off of (it goes off the top of the screen like many menus). Anyway.

As far as the actual porn parts of the game, I don't know how best to allow people to consume the sexy content. If they're going back to things, do they prefer looking at individual pictures vs watching individual scenes (which may have those pictures in them)? I guess either way, adding this feature to at least give people the option to see individual CGs doesn't hurt.

Well it does have a slight problem due to proportions.

So the "normal" picture size of the art is 256x320. Adding on the frame and some transparency around it, the size of the area the end result takes up is 304x368. When displayed in the research notes menu, the space for that is cut in half, which smoothly reduces the image to 0.5 scale.

Buuuuuut there are some CGs that are larger than the 304x368.

Originally I only used the larger CG size for knight sex scenes. I figured the increased detail/size would be appreciated, even though going larger would mean that the CG might not be visible depending on the textbox size/resolution settings. As time has gone on though, I've started to feel like there isn't really much of a reason not to use that larger size for other things too. Smaller resolutions can just hide the text box, after all. 

So the standard size for larger CGs ends up being 336x420 (382x468 with border). While this means that they are the same aspect ratio as the smaller portraits, using the same border means the ratio of portrait to portrait border to surrounding transparency isn't the same. Scaling it down to the same 152x184 space in the notes menu causes proportional differences.

Here's a side by side comparison that... Actually makes it stand out less than I thought...

But it's still noticeable to me, and is probably easier when flipping from one image to another. It puts me in a situation where I'm not sure if I want to include the larger images in this space or not. Might be a bit silly as a concern though. Maybe people won't really care. Who knows!

Anyway uh, the point is that UI is difficult, but this is a feature that has been requested, so here it is. Yay.

But those are the tweets for this week. Not much else to say other than as an ongoing thing: if you're in the Paladin level of support and I have your name wrong or missing from the credits menu, do let me know. I don't actually know how much people care about that, but I do try to keep it as accurate as possible each release. I'd feel bad if you care about the perk and I ended up messing it up.