Dev Journal: Complete Flexibility (Patreon)

When I go back and check the last Dev Journal I posted, I find myself a little frustrated. Part of that is because the recent work has been a slog that I wish I could have gotten done and past faster, and part is because I seemed to estimate there was so little left to do between where I was then and where I am now. To some extent I suppose I was trying to be optimistic, but building a new system is always complicated.

I talked like one successful parse of data from a spreadsheet was most of the way there. Well, it was an important step, but a pretty small part of the larger picture. The new process for handling text in the game is pretty complex, but I'll try to give a quick summary of the steps here:

1. The game loads a spreadsheet formatted for this purpose and uses it to construct a huge array of Objects that track text, when it should be used, and how to choose one text over another in different situations.

2. Once all the spreadsheets it's using are parsed out, the game organizes and indexes all of the Objects to efficiently search through whenever they're needed.

3. Whenever something happens in the game, it picks out the Object holding descriptors that best match the situation.

4. Every time something changes on the UI, it reads the most recent set of Objects chosen out and generates the text you'll see.

This enables us to do a lot of fancy things we wouldn't be able to do otherwise, which I'll get into in a second. The point is, I had the basics of Step 1 in place and proved they could work at all, which is a huge part of it, but Steps 2 through 4 weren't actually built yet. They all use the foundations you have to build for Step 1 to work, but I'd underestimated how much work was left making all that happen, and how much I still had to go back and expand everything in Step 1 as well to make it all actually work.

So I'm kinda annoyed to look back and see myself claim I was about to start writing new content after I “polish up a few more pieces,” because this has been a lot of work, and at first it made me second-guess myself. Did I lose a couple weeks somewhere?

No. I've actually been pretty happy with how much work I've put in this last month, even if I wish it could have been done with faster.

All four steps of the system, let's call it the Active Text System, are built, and as of today, they're actually working together and generating text properly in-game. I've transferred all of the original text the game had to the new system, which was a big part of what forced me to expand how a lot of it works. I still need to do a lot of testing and bug squashing, but the game's new text system is finally online and replicating the original experience.

Which is maddening in its own way. I've worked so much on this update and taken so much time, and I'm only now reaching the point of roughly “looking the same as v0.02, with a different backend.” I could technically ship once these bugs are cleared, but the differences to the player would be minuscule, and it would be a wildly disappointing update. So that means that from here is where I make v0.03 feel “worth the wait.” Which I know, that can be a trap for creators when an update starts taking overly long, and I don't want to put too much more time into this update before I ship it! But the point is that we're about to hit the payoff for all this work constructing a new, more robust system.

So before I wrap this up, let's talk about what exactly the Active Text System will do for us, and why this should all be worth it. I'm not sure how much of this will make it into v0.03, but I intend to work on all of these until there's enough I feel like it's a worthwhile update, and all of them are certainly on the way now that they're possible.

First off, the original goal of this system was to enable alternate descriptions for every situation. Let's say you're playing the game and you just took the action to start having oral sex with someone. Under the old system, it would just see who has the dick and give a pretty generic prose description of you doing this action. Under the new system, along with that description, you could also have, for examples:

• A minimal description you can optionally turn on if you want a “gameplay only” experience, or if you want certain activities to be minimally described because you want the gameplay aspect but it doesn't interest you otherwise.
• A description acknowledging the nature of your relationship with the character-- strangers, lovers, one of you fearing the other, and so on.
• A description mentioning that they offered this action, or something else but you chose this instead
• When the new AI system is complete, a description acknowledging their intentions and desires, and your own.
• A description mentioning that you have an unusual penis, or they an unusual mouth, or some other curiosity of anatomy, or just the fact that their mouth is already very full.
• A detailed description of the position you're taking. Sixty-nine? Mounting their head and pounding it into the ground? Flopped on your back and pulling them in?
• Mention of the fact you have an unusual kind of body and don't pull them into position so much as just mount their face
• Mention of size difference, species difference, sexual history, their being wounded or exhausted, your being on the verge of orgasm or feeling tepid, and so on.

The point being, it would allow for an almost unlimited flexibility of how each action can be described. Of course, writing up all these different descriptions (and coding all the checks they'll invoke) would be a lot of work, but this system will allow for a much wider and smarter selection of descriptions, including factors like minimizing repetition, avoiding contradictions and making your experience that much more special to you in a hundred little ways. I'm really hoping this will be the foundation for a much richer experience across the board.

Now, all that was my main goal, but this system also enables a lot of nice, extra features that wouldn't really have been possible before. Small quality of life things include highlighting every action that directly involves you, highlighting every text that involves the creature you're targeting (AND making that change instantly as you change targets to help sort through complicated situations quickly), and being able to make changes to how text is displayed or actions described in a broader sense and see them change retroactively on the spot. One of the flashier options it opens up that I've been keeping a lid on is the ability to change what character you're playing. I knew I'd like to explore this as an option, but it couldn't change any of the past events to be seen from your new character's perspective, which in turn is important for other possible hijinx related to player control down the road...

But all of this is stuff that I've been prioritizing myself because I feel like it's important to the future of the game. One of the big things you guys have been requesting is just to have more actions available across the board, more sex acts and more options! I've been holding back on that in part because I didn't want to add a bunch more content to the old text system when I knew I was about to replace it, but this is a good time to expand our options some. Now, every action I add to the game will still have to be fully coded into the AI system, which is also due to be replaced soon, so I probably won't go hogwild on that just yet, but this is what I was waiting for on at least some of the new actions.

So there's lots to look forward to for v0.03 and beyond, and now that I've put in the hard work getting the Active Text System online, it's finally time to start seeing some of that good stuff! I'm hoping to get this update shipped soon, it's quite frustrating to me how long it's taken already, but I want to make sure there's enough goodies packed in there that people can see how much good all this work will do us, now and in the future!

That's everything I needed to get off my chest at the moment. Thank you for reading, and for supporting my work! This has been a bit of a slog recently, but I'm hoping now the system is actually running and playable, we'll start picking up speed again!