StrongGirls Visual Novel progress 17/12/2023 (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Jon here with another update. Thank you for playing the beta and sharing your enthusiastic feedback and praise! The overwhelmingly positive reception really gave us a good boost of morale!

This week I finalized the content for bestgurl Yuka. It's not ready for a release so I will ship it when ep3 is fully complete with all the proper story events triggering along with the 'ending' to this chapter.

Next, we have big news about the autosave system!

After making a poll and asking you about how we handled the autosave it was clear that most of you wanted some sort of autosave - but others were very vocal about not liking how we essentially overwrite manual saves. 

With a staggering 142 votes, it's clear we had to do better!

Co-developer Gobbo in response to the Poll decided there had to be another way. I will let him speak in his own words:

Hey everyone! It's Gob, the other personality that lives in Jon's head (but nobody tell him, it's been months and he still thinks I'm a some kind of guardian angel).

Recently, we made a poll to see how you guys were reacting to the save system we introduced in Ep3.

Now, technically, those who voted to say they like the Ep3 autosave system I made won the poll, so I could've said "job's done".

But I don't believe in democracy, screw you guys, I make my own rules! No but seriously, 47% unhappy voters is big enough for me to give a f***.

More than one, even. I gave so much f***s that I decided to make a whole new Chaptering system, with chapters!

And here's how it looks!

< tell other personality to add screenshot here >

When the next build of the game is out, the old manual save system will be restored, and this new one will be added.

As you know, we said Ep3 would be released in October... but we never said of which year.

I'm kidding, I'm kidding, put down the guns!

Anyway, that's all from me!

Holy moly look at that!

Not only did he create a chapter select screen, but he did all the design and it even records the date when the autosave was made. Absolutely mad!

This wouldn't be possible without my Guardian Angel, Gob.

But most importantly, thank YOU for being vocal and asking us to do better. When I made the poll, my expectation was that we would just get rid of the autosave idea completely. But Gob took it upon himself to design a whole new piece of UI! Well done!

Anyway, that's about it for today's post. I will leave you with a bit of an explanation on how the dates work for the girls. I made a post on Discord, but I don't think many saw it so I will repeat it here:

How does the gift system work?

When playing the beta, before meeting one of the characters you may see a message saying something like "You aren't ready to deepen your relationship yet" - and then after the date you may get a similar message.

This is a system where every character has a hidden "affection points".

Therefore, when you see this message, the game is telling you that you do not have enough points with that character to get the next story scene with them.

So when you don't have enough "points" with that character, you will be sent to one of a few random 'generic dates' instead. The generic dates are quick short scenes that allows you to give a gift and sometimes you get a skill check as well.

For example: One of the random Kasumi generic dates, there is a skill check of your knowledge - where if you have sufficient knowledge, your character will impress Kasumi with some business suggestions. This will grant you one extra 'Kasumi point'.

Then you get a chance to give her a gift - which will also reward you with an additional 'Kasumi point'.

If don't give a gift, or don't pass any checks, the date will end with you only getting one 'point' for that character.

Generic dates never progress the story for that character, and does not give you the level rank up pop up (the stars in your stats page)

The generic dates are randomized, and don't always have a skill check. Sometimes they can reward points for other actions (Like paying for the ice-cream on one of Manami's random dates)

The idea is that if you play the game efficiently, you can progress with the girl faster (wasting fewer in-game days)

This isn't very important in the current build, since there are no deadlines and the beta goes on for unlimited in-game days.

But in the final version of the game, the idea is that it should be challenging to max out every character in the same playthrough. - you simply won't have enough in-game days (unless you give gifts, and pass skill checks)

Now with the system explained, I would love to hear from you. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve this system?

That's it for this weeks post! Let me hear your thoughts below or in the discord vs-feedback channel! Thank you again for supporting the project and I will see you next Sunday with another update!

-Jon