5 Days Remain - Phase 1b (12/11/22)

I figured it's worth an update to reassure people that work is ongoing.

We're now at 5 days left of this sprint, and I'm honestly wavering between "Holy fuck this was too much I'm never going to get it done in time" and "I can make it!". Looking at Trello, it looks like very little has been completed, until you look inside the biggest one and see that it had 33 individual tasks in there...

So, over the last week, this is what has been happening:

Clothing system. There's now clothing for male and female characters. The player can customise their wardrobe. There is a minor bug where you always start naked, but that's ok, it works for the story in Phase 1c. There's now an inventory so you can see what you've got. You come with a default selection of clothes. The wolves hunting you aren't bothered with clothes, so they're still swinging in the breeze, but the NPC wolves now randomise what they are wearing.

But this is a sex game. Why are they wearing clothes? Clothes are armour. Simple as that. Each item of clothing has health. When you get captured, each loop of the struggle removes some of the clothes health. Most items of clothing degrade from pristine to damaged to ruined. Underwear takes damage but doesn't visually degrade. There's not really much of them to take chunks out of anyway.

When an item of clothing runs out of health, it breaks and you've lost it. The wolf will then start on your underwear until that breaks. Once the clothes are out of the way, it goes in to the normal struggle and then sex begins.

There are some rules in there though. For normal sex, they only need to get rid of the trousers and panties. When combat is implemented, the upper clothing will take damage from that. So, until combat is added, the tops and bras are just cosmetic! The idea is that when the gameplay is done, you'll be running around and being captured quite often. You need some kind of buffer to aid survivability.

On that note, to get clothing working right, there's now a basic save/load system. There's nothing as fancy as saveslots. It's going to be roguelike, so as soon as you start a new game, the old one gets wiped. After that, the Character Creator screen now has a Difficulty dropdown. So far, difficulty influences how much damage struggle does per turn, and how many struggle loops you get to try and escape once the clothing is gone. It also affects the inventory screen. On Easy mode, the game pauses when you open the inventory. Normal mode puts the game into slow motion and Hard just keeps playing in the background, so you'd better be careful where you stop and use that inventory.

Finally, items of clothing got added to the random item drops. They spawn clothing a bit too often though, so the percentages need tweaked a little.

Both wolves and plants can cause the clothing damage.

That was the first big task. There's two more which I've decided to do at the same time, like an idiot.

New enemy!

But why stop at 1 new enemy when I can make a female wolf and a female badger as well? The main reason for doing these 2 tasks at the same time, is because they are not proper Wolves. So the idea of the game is you have a persistent pack of wolves hunting. They generate at the character creator stage and stay until the end, unless you kill or fuck them senseless along the way. They will be a generated cast that's around throughout. But we also need other enemies to add fun.

The solution is a generic spawner. Plop it down, and if it triggers, it chooses a gender and a species and spawns it. This is actually going surprisingly well so far. This isn't done, but real progress has been made. The Male Badger is completed, modelled and textured. The female badger is modelled and imported, but still needs proper mesh weighting, texturing and fur. I've also dropped in a male wolf, which will become the preset for different canids. Once it's all built, the male and female wolf in the generic spawner will actually be foxes, coyotes, huskies, etc. I'll also add the female wolf in to the main wolf cast. She is yet to be modelled, but work has gone in to let her spawn once she is done.

The generic spawner is progressing, but it's a pretty big job that will take a bit of work. I'm prioritising it over the wolf spawner because the wolf spawner is now full of stuff it probably doesn't need, so if I can optimise and improve in the generic spawner, it gives me a baseline to go back and fix the wolves.

Once that's all done, everyone needs fur, the enemy alert system is getting an upgrade, wolves are going to be a bit more carful around plants, and we need an animation gallery that can be unlocked. Plus there's a buglist of about 11 items. If that's not enough, there's now a "Small Jobs" list of things that aren't urgent but can be worked on in spare times. There's currently 11 of them as well.

To sum up, this wasn't a quick update. The target for completion on 1b is saturday 12th November, but ideally it needs to be wrapped up by friday night so it can bake lighting overnight. The next few days are going to be critical. Once the new enemies are done, the other jobs should be fairly quick. I think the Ai alerts and animation gallery should take a day together and the rest less than a day, which gives 2-3 on the enemies...

Now is also the ideal point to advertise both Discord, where I post updates usually several times a day: Discord

And Patreon, because I'm doing this fulltime, but was also doing other work on the side to support myself, which has unexpectedly been cancelled today, so any support people can give is greatly appreciated: Patreon Support also means access to the game at the end of each Sub-Phase, while public releases are at the end of every full Phase.