5 Days ago, I made the claim that I would batter through the rest of Phase 2a before the end of the year. That is absolutely not happening.

So far, I have done:

• Give NPCs a list of locations to visit and let them wander to them instead of random locations
• Interactable NPCs can walk around and stop to talk when interacted with
• wolves generate at Character Creation
• Furniture in Inn
• Implement difficulty modifiers
• Make items pickup when walking over them

I have not done:

• Cumdarts
• Throwable items
• Change forest foliage to PCG
• Improve dusk - Morning day transition for Night Before quest
• Questlog shows multiple quests
• Finish hornlizard
• Procedural hands against wall when walking into wall

TO be fair, I've actually animated and coded male random enemies going through the reaction, result and recovery from the cumdarts, but have stalled at the throwable part of it and only partway through the female version.

First up, the stuff that is done:

NPC Movement

Before, NPCs in Pineridge would just choose a random location they could reach and then moved there, which led to lots of them in weird corners or standing in the way. Now the whole town is covered in about 70 target locations which include all doors in the town, cafes, stalls and so on. Places where people might actually need to go. This also let me add in some code to stop NPCs if you want to talk to them. Before, they would just walk away from the chat.

Wolf Generation

There's now one more step at Character Creation. The wolves get generated and saved.

Previously, the wolves spawned and had their stats and names generated. The whole point of the game is you have a set pol of 20 Wolves throughout the entire game, and they keep damage or anger or horniness as it changes. This is where most of the last few days has gone. There's now no duplicated names in levels. When a level is moved to, it says how many wolves are in there, then picks that number from the wolf list. You kill a wolf, it's gone from the list forever.

This is just the first stage of this, but as it progresses, if you hurt a wolf, it will remember and might prefer to target you over other potential victims in revenge.

Difficulty Modifiers

Setting the game difficulty actually did change a few things before. It set the maximum size of the dungeons and how many loops you had to struggle free once you lose clothing. Now it also affects gamespeed when you have your inventory open (on Easy it pauses the game. On Normal it runs at x0.2 speed while at Hard it just plays at normal speed. That means enemies can get you while using your inventory...

It also now changes how fast the difficulty on the mouse shake for struggling ramps up, how much damage combat does to clothing, clothing damage from struggle, how much money an enemy can drop and how many items they have in their inventory.

Pickups

Finally, in theory having to stop and get locked into a pickup animation makes sense. If you're being chased, you might have to risk skipping an item to remain safe. In practice, it's a boring animation and the game grinds to a halt for 6 seconds. So now just walking over it picks it up. I might add it in to the game difficulty settings, so easy auto-collects, Normal needs a prompt but picks up instantly and Hard uses the animation.

Things I didn't do

The cumdarts are fun. Rare item collectables that throw like a rock but cause the target to have instant and extended orgasms, incapacitating them for a long time.

I don't give a shit how juvenile it is. It's funny.

Anyway, the male animation took ages, started the female version, but the current stumbling block is switching throwables. Rocks, cumdarts and other grenade type items. It's complex, I'm still working on it.

I worked on that for ages, so decided to take a break on something more interesting and started the procedural hands. That is the current task, and in the process I've added procedural leg placement, so it *should* adjust the legs so if it was on steps, the feet would be placed on the ground on each step instead of one hovering. It doesn't work at all, and I think it's down to the shitty skeleton, so that's a goal for the new characters when they come. I'll play with it some more, but most likely it'll just be the hands that work and the feet will be disabled for now.

That's it!

The end of the year and not the end of 2a. I'm going to keep working on it. Logically though, it was never going to get done in the time limit. There were too many big jobs in there, and even if I had completed it, there's things not on the list. There's some more updates to the Pineridge scenery I want to do first, mostly to the big ramp. There's issues with spawning spots in Pineridge. Plus I spent a full day just doing nothing because I was tired, and a day watching Blue Eye Samurai because it was good. I needed a break. With this failure to complete the phase, I might take a few days off. I've been working on this pretty much all through christmas, so I need a little downtime.