V0.7.4 Progress Report

Hey everyone,
I'm back from surgery, and I am feeling great. Recovery has been going very smoothly, so I've been able to return to work on the next patch pretty quickly this time.
As I had mentioned in the last release post, I've been working on the concept for this upcoming patch for quite a while in the background, so I'm looking forward to writing it down publicly for the first time.

Core Gameplay Rework

The main feature of this update is to rework the "Core gameplay", which refers to the fundamental actions that are performed repeatedly. Over the past years, the focus of the updates was to finish the main story, namely the Ally path. And the vastness of content has made the core gameplay grow very poor in comparison with time. It has become very grindy to reach all the content, which consists of multiple issues.

1. The grind activity is boring - My main gripe with the actions you can take during the day is that they lack meaning beyond choosing the ones that are not trapped, which is essentially a random guessing game. So I want the actions to feel more strategic. With the next patch, I'm adding more strategy and variability to them.
   As you can see above, there will be dice involved, but more importantly, the result of each action will depend less on mood and more on player stats and choices.
   I'm also currently testing to eliminate the streaming action as the only one that actually gives votes. It's a complicated new system that I don't think I have enough space here to fully explain. Loosely, it is inspired by the duality dice system in Daggerheart, but it is not exactly the same either. You have a euphoria, and a dysphoria die. What dice you get depends on your mood. Whatever dice rolls higher makes the character feel euphoria or dysphoria during the execution of the action, thus changing the result. The example above is definitely not the final formula that actions will use, but it gives you a general idea of how the system will change.
   While I'll try to keep the system simple for this patch, the implementation of this will also enable more advanced strategy elements for the next few patches, like special one-time-use dice items, quests that boost certain actions, or other creative ways to manipulate how action results work. For example, the Tranquility syringe could suddenly be very useful when doing an INT-based action.
   There's a lot of balancing work involved in this, though, so let's keep it one step at a time. And also, I'll have to rewrite the texts for each action for multiple scenarios, so there's a lot of work already there.

2. Each grind activity takes too many clicks to get to - So you have to do x actions a day in order to finish the day. You can just skip the day, but then you can't win. The original solution to this was the map, for faster movement, and the day planner. However, they were too expensive to get into the game, and also not visible enough. So the first step is to reduce their cost, and add a quest you get from AI: Ison to get them. However, I feel like they still fall short on really solving the issue. So we need a whole rework of these. That actually deserves its own header, so read on below.

Map & Dayplanner Rework

So the map removes a few clicks for navigating the house, that's something. (Obviously, the design is still lackluster, but I want to wait with that until we can be sure that we don't need to redo it again.)
Adding the actions that we know you have to do every day here as a direct option seems like a good next step to me because most of the time, you will not want to just walk to the room, but immediately do the action instead.

The day planner is a bit more complicated. First of all, it should just always pop up when you're done sleeping. Secondly, it should include interactions with the other contestants. Thirdly, it needs to have options to streamline interaction with the new action system, such as automatically rolling dice or a toggle to not even show the text result for the hundredth time. And fourth, and most importantly, the way other NPC dialog events happen in between needs to be overhauled so the whole day feels more like this is actually the way the game is supposed to be played, not just a weird, unintuitive way to speed up gameplay.

NPC Talk Rework

Another core gameplay interaction that is seriously lacking right now is the interaction with the other NPCs. They have their main date storylines with lots of dialogue, but apart from those, conversations with them are not very varied or interesting. I think it's fine to have a general chit-chat option like that, but it needs to fulfill some kind of purpose, like using it to slowly gain at least a little bit of affection with them, outside of their ally quests. And then we also need more options to make interacting with them a little more strategic. I'm using common dating sim tropes here, such as gifting items to increase affection and trying to flirt. Again, this will not be extremely sophisticated right at the start, but introducing a new strategy gameplay system gives new possibilities to add creative ways to manipulate it later on. But I promise, this will include a lot of new dialogues from the get-go.

New Post-"True Ending" Scenes

Okay, so that was a lot of talk about gameplay mechanics, and not a lot of new content apart from loooots of text rewrites and variability, right?
Don't you worry. I have one new feature right here that'll allow for a new type of story.

Basically, the way we leave our Allies behind after the true ending does not feel satisfying, does it? They are left behind in the lab for June to care for them, but what then? With this new patch, you will be able to spend points you gain from each Doomsday ending to unlock a new scene that shows June planting our friends into realities where they thrive (and are sexually very satisfied.)
These new scenes will be animated like all the new NPC sex scenes, and they will be the ultimate conclusion to the NPC's storyline.
In this next patch, we're starting with a scene for Abigail, and then the others will be added over the next two patches.

Okay, I hope you enjoyed reading all this game design mumbo jumbo, and that you agree with the conclusions about gameplay that I've made. This is a very involved patch, and I'm not very far yet, so it is still quite a lot of work ahead of me. However, I'm very motivated to complete this task because I believe it will significantly enhance the overall experience. I'm not giving an ETA, but I'll try not to take longer than usual. I have a trip to Japan planned for November, so I'll definitely send out the patch before then, 100%.

Write you soon,
Kim