UI improvements

I took some time and improved the tooltip system. It had a few bugs but I also wanted to expand the tooltips to contain more than just plain text.

After putting that in place I could add a new feature to the activity window. It’s a small icon next to the event text, and by placing your mouse cursor on it you get a plain English summary of all the random rolls and other under the hood stuff.

I’m hoping that this will a) better explain the game’s internal systems and b) enable me to loosen up the “pretty” text since it no longer needs to convey every single aspect of the event.

Bed bath & beyond

I haven’t posted an update in a while so let’s fix that.

Building stuff

An earlier question spurred me to work on the building generator and to implement some different room types. I made a bathroom. For bathing! In fact, the exercise of implementing a new room type forced me to replace a bunch of old placeholder code with a more proper implementation.

Random events

I added an early, but functional, random event system. These events can trigger – randomly – when a specified condition is true for any slave. I’ve experimented with this before but I was missing the part where a player decision could affect the state of a slave.

As a proof of concept I made a random event that, if a slave’s health got too low, they could get sick (or not). I then made a second event that would randomly make a sick slave healthy again, as if they had recovered with time. I thought it was kind of an interesting concept and I’d like to explore it more.

I still have to write up a bunch of (hopefully interesting) events, but at least the technical details has been laid out.

Stress

This is a really minor thing, but I flipped “happiness” around and called it “stress” instead, and immediately a lot of my math and simulations started making more sense. For instance it doesn’t make a lot of sense that taking a bath makes you happy, but it does make sense that it relieves stress; and anything that could be considered “unhappiness” translates very well to being “stressful”. It also removed some ambiguity with “Morale”. See? Game design!

Greetings

Another minor thing. You can now place one of your characters in the entrance to greet arriving customers. A social skill check is rolled and if it succeeds a bonus is added to all working slaves’ own social skill checks. This means a highly social character can assist socially inept slaves.

It’s not very significant but it’s something a player character can do to contribute to the business of whoring without actually whoring themselves out like a lowly slave.

What’s next?

Looking down on my notepad I’ve written “Multi-event ?”, which is to say I’m considering adding two new activity types: single customer on multiple slaves and multiple customers on a single slave. This will open up the possibility for a wider range of customer requests, like exhibition acts and group sex.

This is an interface/assignment problem more than anything but I think it could work.

Such progress!

I’m on my yearly staycation and I’ve pretty much been coding every day and I’ve made a decent chunk of progress on House Dominae so far.

My focus has been on the simulation character interactions, and basically cleaning up errors I’ve come across. Here are some of the things I’ve done:

Feelings

I’ve implemented a model for morale and happiness. Slaves will now get unhappy when they’re driven against their own needs and wants and vice versa. A slave’s sexual orientation has become a pretty important factor for their overall happiness. Cammy (gay in my game) doesn’t like sucking dick and she’s being a prissy little cunt about it!

 

Characters now form relationships to each other. There’s a new ‘Socialize’ activity for when you want to improve a relationship between two characters, without sexual intent. A slave’s relationship to the player character is extra important because it carries consequences for their obedience and overall happiness.

Characters can also be attracted to one another, either physically or sexually, which aids in their bonding. The attraction is asymmetrical and based on their individual sexuality.

Minor note: There’s a new mental health bar and if it ever goes down to zero the slave “breaks”, erasing most of their personality and rendering them extremely compliant. A slave’s mental health is very stable on its own so it’s up to the player to introduce the necessary trauma.


Punishment

I’ve redone the insubordination system once again. Whenever a slave breaks a rule they’re tagged with an insubordination account. The player has two days time to punish any insubordination, or it will convert into a permanent deduction to obedience. Proper punishment gives a slight increase in obedience but not as much as it used to.


Horny slaves

Lust (or horniness) has been implemented. Slaves will grow horny over time, some more quickly than others, and they can cum in sexual activities. Orgasms naturally affects their happiness. Whenever a slave cums “legally” you’re given a gem, which is a special currency which doesn’t have a use yet, but will in the future.

If a character goes to bed horny they may forfeit some sleep in order to masturbate. You can forbid a slave from masturbating but it becomes an obedience roll at that point.


Interface

This is a minor thing, but because I’ve added a new set of rules and concerns I also put some time into making sure it’s apparent in the UI what the state of a slave is. Potential concerns and critical conditions are indicated with icons on the portraits.


Town locations

There is now a number of town locations to visit, although not all of them have been fully implemented yet.


Last but not least…

… I’ve done a lot of sweeping improvements to the text engine, conditional expressions, event image selection, and I replaced the random number generator with a super robust noise function based alternative. It practically prevents save scumming; even more so than before.

Pawn editor

Today’s project was the in-game character editor. It enables editing of the 3D appearance of the character “pawns,” as I like to call them.

There’s nothing much to say,

really

. The color wheel probably ate up most of the time.

For character authors the editor will output an alphanumeric code that encodes all the information necessary to render that character.

00480-D040K-4803Z-ZVUQX-66099

That code can then be copied and pasted into the character creator. This ended upt being the method I chose for setting a character’s 3D apperance.

I could’ve made the appearance settings available in the character creator too, but since I wouldn’t be able to render them there, it

probably

wouldn’t be very useful.

I’m getting back into the swing of things. Vacation is just around the corner and I’m feeling great!

First off, I’ve finally added multi-selection support to the character creator. This enables you to select a whole batch of images and assign the same tag to all in a single click rather than twenty. This was the final sore thumb in the creator I wanted to get rid of.

I then began compiling a list of default images that the game can fall back upon whenever a character file comes up short on any specific activity. However, in doing so I discovered a bunch of bugs in my image search algorithm. This eventually led me to create a debug window in the game where I can enter arbitrary queries and see what comes back. I imagine it will prove useful to future character authors.

It only took a few minutes of playing around with it to realize I had to alter the syntax somewhat to allow for “soft” search terms, where I could ask for a shemale but settle for a female instead, etc. Things of that nature.

PS. I’m currently playing Slave Maker 3 and I’m rediscovering a bunch of qualities that game has that I’d forgotten about.

Town locations UI

I want to elaborate on what I meant when I said I’ve made “minor improvements” in my earlier response. I haven’t had time, or the energy, to make any big sweeping changes, but even when I’m pooped from work I still like to tinker with the small stuff.

Recently I’ve been trying to formulate the interface for the lateral mechanics in the game, like purchasing slaves, items and upgrades, while also moving away from putting everything in the left side bar.

So this is the direction I’m currently moving in, which is simply to put a face on each of the town functions, sprinkle some flavor dialogue on there and see how that plays.

Bonus screenshot of the (borderline superfluous but totally playable) gambling mini game: