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:
Spent some time on the character creator again, because it needed to get caught up with changes that’s happened since last time. Now it’s got pretty much all of its features in place and should be good for a while to come.
Yakuza 0, and SoldGirl Town. The latter is a straight-up sex slave simulator while Yakuza has an action-adventure game with an optional “mini-game” where you run a hostess club.
These two games are obviously wildly different, but they share a common element, and that is how the player is tasked with matching girls with customers.
So far I’ve gone out of my way to hide numbers from the player. At any point where I do show numbers I always try to associate it with a word, to at least give the player a chance to ignore the underlying math.
The thing that I have come to realize is that sometimes it does makes sense to expose the raw numbers, in order for the player to better understand the rules and make educated decisions, and to form plans. So I think I may need to relax the roleplaying part of House Dominae on behalf of the simulation game part.
Yakuza’s system is simple and easy to understand. Customers drop in with random values in three stats:
Primary preference (Talk, Party, Love, Skill)
Secondary preference (Sexy, Beauty, Cute, Funny)
Money on hand (Poor, Average, Wealthy, etc…)
The primary and secondary preferences directly correlates with stats for each girl and the player must match the best girl for all customer, (or save them for higher paying customers.)
The customer may get annoyed and leave if you give them a bad match. The secondary preference isn’t as important but it helps to make the customer spend more money. Wealthy customers have higher demands than poor customers, but they spend a lot more.
I haven’t played a lot of SoldGirl Town yet, and it took me a couple of attempts to break through the language barrier, but I think I’ve gotten a pretty good early grasp at its system.
In SoldGirl you kidnap girls and force them to work as sex slaves. Each girl has three key stats:
Appeal
Technique
Nymphomania
Unlike in Yakuza you’re not matching these values against individual customers, in fact you have little control over customer matching, rather they determine the girl’s success rate against groups of customers. High-stat girls can be placed in higher paying areas, netting you higher profits.
So what does this mean for House Dominae? Well, I haven’t implemented any of my ideas yet, but I’m strongly considering having some kind of archetypal matching between customers and slaves.
One possibility is that customers arrive with a very obvious requirement, like “I want a girl with Beauty 5 or higher”. The old me would cringe at that, but I believe that is much more easier for the player to reason with. They can immediately find a compatible match, and make additional considerations if they choose to. Or if they don’t have a suitable slave that can potentially create a new short-term goal.
Was this interesting? Let me know. More updates soon.
While I like the concept of customizable character pawns, I’m not really sold on how they have looked so far. My aim was to have extremely simple 3D approximations for characters, that would be super easy to customize with a few parameters. However basing them on Kokeshi doll meant they became too simplistic and visually boring.
So I took a day and tried creating a new proper model and here is the result. I’m going for a super deformed look with relatively low detail. I haven’t put it in the game yet, but I’m hoping it will turn out great.
Update:
Threw it into the game and yeah, it looks alright. I can move forward with this. 🙂
I’m currently doing a (super hot) art commission so I have no progress to report on House Dominae. Instead I’ve decided to post some pics and details on the game’s character creator.
House Dominae is very much a game that revolves around named characters and one of my goals is to elevate them from more than just a bunch of jpegs. I’ve cooked up all kinds of systems to hopefully enable that but they all add to the complexity of the characters and a good character creator is paramount to make that work.
The creator is written as a separate application, using modern C++. Compared to the game itself it makes for pretty ugly screenshots so please bear with me here.
Admittedly, I rushed this initial version because at this point I only need it to create a small stable of test characters and I didn’t want it to steal too much time from working on the game. That said, the creator still needed to do a lot.
The most important thing is to make it easy (and fast) to add, configure and tag event images. Additionally, because images are cropped in the game it’s important to give the author full control over how each image is cropped and panned, without introducing tedium.
Tags are ordered by category and assigning tags is straight-forward but this is one part of the creator where I need to spend some more time before I can call it good. There are a lot of improvements I still need to do, and I cringe a little looking at these early screenshots, but all in good time.
