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.
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.
This past weekend I decided to take care of something that’s bugged me for months, namely the code that evaluates sexual encounters. I’m sure there’s a forum post of me somewhere talking about how great I had made it, but don’t believe past me!! Past me was wrong!
Without going into too much details, in general, it was another case of me overthinking a simple problem and going out of my way to obfuscate the math, to the point where even I got confused. The new system simplifies a lot of it, and in general it’s easier to reason about the numbers. If an blowjob request has a difficulty of 3, the slave will need an Oral skill of 3 to perform it successfully. Straight forward. Stuff like that.
Like before, there’s an obedience check, a service check and a skill check – and now the math just lines up much better. You don’t have to succeed them all, but doing so yields the best result.
I’ve also changed how experience points are accumulated. The goal was to give experience proportional to the difficulty of the requested act, without making it too rewarding, or not rewarding enough. Again, by simplifying the math I got closer to that goal than before, I think. Right now, from zero to a hero cock sucker takes about 15 cocks, for a middle of the road slave.
Finally, I put some time into the encounter texts. I used the blowjob event as my test case and tried to feed as much information I could to the text generator, and write appropriate phrases for it to use. The text in the screenshots above are generated by the game, for the same blowjob event. I guess one had a slightly better outcome than the other.
The “Nice boobs” phrase is an indicator that the customer had an affinity for one of Chun’s physical traits, and “Chun-Li welcomed a thug with a smile” hints at a very successful service check.
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.
I’ve got a simple character generator up and running, and I’ve created some more textures and geometry to inject some variety. I haven’t gotten around to modeling hair pieces yet, so that’s next on my list.
I predict that hair will be the most impactful part of the character pawn, so I plan to create a lot of combinable pieces.
