I’ve added food (and hunger) to the game. Food will serve two purposes: primarily it’s as a simple upkeep mechanic. Slaves require food to survive and food costs money. The second purpose is as a morale booster.
For every slave you acquire you have another mouth to feed. But you don’t buy or manage a food stock. Instead, your characters will passively consume some amount of units of food every turn and at the end of every week you pay for the total food consumed.
You can set how much food is allocated to each of your characters. You can starve a slave to save money, however they’ll be less happy and weaker as a result. You can also reward slaves by giving them extra food, which will have similar but positive effects.
Naturally, the owner/player character requires more food than the common slave to be content.
At the end of the day this is a fairly inconspicuous addition. The player is not required to manage their food consumption if they don’t want to, as long as they can earn enough to pay for the weekly food expenses.
Renting buildings This weekend I put some work into the game’s building mechanic.
You’ll start the game in a building just big enough to house you and your one starter slave. To progress and expand you’re going to have to move your brothel to successively larger buildings. Every building has its own room layout, which is an important consideration because the size of a room determines what type of room it can be.
You can also choose which town district your brothel is situated. The location of your brothel will heavily influence the kinds of customers you can receive.
Naturally, all of these considerations will affect the rent so choose wisely.
Hermaphrodites I also made a small but critical change to the shemale gender. They can now have both male and female genitalia. (They used to only have male bits.) I really liked the idea of a well-defined third gender and how it created a nice symmetry with the other two genders. At the same time this is stuff people really care about and in the end, the less restrictions on character creation the better.
Shemale characters with both a penis and vagina is now referred to as “hermaphrodites” but are still considered to be members of the same gender as their vagina-less sisters. They’re a little OP, because they they get the best of both worlds, but so be it.
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.
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.
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.
This is the character details window, as it looks in the current build.
For as boring as it may look, it’s a pretty good indication of where a lot of my work has gone into, because pretty much all of those meters and values reflect actual gameplay bits. There’s a lot of math and relationships hidden underneath it all.
