HELLGAME

This week: well, still at a low ebb in energy for hell game, so progess remains slow, but I'm still slogging away. I mean, there's still been progress, just, kinda slow.

The big thing this week would be that I finally put together the code to handle detail options in the UI. Right now the options that are there are pretty simple (there's just 'build' and 'hairstyle', basically) but the structure is in place to add more. I also fixed basically all the bugs with the new version of the body editor -- I think it still needs some layout work, but it no longer breaks or anything.

Incidentally, if you have suggestions for things like hairstyles or facial hair options, this would be a good time to mention them. Currently I've been going through the NPC encounters, turning them into node trees, and trying to consider if they have any traits that could reasonably be represented with detail nodes, but that's definitely not going to catch everything.

This week: uh not a lot. Mostly infrastructural stuff -- I got the new flame demon variant in-game, and also got its node tree generating and rendering (you can check out a screenshot here)... we'll see how in-depth I want to make that. Even if it doesn't do anything, it's probably worth it to put together node trees for all NPCs at some point, just to make it easier going for when I do make them do something. I got NPC-generic piercing data fully working, though right now there's only the one NPC that uses it. Outlined another location. Did a little more work on unique IDs for NPCs; that'll probably be the next thing I do, since it's a prerequisite for getting various quests working. I was hoping to do some scene writing this week, but I just never really got around to it. That's about it as far as work goes. I'll should get back to updating the TODO, and make a new post that more accurately reflects what I'm working on right now, so I'll edit that into this post in a day or two.

Okay, status post.

Got a bunch of stuff done in a bunch of different directions. The new description editor is working in-game; several of the new nodes are up to halfway done / mostly done (the biggest concern at this point is support in sex scenes); there are a bunch of [LARGE] description fragments added, etc. A lot of the new nodes are in the half-finished realm of "stored in the PC body data, but not having any description fragments written for them" (the new elements), or "with description fragments written, but not tested against any in-game scenes" (the new animals), so I haven't actually checked any of them off of the todo list yet, despite having worked on them a bunch.

A lot of the work this week has been on new content. Did a trial generation of a new npc variant (satyr-like flame demon miner) that would have a bunch of different randomized piercings, with something like a few hundred million combinations, and I'm planning on adding similar combinations to existing NPCs to diversify the population more. I started digging into generation of NPC body trees, wrote some of the code that would handle PC impregnation (and the stub of an interaction that would get the PC pregnant), and also wrote some code/event demos for having the PC get the [ICHOR]»infested node placed on them during a sex scene.

There's a more detailed writeup, including some event extracts, on the patreon.

Basically I'd like to start adding more in-depth content -- quests that unlock other locations or new NPCs, events that leaves NPCs or the PC in a different state than when they started, that kind of stuff, so I've been coding up some of the quest notes and trying to flesh out some of the planned content.

I'm debating between continuing work on all of these things at once vs. focusing specifically on finishing the new nodes, making one update, finishing the new content, and then making a second update. So if you got thoughts about that, comment. But right now the plan is to keep picking away at the description updates, while also writing/outlining new content, until one or the other is done.

Springing back to work. This week I started coding up the [STELLAR] element mods, so right now their transformation effects are correctly set in the body data, but they don't yet have their description lines set. I also started doing the writing for one of the sidequest things I outlined, so I have a few new scenes for the machine shop written, a few others outlined, and a chunk of the quest itself written. That'll actually be the first bit of pregnancy/impreg content in the game when it's done, so I'm pretty enthused about that.

Also this week I started on changing some of the event code around, so that each location has a unique ID. This makes internal event/quest data storage a little easier to manage, and makes it easier for different events to talk to each other and share data -- so for example, making repeating NPCs showing up in multiple locations. This also lets events add objective markers on the map, which as you can imagine would be pretty useful for, you know, having quests.

One of the things I've been really wanting to add has been, you know, literally any kind of progression content, so basically all the quests have some aspect of... going somewhere, doing some things, getting a reward, and then critically being able to return to a location that's changed in some way. So hopefully I'll be able to finish a few of these quests before I finish all the updated body stuff, so I can (finally) show some of that off.

In the mean time: getting the other elements working; getting the new animal nodes added (and adding in full support for feathers); basically all the stuff mentioned in last week's TODO, which is still applicable now. All I've really done with that list so far is add to it, but hopefully next week I'll be able to fully finish some of those things and cross them off.

Okay weekly status post. I am going to be honest, I got almost nothing done this week. I kinda got sucked into the map generation swamp, where I messed around with some stuff for a while but in the end didn't really come up with anything I liked all that much. So that was a bust.

Definitely going to be moving back to working on updating PC descriptions, since that's something I have a big chart of what needs to be worked on and in what ways, vs. the extremely open-ended work of "idk, mess with the map generation until it looks better". I'll probably make and link a todo list for body node plans tomorrow, since I want to get back on track after what feels like a wasted week.

edit: TODO list here

Okay, weekly status post.

This week I did more quest bookkeeping and started organizing and rewriting the now-gigantic quest document. It's basically a giant list of quest concepts, in varying degrees of vagueness, and now the thing is to try to convert a few of them to more detailed outlines and then start writing/coding them. There are a few in decent shape, but I'd like a few more before I stop brainstorming and start coding.

I also started working on map generation again -- I'd like to get actual paths generating again, and have them link up to distinct location areas, with random encounters clustered around related locations. That involves a certain amount of randomness mixed in with some pathfinding code, and until it's done it's going to be hard to tell if it looks good at all. Map generation stuff has been going kind of slow, and I'm not sure if that's just because the past two weeks have had me distracted and somewhat busy with other stuff, or because map generation is fundamentally harder to do -- when, say, adding TF nodes, or writing new content, I basically have a gigantic list of concept/outlines to slowly make my way through, but with map generation it's more like, "try out a bunch of things until you get something that looks mostly good most of the time". It's a lot less certain.

So I'll probably give another week or two of messing with map generation before I put that down and focus specifically on coding up the quests I've been outlining.

Okay let's see... not a whole lot this week. The thing I need to do with story content is centralize all the notes that I've made, which have accumulated all across my dev environment over the past... two+ years? So step one is to just get everything in one big pile so I can start to link them together, and then after that is fleshing out vague concepts into more concrete events, plus brainstorming new things.

Plus I will be honest, I spent most of this week working on a side project, so that kind of distracted me from doing anything beyond bookkeeping. The demo is visible on the Patreon, and depending on the preliminary results of a poll I might keep working on it during HELL GAME dev time, but... likely not to the degree that I did this week.

The plan with the new story stuff is that it'll link in to the map sectors -- instead of the map being a mostly-undifferentiated mass of encounters, each map chunk will have some minor quest attached, whether that's "beseiged by angry spirits" or "reality unraveling at the seams" or "train's broken" or whatever. Some of them will be more plot-heavy than others (like, the map chunk that has Cerberus' gate on it will get a unique quest) but they'll all be ways to introduce, yknow, actual named characters of varying degrees of randomness, and to set up some more actual gameplay sections, since those are things that HELL GAME has been pretty light on so far.

So getting major, minor, and randomized quests outlined, written, and coded up is basically the story-related part of this update, and it's what I'll be working on for most of next week too.

Okay so this week was mostly getting into the other half of what this next update is gonna contain. I've had a huge and growing pile of story/plot/quest concepts that haven't really been put into the game in any shape so far, and now with the event code and map generation changes I think it's well past due for me to actually, you know, add in story content.

So this is stuff like: the other half of the intro scene, actual plot stuff regarding the gate to hell, actual plot interactions about the factory, named NPCs beyond Cerberus, and more detail about hell generally. Plus some repetitive randomly-generated quest sequences + random named NPCs. This is gonna be combined with more work on the map generation, to make the map less flat and rectangular, and to actually structure the locations+encounters added so that it's not just a random scattering of stuff across a zone. Since the map generation framework is all done, this is mostly just tweaking the specific generators I'm using to do a little more, which shouldn't actually take that much time. I'd also like to get slopes and heights working right; that might take a bit more time.

Actually on the note of the map code, here's a question: how fast/slow is the new map code for you, and also, how modern is your browser? It was "moderately slow" for me, and then I updated my browser and it got 10x faster, and it made me realize I basically had no clue if it was a total slideshow or perfectly fine for anybody else, or what.

So I don't really know how much plot stuff I'll be able to get done before time comes to release the update, but, you know, probably "some". At this point I need to do a bunch of outlining and drawing new map tiles to get a more concrete plan for what to change, before I start digging into the code, so that's probably what I'll be doing for next week too.

Okay, let's see. Did a bunch of restructuring description code. Added PC height to the body data glob, set it properly based on large nodes, and wrote & coded up the first set of description fragments for variously-sized bodies. Worked more on the new body UI, in preparation for finally letting players buy new body slots (which is something I've been planning from the beginning but let fall by the wayside). Put in some groundwork for allowing cock-tails and cock-tongues, even though that wasn't on the poll -- it's a comprehensible interaction of nodes, and it's been on the todo list for a while, and I've ever had the descriptions for them written up for a while, so now's the time to get it done I guess. Did some restructuring of how descriptions are formatted, and just generally improved prose flow (though that's always very subjective). Basically a whole lot of misc. description system work.

The past two weeks have been in a kind of exploratory phase, trying to figure out how much I want to commit to adding now, and I think from here on things might be more directed as I push some of the options back for later. The new additions for the next update will be as follows:

• a set of basic build, coloration, and hair detail options
• better [LARGE] support, all-around (bodies, horns, cocks, balls)
• [STELLAR], [GEM], and [ICHOR]»infested as new elemental nodes
• [BAT], [CHICKEN], and [DRAGON] as new animal nodes
• not adding [WINGS] (writing sex scene support for the new bodytypes would be an enormous undertaking, so I'm gonna push that back for a later vote)
• [MOUTH] and [TONGUE] as new genitalia nodes, though mostly for...
• ...letting people attach [COCK] to mouths and tails

Next week will be more working on those, as well as probably some sex scene writing and event code fiddling, since I've been wanting to not solely work on description stuff for this update.

Okay, let's see what I did this week. Kind of a big grab-bag.

I wrote most of the new body editor UI; there's a demo of that on the Patreon. I drew some new map tiles and did a little bit of work on the map generator -- I'd really like to get them being less boxy and samey, and to actually introduce slopes, and the only thing that's stopping me at this point is just getting some generation that looks nice. Also I need to do some sub-sector pathfinding to work on placing locations and encounters in more reasonable places, rather than randomly-scattered, but that's gonna take a little more work.

Mostly what I did was work on descriptions. Fixed a bunch of bugs -- word salad descriptions for certain floating heads, missing cock size lines for snakes, conflicting descriptions for certain knots, etc -- and also changed around cock sizes in preparation for adding in [LARGE] to bodies. (Basically this splits cock sizes into two values, one being 'relative to body' and the other being 'objective', and incidentally expands the objective cock-size limit a lot.) I also wrote new cock size lines, added more description chunks for having huge/many balls, and started in on adding in better support for [MORE]/[LARGE] nodes on horns. I'm still outlining the new nodes -- writing up the effects [STELLAR] and [GEM] should have and adding full support for [WEAPON]»chain. Haven't gotten any actual coding done for details yet, since the body editor UI isn't all the way there yet, but I've done some outlining as to what kind of details should be available.

Plan for next week: lots of the same, probably.