HELLGAME

Okay so: 0.3.2, fixing the bits of the flame demon/snake pc scene I didn't catch last time. (Sorry, I usually have some semi-automated testing tools to catch the most obvious kinds of errors, but they're broken now in a hard-to-fix fashion. Last week I was like "eh whatever I probably got it all", but uh, this time I checked the scene by hand, and it SEEMS to actually work.)

In map/event code work, this week I finally got the new map code working in the game proper, instead of as a standalone test, which is real important. What's left to do is some technical stuff about spawning/respawning encounters in the right locations, plus working out code for serializing/deserializing for the new maps (in the dev build you can play with the new maps, but not save or load them, which is kind of an issue). Another issue is that the new maps are all just boxy squares, which would be nice to make into something nicer-looking before I push the update live. Here's a sneak peek of what the new maps look like, and ideally by the time I finish the update they should look a lot better than that.

First things first: patch update, 0.3.1. I fixed (hopefully) a few remaining body errors, where I'd let a scene that wasn't 100% done through. Whoops.

So beyond that, what I was working on this week was finishing up the new map code. This is about 90% done, since it's what I've spent large chunks of the past few months working on -- probably it'll only take a few weeks to finish, and then I'll release 0.4 with New, Bigger And Fancier Maps. After that... there's still some event-management code that needs to be written, and once that's written I'll need to write some events that use it. I may or may not keep working on that, depending on how I feel about, uh, more code writing vs. content writing. Alternately, I'll make a new dev poll based around story content or new TFs and work on whatever wins.

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(In case you're curious about the specifics of what I mean when I keep talking about 'event code', here are some examples of planned quests:

• The 'void worm' quest I've mentioned a few times, which involves going into the mine tunnels below the swamp. While the event is running, all normal encounters in the mine need to be suppressed (e.g., the minotaur miners and acid slimes and crystal dragonoids, etc), which means I need some event-managing code to remotely enable and disable events based on global flags. There also needs to be a quest intro event placed across the entryway to the mines, so that you have to trigger the quest before you enter the mines, which means I need some way to identify region borders and selectively place events at them. Then, you made your way into the mine depths to get to some holes into the void, which means I need some map code to place locations at certain 'depths', and to guide the player to them. Then after the quest finishes, it needs to activate and spawn all the 'regular' mine encounters.
• There's a hellhound knight quest that involves taking a hellhound knight to go visit some feral hounds, followed by pinning you into a region by spawning a wall of hellhound knights so that you have to go through them (and trigger the following event) to 'escape'. So, again, I need ways for events to selectively spawn encounters on nearby map regions.
• There's a factory crystal-refining quest that ends with somebody telling you that a certain machine shop operates a smuggling den beneath it. But to actually do that, I need some way for the quest to pick out a specific location with the right flags set, and actually give the PC a goal pointer to it.
• There's a Ganzer worker quest about visiting the ruins of fortress Ganzer, which would again need the goal pointer thing, and some other Ganzer worker quest stuff that would require selectively spawning or locating matching events on the map.
• There's some farm 'quests' that are just like, resource gathering, which would need to select any/all matching events and highlight them on the map (e.g., get this material from this kind of location type) so you know where to actually go.

So basically a lot of internal work that lets events lookup, store, and spawn other events.)

So, at long last: here's the update! Part one of the update. Version 0.3.0, if you care about that sort of thing.

Things this update contains:

• Save-versioning code! This lets you reuse saves as I continue to develop the game and change around what save data is stored, instead of having to start over each time due to reasons like 'some internal variable isn't set to the right value', or whatever.
• Fixed branches for weird bodies (orbs, floating dicks, floating heads, etc), so there should be no more encounter errors. (At this point, they're all rejection branches, but that's still way better than an error screen.)
• A bunch of new branches in various sex scenes:
  • Crystal dragonoid snake-body sex scene
  • Son of Hamar-Tabal cum inflation scene variants, if the PC has many/large balls
  • Clay-man inflation spitroast sex scene branch
  • Lesser hellhound sheathplay/prostate milking sex scene branches
  • Lesser hellhound fisting sex scene branch
  • Minotaur miner rimming sex scene branch
• Some minor new encounter types for the following encounters:
  • Flame demon
  • Hellhound knight
  • Lesser hellhound

(Though the hellhound encounter types are 99% in the description, with minimal encounter changes.)

• Also I updated the info listing linked in the navbar above to make a distinction between planned content and content already in the game

Most of this will be recapped in-game, since part of the save versioning thing is also an in-game update log.

As always, you might need to reload (F5 or Ctrl/Alt/Shift+F5, depending on your browser) the game to flush your browser cache, so it gets the newly-updated files. Please tell me if you have any issues.

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The bulk of this update is actually a lot of internal event/server changes that you shouldn't notice at all unless you manually inspect your save data, in preparation for the next update. This has made a lot of more complex encounters possible (in terms of changing encounter state around on revisit, or having different encounters interact in various ways), but there's not actually any in the game yet that use these new abilities.

So: the NEXT update, or the next two updates depending on how much I want to do and how long I want to continue slogging away through this particular part of the game's code, is going to be the new map code (complete with much larger, hopefully much more interesting maps), encounter respawning, and a whole mess of new (unfinished) encounters. If I keep slogging, it'll also include some rudimentary quests and some story stuff, as well as some fleshing out of those unfinished encounters.

Thank you for putting up with the very slow development of this particular chunk; I'd known since I put up the initial demo a year ago that the existing event/map code was kinda impoverished, but the process of getting the event code to the point where I could do things like... set triggers, or remotely activate and deactivate events, or respawn encounters in reasonable positions, has ended up being way more work than I was anticipating. Now it's (mostly) done, and it should be a lot easier for me to write more involved encounters.

(I've been debating hosting another development poll, this time for new tfs/body nodes to add, and weighing the merits of either continuing work on sex scenes vs. adding new tfs vs. just devoting all my dev time for the moment towards finally finishing this map stuff. If you've got opinions about that, now would be the time to say it.)

Hey, thanks for the well-wishes! I'm mostly-recovered from being sick; still kinda low energy, but mostly better. I've only just in the past day or two gotten back to work, though, so no update this week. The work left to do at this point is literally just "write two scenes" though, so barring an extreme upset everything should be ready by next week.

oh hey just a quick emergency update -- i'm super sick with some kinda stomach flu, so for the past few days i've mostly been lying in bed and vomiting. it's not great. so the update is gonna be pushed back at least a week, maybe two, depending on how long symptoms last.

I didn't get much done this week, between some RL stuff coming up, starting on a side project, and, uh, general laziness. The one big thing I did do was get the save migrator working -- when this next update drops you'll be able to load up your old save and it'll tell you what changed and regenerate the map for you, rather than making you start over from scratch. This should also hold for any future updates. So that's nice.

Given my current pace, the plan now is to just focus the next week on finishing the few half-finished scenes I have written, and then making the big update next week. So: next week, the first half of the big game update.

This week: I worked mostly on the encounter internals; did stuff like fix some thorny event parsing bugs and change the save data format around. Also I wrote a little.

The only thing left that really needs to get done before I push the update is to write the savegame migration code -- basically when you load an old save it'll give you a screen telling you what's changed since you made that save, and tell you if it'll need to do things like regenerate a new map or regenerate the encounter table or whatever. Basically something to put an end to needing to make a new save every update, which is definitely gonna be necessary once I finish the second half of this update and all the maps change 100%.

That being said, I'd like to focus 100% on writing for a while, to give this update a little more, you know, actual content, as opposed to internal code restructuring, so, the plan is to write the save code and then write until I get tired with that, and then make the update. The update is around one to three weeks away, probably.

Finally got the population generator hooked up to the map generator. There's still some code left to write, but this is the biggest part done. Which is good, because I'm getting pretty sick of working on map code.

This is actually... I think the last major code addition I'll have to make to the game. There's plenty of small tweaks or minor additions to make (gotta change the body UI, gotta add in rewards for combat, gotta flesh out the challenge system, etc) but this is I think the last huge new thing. So that's nice; it's been real nice working on content lately instead of just toiling in the code mines, and this whole map thing has been kind of an unwelcome return to only working on a mess of code for eternity.

So, this the point where I'll start preparing the next game update. This is going to contain all the expanded sex scenes I've written so far (hamar-tabal cum inflation, lesser hellhound fisting/prostate milking, lesser hellhound sheathplay/hj, minotaur miner rimming, clay man spitroast/gangbang) + all the rejection branches and bugfixes + whatever other expanded sex scenes I get around to before I finish fixing up the rest of the code (uh probably... minotaur/snake anal scene, dryad sex scene at farm, hamar-tabal topping branches, maybe some other stuff?). This will take... three or four weeks, I think.

After that, I'll move on to putting the finishing touches on the new map code, which will include the new rendering system, generator, encounter respawns, and like another 30+ new (short, unfinished) encounters, along with some more expanded sex scenes, probably. I have no clue how long that'll take.

This week was still mostly working on map generation -- I'll spare you the technical details, but a brief summary of the setup and what I'm doing is that the overall map is split up into 'zones' that are themed regions -- swamp, factory, etc -- and each zone is a collection of connected 16x16 tile 'chunks', with gates between them to make up the overall map, and each chunk is a bunch of shapes kinda glommed together to make a landscape.

Previously, I'd mostly been working on getting zones generated in the right places and in the right ways, and all connected without any unreachable areas, and with enough chunk-sized alcoves and irregular paths t be interesting. At this point, making the map generator better is mostly making more interesting landscape shapes or more interesting ways of converting those landscape shapes into map tiles.

What I'm doing right now is hooking up the population code so that the map translates the big list of encounter data into actual encounters on the map: not only the actual "make a map object that refers to the encounter" part, but making sure that encounters end up throroughly scattered, instead of all clumped together; and in the right chunks; and on tiles that are reachable by the player; and on tiles that make sense for the encounter to be on; and so forth. There's a similar system in place for locations, which are basically exactly like encounters only they don't get removed or respawned, and generally should be located in a more central location in each chunk.

The next step is to code up all those half-designed events I mentioned last week and cram them into the generator, so that I'll have some actual data to use. That would also give me a way better sense of how the game actually plays (kind of an important thing to know) and let me start fleshing out some actual interactivity with all this new stuff.

Also I did a little writing: wrote a short minotaur miner rimming scene (like only ~600 words), wrote the lesser hound assplay and prostate milking scene (~900 words), and started writing the clay man spitroast scene (longer than that, but still very unfinished).

Oh right it's a status update day.

Basically 100% map generation stuff. I fleshed out the generator, ironed out some bugs, found some new bugs (including a particularly nasty infinite-loop one, yikes), and started placing actual tiles down for the latest generator revision. I haven't gotten all the way to hooking the population/location generator into the map system, but that'll probably happen, like, tomorrow; the only reason I haven't done it already is that I got distracted with the tile placement part of the generator -- right now the generated maps are just a bunch of big square boxes hooked together by paths, and technically that's all I need to have to test everything and have a playable game, it just looks really bad.

Something that's becoming more and more clear to me, though, is that to fully populate a map of this size (The new maps are looking to be about sixty times larger than the current maps. That's sixty, not six.) I'm gonna need a lotttt more encounters and locations, so I'm keeping an increasingly lengthy list of descriptions and concepts, and just trying to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks.