This week: more writing.
uhh I was hoping to be able to post the hellhound knight scene today -- it's at around 10k words now total, though a little bit of that is code boilerplate or duplicated prose in separate branches -- but it's not quite done yet, so, I guess I'll do that update sometime this upcoming week. Or maybe just on the next status update; I haven't really thought about how to synchronize game updates with these posts yet.
(A huge chunk of the delay is that the encounter is gonna require a nearly entirely separate branch for if you're a snake. There's overlap between biped & naga scenes, and there's overlap between centaur & quadruped scenes, but the snake/worm blocking is sufficiently different that it ends up requiring wholly unique scenes. This is maybe more of a problem since I think nobody is even playing as a snake. Listen. I would be playing as a snake. Well maybe once I get [BONE] and [POISON] nodes in.)
I feel kinda bad it's been like a solid month-and-a-half since the last dev poll. This last update has definitely been me biting off more than I can chew, or at least chew in a timely fashion. Turns out that uh... four new monster encounters plus a few quest scenes plus a bunch of mix-and-match voyeur threesome scenes PLUS a new map PLUS a bunch of internal event code changes takes a while to code up! I'll try to get a handle on that going forward, probably just by scaling back the amount of stuff in each update. But for the time being we're LOCKED IN to editing all these scenes for a while... I guess the order here is a series of updates that look like:
1. hellhound knight
2. minotaur miner and slime guy encounters just dropped into the factory
2a. event code fix so I can put in the mining barracks, also just dropped into the factory
3. map update so that I can actually put the void snake quest in and move the other encounters to the new map
The hellhound knight scene is basically at "tier 1" at this point, which is to say that it's got basic bodytype branches (excepting snakes), but that it doesn't really handle material types (fur vs. skin, muzzles vs. mouths, what if you have a flared horse dick or a twisting bull dick, that kind of thing); that's what I'll be doing next to finish it up.
Oh yeah, and I've noticed a few body/encounter bugs: currently having four arms and nothing else gives you a "complex"-typed body, and then you get to see basically every scene explode and break in various ways; floating dick bodies still don't have any scenes, so basically everything errors out for them too; the dryad/farmer threesome errors out if you have a formless orb body. So at least know that I'm aware of those problems, even if I'm still focusing on writing new scenes rather than fixing weird bodies for old ones.
Oh yeah, and I plugged hell game a few places recently, which made me realize that I should probably at some point write up a comprehensive game plan and stick it somewhere permanent. It's just... well, I'm extremely very aware of how many people wanna make a porn game and can only put together feature lists and not do any of the actual work, which has made me kinda leery of putting together a feature list myself, since "elaborate and sprawling todo lists" is kind of a hallmark of a project that's going nowhere. But seeing as I have a playable demo, even if it's pretty rough, now might be the time to put together an outline so other people have a better idea of what the finished version of this game might look like: what's still filler and what's working as planned. So the "development TODO" thing might get split up into something like "planned goals" and "currently working on" or something like that.
I like playing as a snake
I don't think an elaborate and sprawling todo list will show negatively on your game as long as you keep posting these updates for the users. It shows you are actively working on the game and on top of the demo shows really favorably on your project.
I have just discovered it and: holy shit, monster body generator! Ability to be a disembodied snake head! I have no idea about the rest of the game yet and dialogue options are really simplistic, but I extremely enjoy body construction. Thumbs up for that.
Btw, there's a bug with drya: you can browse for modifications only for the first time. All others return blank menu.
@Nox: yeah, dialog options (or at the very least some exchanges that aren't about fucking) are in the works. and re: dryads, are you sure? the deal with dryad shops is that they're randomly determined at map creation time; each dryad will either have a shop or not have a shop. revisiting the same dryad should definitely get you the same shop/not shop options.
@xax: checked. Turns out I was just really unlucky with shop generation. False alarm. Sorry.
Found instead: raw code in text. "To make you {wail}", (Ganzer worker).
A way to gain "unknown locomotion": go for naga, then switch tail for any different one.
Fact of two hands is sometimes not displayed. Not sure why.
Also, if you don't mind, you need to find an editor somewhere in the future. To take that scene with Ganzer worker, I've counted seven "back and forth"s all in all. Four of them over the span of two paragraphs. You have an affinity for repetitions, watch out for it.
whoops i should go fix that.
for descriptions, the _concept_ is for parts to only be remarked-on when they're unusual, to prevent lines like "you have normal human legs attached to your normal human waist, covered in normal human skin". that being said, what's considered "unusual" and what isn't is currently kinda weird; the whole system needs further work. (as it is, there's a hand description added for the animals that don't naturally have hands/paws, so, hooved animals. i should add one for snake arms too, now that i think about it. but it's definitely not the most intuitive setup.)
and yeah "repetitive" is definitely a thing people have called my writing before :V i'll try to keep an eye out, but given the layered thicket that is these event files & the amount of necessary repetition there ends up being, i don't have a lot of hope of categorically solving the problem. like, in the ganzer scene there are actually a solid _sixteen_ uses of "back and forth", it's just... some only show up if you have a horse dick, some only show up if you're a snake or naga, some in mutually-exclusive branches, etc etc etc. so they're kind of a mess to edit.
Oh the subtle difference between human-headed serpentoid and naga with serpent tail.
Current system makes sense, at least, even if it has a few hiccups here and there - good luck with that.
While we are at it, lifehack: four-legged snakes can be just called "reptiles". Technically correct and just sounds nicer. Unless you plan on having separate snake and reptile/lizard nodes, but I'm not sure what critical difference there would be...
That's why I suggested an editor/proofreader. Reading text in-game as opposed to in-code has benefit of smooth telling, with everything tied together. I suppose you don't have any means of generating every possible scene debased on code?...