Wow it's Friday already.
Okay, so the crystal dragonoid encounter is progressing; the encounter is at about 12k words now. I should get it mostly-done in a week? Depending on how distracted I get working on the tofix list.
So the plan: once I finish the crystal dragonoid encounter, I'll update the live version of the game with that encounter plus all the misc. bugfixes I've done since then. Then I'll open a new poll and start working on a big gameplay update, since I've been itching to get this game into a state that actually functions as a game for a while now.
Basically 90% of the work I've put into the game since launch has been writing new encounters, and that's getting to the level of diminishing returns without having some game connective tissue there. So I'll be working on that, with polls in the meantime being about adding sex scene branches or new TF nodes or NPC transformations.
(I've also been thinking about changing the map-rendering code. Today I just threw together a little canvas experiment to see how feasible it is, and it looks like the answer is "pretty feasible", so that might be a thing coming soon.)
I'm curious, what exactly do you mean when you say 'game'? From my point of view, this is already a CYOA porn game. One with an unusually good signal to noise ratio. It doesn't have stats, dice rolling or insta-loss bad if you don't have exactly the right item ends the way a more conventional Fighting Fantasy-esque CYOA might, but IMO that puts it heads and shoulders above such games. For me, your focus so far on written content over numbers, randomness or gotchas is very much a plus.
* bad end
basically by 'game' i mean... containing some mechanical elements that aren't just sex scenes. hooking the stats and skills into challenges, adding more challenges, making them drop or gate items which you then can use to buy nodes. something to break up the current gameplay of "load up on nodes from the demo shop, then bop around between encounters until you've read all the sex scenes, then quit". i'm not planning on anything hugely difficult -- imo a lot of porn games have a tedious fixation on being TOUGH BUT FAIR when it's like, look, this is a porn game, stop making me choose between sex perks and mechanical perks -- but id like there to be some kind of connective tissue between all the monster fucking, at least.
currently the game is very horizontal (in the sense that you can do anything from the start, rather than having to vertically progress through specific content tiers to open up more content), which i do like, but i'd like to have _some_ sense of progression or unfolding.
like, i'd like to add in more content for revisiting encounters. second-stage sex scenes basically; different locations or more extreme stuff or organizing threesomes or whatever, and i feel like for that to play well (as opposed to just making people activate an encounter repeatedly) there should be some story/gameplay thread that NARRATIVELY JUSTIFIES the encounters moving around, and generally giving the player a reason to actually revisit encounters (turning in tasks, getting nearby drops, whatever). plus, i'd like to flesh out encounters and give them a lot more dialog, and that means giving them something to talk _about_, and so that 'something' might as well be gameplay stuff.
i'd also like to have areas or sub-areas that unlock, to give more of a sense that there's... stuff there, basically, instead of just having a map full of people standing around waiting to fuck you, which would mean that e.g., to open up the smuggling den area you gotta actually do some 'introduction to the factory smuggling situation' events beforehand.
or, specifically, about randomness/stats/bad ends:
i'm not planning to ever have randomness in the way, say, Corruption of Champions does it, with lots of "if you visit somebody and pick the third talk option and answer 'yes' then on subsequent visits there's a 25% chance for such-and-such scene to trigger otherwise you're locked out of it forever". i'm also not planning to have randomness in the way that Flexible Survival does it, with "hit 'explore' to pull one random thing from a deck of 500+ encounters/locations/events, and if you don't get one you think is hot you gotta try again". or the randomness that a bunch of sim games have, that are just like, drawing events from a deck and if you happen to not get the useful ones then that's an inevitable game over, eventually.
the randomness, and planned randomness, is more frontloaded. there's random encounter availability (like e.g., flame demons are generated caged or uncaged randomly) but generally i'll be making sure that either 1. you can switch encounter state (in this case, actually caging or uncaging one of them) or 2. at least one of each major variation is generated every time. randomness of that kind is gonna increase as i add more variations. i've been debating adding encounters with different preferences, leading to different sex scene branches being available, but i haven't really decided if i want that or not -- it would mean sometimes having to pick-and-choose your way through encounters if you're really invested in getting a specific scene, but the lack of any substantial differences in sex scenes leads to most encounters of the same type feeling kinda same-y. similarly, once i add in NPC transformations, they'll be determined by encounter types (dryads tf in this way; hellhounds tf in that way) and sorted into categories, and each specific encounter will have tf 'preferences' that determine which categories are available or not; i'm not 100% sure how visible those will be beforehand yet.
there's not gonna be bad ends. like, i've been thinking about putting in code to handle challenge failure with special scenes instead of the default "challenge failed / rewind? / restart?" screen, but the planned use case for that is so that i could have e.g., a fishing challenge with a failure branch that goes "you did not in fact catch the fish (or sahagin), you wanna try again or just leave" instead of, like, "i guess this fish killed you???". (also in the event you haven't messed around with the trifling amount of challenge content in the game currently, failing one lets you rewind to the start of the event or back to the world map right before you activated the event, so even in the event of loss due to low stats there's not a major penalty.) adding in a billion (or any) "now you're a sex slave / horribly cursed / whatever" bad ends is definitely not on the table.
the stats... uh basically the goal with the stats system from the beginning has basically been a way to kind of mechanically push people to get weirder bodies. (since each node gives you a stat boost.) "okay sure you can just play as a human for the entire game, but you're gonna end up underpowered". so IDEALLY with the challenges tuned so that they're fairly trivial given a complex body, but more difficult / potentially requiring grinding if somebody is really driven to have a sparse body. the actual balance is one of the most unclear things, if only because it involves making a lot of charts and graphs, but that's the goal at least. less "challenging gameplay" and more just having some interface toys to click on between doing whatever else.
okay this turned out kind of long but hopefully that should give you a better idea of my plans.
Cool, now I understand the purpose of challenges better.
I think the highest-leverage way to increase the game feeling right away is to move some nodes from the demo shop out into encounters, so we can get a feeling of progress from collecting more kinds of node.
Can we maybe have a sandbox option, where we start with like, a lot of the basic nodes available, and maybe there could be parts we can only unlock through progression?
@Nony
you know, the original plan was to pretty sharply limit the nodes you start out with, so that you do end up being some variety of weird floating thing for the first bit of gameplay, but (i guess unsurprisingly) given how negatively everybody i mentioned that to reacted i'll probably try for something else, and let people get their hands on a basic set of nodes fairly early on. a lot of that is still in flux -- definitely some of the more advanced nodes will be restricted in some way, but which ones and how is a big blank currently.