*HoT: Suggestions
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June 13, 2013 at 3:46 am #1975Some thoughts: When there are no more upgrades or new hires available, have those locations greyed out on the map. It’ll remind the user that they don’t need to send a worker there unnecessarily and cost profits (important for scenario play.)
Enable the quality/quantity standards to vary depending on items assigned to the house itself. Higher quality items attract wealthier clients, though in more exclusive (less) numbers. Items that advertise more (flashy lights, loud music, etc…) attract more clients, but of a more common type (more numbers, less money per client). Someone mentioned adding a bar, this could work well in adjusting the clientele also: expensive drinks=more money, cheap drinks=higher numbers. Hustlers will still attract more clients, but how the house is furnished would affect the type of clients attracted.
Obedience school (*cough* Mordechai! Impy! Helsy! *cough*). Assignment as a maid is slow and for short-term play, it’s sometimes not enough. This could also open possibilities for tougher characters to increase skills as a ‘trainer’. The student would gain obedience, the trainer would gain, I don’t know, sex skill maybe? Both would have a slight health cost, playing rough is hard work after all 😉
That’s all I have for now!
June 14, 2013 at 4:28 pm #1980Good idea about removing slots that you can’t do anything at. Have been thinking of adding a number below the hire slot showing how many contracts are open that day, but not sure if it takes away some of the surprise and thrill of rolling the dice.
Adding types of clients… some good ideas here. Have me thinking, to make this work, on the goal map where it will show upgrades, have it so you can toggle certain upgrades on/off to adjust which customers you’re trying to attract. This way, we can also have goals where you need to serve X number of a customer type.
There will be an obedience school in the next map~
June 14, 2013 at 7:48 pm #1985For the hire slot, a non-numeric indicator, like a ‘!’ or a star or something would work and keep the surprise factor intact. Usually for me, it’s not so much surprise as “I NEED HIRES!!!” lol!
June 17, 2013 at 12:41 am #2012-Some extra strategy incentives such as trends to capitalize on: maybe on a given three weeks or so male bottoms are in high demand and draw in more customers/cash, but you need to make sure they’re leveled appropriately to withstand the influx of business. Then the next month everyone wants a piece of anything with white fur, etc.
-Specialty customers that you assign a character to that require high stats in particular areas. Stuff like one of your hires being rented out for a ‘party’ or a general treating his soldiers on shore leave, at the highest difficulties maybe even serving royalty. These events wear health down quickly and demand specific traits (a diplomat might want someone especially charming, soldiers just want the highest sex appeal) but are worth big EXP, cash and stat bonuses if the character is able to handle it. Think of them like boss battles?
-I liked that different characters have different text blurbs, it gives them some personality beyond their statistical value and it’d be cool to expand on it with them making little dialog comments here and there. Also would be nice to be able to scroll the the event text instead of pages, but iunno if that’s not doable.
-Adding to the idea of building on some character personality, two characters frequently working together in the double rooms could start to develop some camaraderie with eachother, providing boosted stats when they work together
-definitely seconding minipixel animations.
-Possible additional customization to the house. Instead of a set upgrade path, say you have a set number of squares that you lay out as you see fit, along with other specialty room types similar to the spa so you can plan a layout that fits your strategy, or just your kinks. So a player could create a house in a format like
-Four double rooms raking in cash
-Two spas for protecting weaker chars
-Two Dungeon rooms that boost a char’s obedience but increase their damage taken
-Two slots for high level maids-And on a more personal preference note, more baras
June 17, 2013 at 10:00 pm #2014Excellent ideas! Will see what I can do. Working in a boss-battle setup has been on my mind for quite a while. The second house, will aim to allow for more customization. Can make the event-text scroll instead of flip, or something–what’s there is bare-bones functional but not ideal.
And to clarify, bara means like (doing a quick search here… am terrible about keeping up with the lingo,) gay guys who are more a guy’s guy rather than effeminate? Could research this all night long, haha XD
June 17, 2013 at 11:43 pm #2018Yeah, bara generally refers to more masculine builds, whether it’s muscles, barrel chests, scruffiness, somewhat pudgy, etc.
June 18, 2013 at 12:12 am #2020Horses are a lot to handle, but will try. (tee hee)
Was thinking about the event-text banner setup, and had an idea. What if you flip between characters and house summaries, and then can scroll each. That way, would be easier to digest the information. The only issue is, when the events are happening, would be silly to show/flip between pages rapidly. It might work. Just an idea!
June 18, 2013 at 3:38 am #2021As an observation, I’m starting to see how allowing custom characters would benefit; everyone has bodytype, gender and species preferences that would make the initial build huge, lol! Depending on how the coding works, a simple template readme for the content would work. Lemme pull an example, my old Star Trek ship creator game allowed custom crew profiles.
[5,8,1,10,6,3,9,2],2,8
Name: Chris Robyns
Rank: Ensign
Born: 2216
Place of Birth: Remus 7
Assignment: Assistant Cartographer
Last ship: U.S.S. Reliant
Academy Class: 2236
Biographical Details: The accomplishments of this Starfleet officer are too numerous to mention here. Awards for excellence in astronomical sciences abound.Bio details aside, this format applied the information and ability code string (at the top) into the game and it worked pretty well. A simple .txt and .pict (for the profile pics) were all you needed. The game would check the import folder for these and run them alongside the standard characters.
For HoT, the .txt format could go something like this (I’ll use Bowtie as the example, since I’m about to hire him, lol):
file name (this would not appear within the text itself, obviously): bowtie_profile.txt
[50,45,20,35,50,60],2,0
Name: Bowtie
Sex: Male
Bio: Blue tiger and snow leopard mix, tall and toned, stern but caring. Will only top, very dominant in bed.
Impressions: There’s a regal air about him. Has a thing for his hind paws being played with.The code string would represent as follows:
[Charm,Sex,Hustle,Smarts,Toughness,Obedience],Orientation,RoleThe first six would be regulated by a set amount of total points, in fives, that you can assign; if you exceed that number, the file wouldn’t import correctly (no cheating!). If you want a higher starting stat in Sex, you have to lower another stat. To get higher stats after import, the character has to go to the gym, schools, etc… as usual over the course of gameplay.
The two extra numbers, orientation and sex role would only apply if it’s applicable to the game mechanic. I added them if those features might be in the works for later release. Again, I’m using this whole thing as an example for adding custom characters, so don’t quote me as an expert!
Orientation: 0=straight, 1=gay, 2=bi (I know there are well over three definitions of sexual orientation, but for simplicity sake, we’ll stick to three)
Sex Role: 0=top, 1=bottom, 2=versatile/switchFor the graphics, a set file type (.jpg, .gif, .png, etc…) would be required, using a specific file naming convention (ie: bowtie_hire_pose.jpg, bowtie_rep_up.jpg, bowtie_char_icon.jpg, etc…) which would keep the character data and graphics correctly organized. Sizes would be specified for correct formatting when the game opens the profile. Nothing complicated, very straightforward.
Like I said earlier, this is me thinking aloud. I honestly have no idea if this could be used for HoT, but I figured it might be worth looking over. If anything can be used, yay! I posted something usable 😀
If not, I’ll shush and let the programmers have a good giggle at my expense, hehe!
Cheers!
June 18, 2013 at 8:14 pm #2025I have a couple concerns/suggestions, more about balancing issues though.
Firstly (and I think most importantly) is that I think it’s a bit too easy to exhaust characters, especially in a long game; I’ve played it a few times already (on the 80 days game, so I’ve had time to get a lot going), and managed to get enough characters to get a “full house” going, but I could rarely ever actually make use of even half of the room upgrades because the characters would always get exhausted so quickly (even with 50+ Toughness) that there would just be a perpetual queue of characters waiting to get in to either the Inn or Hospital. (I’m totally assuming that Toughness is what helps make that a little better, because it’s not very clear what stats do what all the time XD)
Suggestions as to fixing that would be:
– Add purchasable upgrades that allow more than 1 or 2 characters to be in the Hospital/Inn at once (probably quite expensive, as they would be most useful when there are many characters hired)
– Alternatively, add some more ways of either boosting health (and removing fatigue) and helping Toughness be more effective in keeping characters’ health up
– … Even more preferably, some combination of the above =PAs I saw (I think on the “To-Do List”), I agree that advertising is overpowered (same for “Leader” spot), although… try not to nerf it too deep into the ground D:
I also think that there should probably be some sort of upgrade that makes it so the house can take more before being in disrepair, having sortof a better maximum messiness capacity (because, as it stands, I don’t see much point to having 3 maids, since 2 seems to always be enough to boost the status from empty to full). I say that also because it’s very easy to reduce the house’s status bar from full to empty really quickly with a full house.
… And does a messy house have any consequences? If not, there should be :XJune 19, 2013 at 8:32 am #2029@Firewolfe
Your template is more or less spot-on for how we’d handle it, and very neat to see, thanks ^^ (would be hilarious to add a spaceship map and duties, maybe towards the end of the project)We’ve worked orientation out of the design on purpose, so it could just be a note in the bio. Role will be the classes I’m currently working on that define a character’s skill set.
We could allow people to put whatever they like for the stats, as I’d like to see the game be able to adjust the cost of a character based on them, exponentially. For a rough example, a 10/10/10 stats would cost like 100, but a 100/100/100 would cost 100,000. Meaning, make the stats too high and the player won’t be able to hire them easily. If the player can’t hire them easily, their rep and skill points will suffer from lack of play.
@Justa Puppet
Sorry about the lack of explaining stats and things ^^; will probably upload a (somewhat rough-draft) tutorial soon. And thanks for the suggestions!Upgrades, items, and character skills should allow a full house to function, at least for a few days before having to deal with health issues. And those things aren’t in place currently, sadly.
Messy house consequences (currently):
green, 1 customer = 1 health point taken from the character they see
yellow, 1 customer = 2
red, 1 customer = 3June 19, 2013 at 3:01 pm #2031Wow, cool to know I wasn’t too far off the mark! I also like your idea for the stats vs pricing, it makes sense and still lets the player do what they want. And thanks for the explanation about the housekeeping. I’ve wondered about that myself.
Now, to start making my .txt files, hehehe!
June 20, 2013 at 11:34 pm #2033Perhaps more maids could mean that the rate that the tidiness meter goes down decreases? So if you have three maids with full upgrades, your tidiness doesn’t reach red. One way to decrease how quickly character’s become exhausted, at least!
June 21, 2013 at 11:06 pm #2044That’s an interesting idea. Will try it and some other things, and see what works best.
Hopefully the balance issues will be taken care of in the next update, (besides obligatory fine tuning.)
June 23, 2013 at 12:27 am #2048WARNING! LONG POST AHEAD!
Regarding stat/skill boosters on characters that already have high stats. Example: Murguy has very high obedience as is, it’s somewhat wasteful to have obedience stat boosters for this profile when the character maxes out at 100. While the skill booster does add personality flavor, it is redundant to place them on characters that otherwise would not really benefit. A way to work around this and preserve the character’s personality defined by the skill boosters would be to lower the stats that would be needlessly increased past the 100 limit. For example,dropping Murguy to a 75 or 70 obedience would offset this problem, since combining a percentage and point boost would still push his stats high.
Thinking out loud again for possible character creation setup:
– Player opens the game after placing character files in the import folder. Goes to Options>Character Creation>Import and loads the new character. The game generates the character based on the attributes in the .txt file and graphics. The player then selects the desired skills; the one-time skills being the most expensive, then percentage-increase skills and finally point-increase skills costing the least of the three types. An indicator would tell the player how much this character would cost to hire in the game once desired changes are set. Character can then be imported and played.Custom Character editing would be done one of two ways. Skills can be adjusted from the options menu: Options>Character Creation>Character Edit, changes would be made similar to creating a new character and the game would update the existing file.
Default stats would be adjusted by making changes to the character’s .txt file and require removing the character from the playable set: Options>Character Creation>Remove. A copy-proofing code would alert the player if a .txt has been changed without removing a character first in order to prevent duplicate characters. Not sure how easy this would be to implement, since the code would check the default stats of the .txt against the existing imported character file. If they don’t match, one would get this message: *Character already exists! Please remove character before making changes.*
Thinking ahead, like WAY ahead, one option could be to allow players to create a scenario (open-ended or otherwise) using only custom characters. Players would be able to create a world entirely populated by their own designs:
[_] Start game using pre-made characters (by default, always checked)
[x] Start game using Custom Characters (by default, always unchecked)Due to the coding that I know would have to be wedged into the current build, this is not something I would seriously suggest, since the game would have to be almost completely dissected at the back-end and reworked, which would beget a whole new round of testing and bug-killing! But I thought I’d get it out there anyway, lol!
Ok, I’m done!
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