The Progress So Far

Been working on the new dungeon system, here are some of the new things so far.

The first is a rework of the transition system. This is kinda hard to explain without going into technical details. But basically, under the old system, the game simulates all zone that the player have visited. So the game may be running the village area, the tent area and the dungeon area at once. This have a couple of problems, such as poorer performance and oddities such as villagers falling into the camp and so on.

Under the new system, only one active zone is run at once. If you visit the village, the tent area is “frozen” into data and removed from memory. When the player visit the tent from village, the village area is “frozen” and the tent area is loaded into memory.

So why isn't this done in the first place? Well, basically, the game had some issues in saving units information. So the village cannot be “frozen” and brought it back. If done so, it would be a ghost town.

That brings us to the second feature. Which is maps now saves (some) unit information, in addition to some other stuff required for the next feature:

Feature three, a new dungeon generation algorithm.

The main change is that instead of generating everything procedurally, this new algorithm will take a list of existing premade pieces (map files), and sew them together to make a dungeon.

Here are a couple examples: The individual dungeon building blocks are on the left, the generated output is on the right.

Compared to the first algorithm, the new algorithm generates more linear dungeons instead of maze-like. think this is an improvement because running around/ backtracking in a maze really isn’t that interesting.

Also note that the “walls” are a pure development tool to distinguish between the building pieces. The algorithm only cares about where the connections can happen (those are in blue) in each building block, it is entirely up to the creator how each block should look like.

Finally, I added “blueprint” items. These can be used to place objects in the environment. How it works is similar to Minecraft, you acquire the item (through shop, drop, etc), equip it, and it will bring up the preview model on the cursor. Move around, look around, then press LMB to confirm placement.

The end result is similar to what you can accomplish via the “terrain_editor,” but this is much better in my opinion. The interface is a lot cleaner and it takes advantage of the hotbar system so you can quickly access to the objects you are interested in. But the biggest reason is that the “terrain_editor” is too powerful for regular gameplay, it’s basically a cheat. However, these individual blueprint items can be fine tuned in terms of what type of objects the player can construct, their accessibility,  and their cost.

Still a bit more work to do. Need to implement some additional meta information/placement information, etc which are required for turning the 2d sewed-together dungeon blueprint into reality. I should be able to get the features working sometime near the end of next week. However, actually making the individual map files (dungeon blocks) and create a new dungeon will probably take some more time to do. So what I might do is release the next build with the new features but without any new dungeon/content. It’s probably going to be somewhat buggy and it’s probably more for the modders rather the players. Caution is advised. :D

v4.944 - Tweaks

Patreon LINK.

Changelog:

        - fixed move selection bug where futas are treated as males
        - more units have access to threesome moves
        - you may now grab restrainted units (instead of carry or nothing) if your current equipment is not an restraint
        - implemented a few more cheats

The previous patched made a couple of systematic changes. The issue with those is that it can be difficult to see all their effects without throughout play testing. So thanks for all the feedback! Hopefully this patch nudges it into a better place, if not, we can always try again :D.

v4.942 - bug fixes

Patreon LINK.

Changelog:

        - males: can now equip horns and tails
        - fixed bug that only beatdown could be selected on unit on devices
        - optimized the interaction prompt when attempting to place unit onto devices
        - restored pp to units that lost them in previous patch
        - traps: now assigned to teams & only triggers on hostile units
        - trapper units will now place traps of their own team
        - fixed abilities duplication bug on save/load
        - added temporary command [fix_dupes] if you are affected by this bug
        - added a new hair style "hair_short_7"
        - added experimental modding command [gen_iks] to generate .boneLocalOffsetsArray IK data
        -   you still need to "prime" the ikChains with "targetSkeleton" , "targetBone" etc
        -   will have a separate post on how to use this

If you noticed that saving takes a long time and/or the save file is too big, check to see if you are affected by a "abilities" duplication bug by taking a look at the "abilities" tab. If you see a million copies, open the console and type in [fix_dupes] without the [] and that should  fix the problem.

Secondly, if you are having problems opening the console, change your keyboard language input to English-US and that may solve the issue.

Thirdly, I added an experimental command [gen_iks] for modders to implement new grab animations in game. There are a couple of great ones already but unfortunately there was no easy method to author the IK data required to handle different body sizes, until this patch. I will make another post in detail how to utilize this new command.

If you havn't checked it out already, we have a mod repo subreddit at: https://www.reddit.com/r/enlit3dGames/. There are a couple really neat mods out there already.

V4.94 - playable males!

Patreon LINK.

Playable males and additional console commands are here! This knocks off the first and second significant features for this month. There will be another $10 Patreon only post on how to utilize additional console commands not mentioned in the patch nodes.

Changelog:
        - new feature: units can be assigned with a list of known moves(grabs) to pick from rather than having access to all the moves
        - some units are now assigned with a list of moves
        - fixed bug with hotbar key displaying incorrect numbers after swapping
        - game will now forcefully fade out to camp if player's green HP reaches 0
        - implemented additional console commands (as $10 patreon reward)
        - implemented modding commands: [list_item_ids] and [list_unit_ids] to display list of item uids and unit uids
        - implemented playable males - potion can be brought off alchemist or as reward for Ludas Lair
        -   armor for males can be found as random loot/in shops, the shorts can be brought off alchemist
        -   note: males cannot wear female armor and vice versa
        - changed the opening console key (`) check to a different method - there is some issues with different layout keyboards, the solution is involved; this is just a bandaid
        - added the new hair styles mentioned in last build

Plans for January

Hope everyone had a good holiday and Happy New Years.

As mentioned previously, I want to start wrapping up on implementing new features and move onward to content.

There are three significant features planned for January:

The first is cheats/console commands.

"Basic cheats" are included of course, like spawning items, give exp, kill command, fully heal self and so on. You can also use it to spawn units of your choice,  place them on different teams, and watch the ensuring battle/orgy.

In the past, there were a lot of interesting ideas and suggestions that were deemed too imbalanced or unsuitable for the regular game. I am pretty open to those ideas when it's a toggle after enabling cheats. So you can expect some wacky modes and experimental stuff in here as well.

Anyhow, as mentioned before, this is gonna be the reward for the new $10 Patreon tier. Information on how to use these cheats will be in a future post to come.

The second feature is playable males.

I thought for a long time that playable male feature isn't that important because you can come very close with futa + body sliders. But then I took a look at the number of moves available, and it turns out that there are far more male/futa-female moves than female-female moves. And this creates a big disconnect in game as there are far more female enemies. So if a player doesn't like futa content, then it's very possible they will be missing a big chunk of content.

Hence, I think playable males is a very important feature as well and I want to get it working before the end of January. However, please keep in mind that I am not going to create a male and a female version for every armor set - simply don't have the resources. So expect much fewer outfit choices for males, especially at the start.

The third feature is a major revamp in dungeon random generation.

Right now, the game generates empty rooms and hallways and then connect them together to form a dungeon. It works, but it's not very interesting or detailed. So I want to move onto a better system.

Essentially, this new system will allow the user to create premade rooms (by hand), and then the generator will randomly select a couple of these premade rooms, and sew them together to form the dungeon. This technique is used in lots of games, such as Warframe, Binding Of Isaac, and Enter the Gungeon, etc. This allows for a much greater level of detail and variation than empty rooms.

I don't have much other to add because, well, I havn't started on it yet. But there is one thing I want to say: After much feedback and testing, I don't think the maze aspect adds much to the game. Backtracking isn't fun, getting lost isn't fun, having to track down the AI because they got lost isn't fun. So what I want to do is to make the new generated dungeons more linear. Have a clearer path from start to end, less dead ends, less mindless running around.

These aren't the only features of course, they are the only ones I consider "significant." Again, thanks to everyone who supported / is supporting me and I look forward to finally pushing the game out of the tech demo stage.

P.S. The game name is probably going to be "Heroine Rescue Team." (With quotations around "Rescue" :wink:.)