Carry mechanic

Carry mechanic is done. For devices, PowerModder kindly provided some sample machine models for me to test. So I put this little skit together to demo the carrying to device mechanic: https://twitter.com/i/status/1285005719230537728.

The other big application of carry is repositioning other units during combat. It works both on allies and enemies (assuming you succeed in the Grab check first). People brought up Grabs can be difficult to use because you often get interrupted by other enemy units if you grab one of them in the face. With the carry mechanic you can now drag the enemy into a save spot first and worry less about other enemies. Here is how it works in action: https://twitter.com/i/status/1285005620811149312.

Speaking of grabs, I feel that the units behaves too "sex-adverse" in this game. That mentality made sense for Heroine Rumble, where it's about who can outlast the opponent, in this game units should enjoy it more, and shouldn't spam Escape the first chance they get. After all, if a hottie is blowing you off, why stop?

So I made these following changes:

• Grab (ability) success chance a lot higher.  
• Selecting Tease/Pleasure/Finisher chance a lot higher. 
• Pleasure: 60% base 
• Tease: 90% base 
• Finisher: same as Pleasure, but only works versus foes with > 50% lust 
• Removed 'Study' and 'Lockdown' as those options suck. 
• `Switch Grab` and "Reversal` now costs HP, but success chance alot higher. 

In addition, enemies units will now pick between `Mock`(raise the lust level of attacker) and `Reversal` instead of `Escape` on their turns. In the future, I want to incorporate some sort of sex-aversion meter, and the AI's decision matrix will be influenced by their personality: sex-adverse units tries to `Escape`, and sex-loving units favors `Relax`, `Mock` and `Reversal`.

Next up, I am going to implement a party-selection screen, where you can pick who to bring with you on each dungeon runs. Something like selecting up to 4 out of ~8 premade characters. Stay tuned.

(Starting on) Devices and Base management

Started on work on the base management portion of the game. There is a lot to do and I decided to start on the equivalent of the Prison area first. Where you can find captured enemies and play with them at your leisure. To make it more fun, that means devices!

The basic functionality is working already, as in you can hop on to a device and animations will play. This post will be public so you'll have to use your imagination on what that looks like. 

However, complementary features, such as adding a "Carry" option to drag units around during grabs is still to-do. Those features are what I am currently working on.

I also implemented the render-to-texture feature, which is shown below to render portraits to texture:

This rendering portrait feature is something that HR had but is missing in HRT. This new system is superior to the implementation in HR because rendering to texture and reuse is a lot more efficient than re-rendering the portrait every frame. In fact, HR runs alot better when I disable the rendering portrait feature when testing on low powered hardware.

Besides the obvious applications of these portrait textures, another area I want to improve is the character customization. In short, I am aiming for something like this:

Here is where the rendering-to-texture will come into play. The outfits pieces can be selectively rendered to a texture and to use as preview. Rendering-to-texture in game is generally superior to prepared texture files because it will use the same lighting system, so it gives more consistent results on how it will look like in game, but also to benefit from whatever upgrades in the in-game lighting system gets.

Character customization is still very early in development but I hope this will give you a taste of what it will be like.

Demo 3.3!

Patreon LINK.

New build is here! In this update, added a new 4th futa martial artist character to the player party and male version of trooper enemies! The encounter difficulty is unchanged, so it should be easier now with an additional player party member.

If everything goes well, I will start working on the base management side of the game.

New character!

Added a new character for the next demo! So it will be a party of 4 versus the same enemies, which should make it a lot easier.

She is a martial-arts based character and comes with a new outfit!

I choose a simpler ability design for her as I feel abilities like the Breaching Shot is not good introductory ability. She have a ranged attack as her basic attack; a Pump Up that buffs her physical attack, and a Rising Dragon melee attack that deals heavy damage to target and knocks it back, but has a cool down. The main decision points in using her are whether to use the Pump Up on round 1 or attack, and when and who to use the Rising Dragon against.

Here is a video of her in action:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1278881195552436224. 

Before I forget, she is a futa character, to test out to see if the system works as intended and to give the player more opportunity to see M/F moves.

I also added animations for certain existing abilities, you can preview here:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1278881053512364033 

Demo 3

Patreon Link.

Here is the 3rd CATC demo. It features a huge grab-system upgrade with a lot more positions ported over from HRT! Lucia's lust inflicting ability also have additional effect if it causes target's lust to overfill. Give those things a try!

Otherwise, if you are interesting in tweaking side of things, a lot more game data is now exposed via json files. Head to /assets/json/ folder and take a look at unitdatas_.json, outfits_.json, grabdatas_.json and others.

Progress Update

Lots of things since the last post!

First thing first, thanks to everyone for taking the time to participate in the grab effectiveness poll and all the comments. There is one particular comment that I really like, which is to balance all the grabs to be approximately equal, but with a bonus with every additional grab learned. So there is still a benefit to "collect them all," while not leaving the older grabs obsolete. Going forward, that will be the direction I will take to balance the grab.

Onward to the new features:

The first thing I did is add the body organ requirements for the grab moves, so now when you get the select a grab prompt, only grabs that are appropriate for participants are shown, instead of everything. Here are 2 examples to illustrate, note the grabs are different depending on who is grabbing who:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1275152768852877312

https://twitter.com/i/status/1275152636472246272

Then I implemented a new technique to handle equipment and outfit pieces. Basically, certain outfit pieces can be designated to replace the body model underneath, instead of only attaching on top of it.

This method have several advantages: 1) less clipping 2) outfit can be smaller than the body model, 3) solves the bare foot versus heel problem

Here is an example, with the top using the "replace body model feature" and the bottom without:





Another thing is that the 4 female sets are now separated into pieces instead of being a whole body set. However, the outfit customization feature wouldn't be in the next patch. I want to have a similar UI like Illusion and Custom 3D Girl/ Maid games, so that will come in the future.



With this separation, now it make sense to augment the grab system so that the outfit pieces that is in the way is hidden during grab and then re-shown afterwards. A very important feature, and Im glad it's working now. See the twitter links above for a demonstration.

Finally, I added a Ecstasy state similar to the Affliction system in Darkest Dungeon. When the lust bar is fully filled, the unit will now unable to control themselves and start playing with their own bodies. This is what the picture shows.



Still tweaking the damage and duration values and the implementation may not be final. But that's the basic idea: some sort of penalty/state when the lust bar is fully filled. Oh and btw I don't intend to have an equivalent to the Darkest Dungeon's Virtue. All lust-filled effects will be detrimental, or being double edged, at best.

Ported moves over from HRT

Here are a few samples:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1272726057251041281 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1272725843907719169 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1272725782930939905 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1272725715352338435