Back to it

The jam is over. And just as I was hoping, I have learned a lot. I wish I got more done than I did, but in the end, it wasn't going to be used for much. The coding portion was a bit of a steeper challenge than we were expecting, and ultimately we ended up with something I'd call the bare minimum of the bare minimum. But I'm still more than happy we went at it, because as I've said, this was a huge opportunity for learning. While I didn't get to touch any of the code myself, I got to do something I actually found quite enjoyable. Bug testing! I played our shitty little game and found a few bugs, which gave me some insight into what sort of simple errors can lead to large problems. I'm looking forward to actually coding something myself for TT. I'm definitely not expecting to win any awards, but then again, the best reward I could ask for from this was the learning experience. So what, if anything, will I be changing in my approach?

I will be trying to do more in the day by day. This is because I found that time was a large limiting factor in the time for actually completing code. I myself got into a pretty comfortable rhythm for a few days where I'd get on and do an hour or so of art, which worked out to get where we needed to, but with the requirements of TT, the number of assets are going to be far more numerous. Not to mention, the actual coding for everything is going to require a lot of thought and effort. For example, I find that if you spend 6 hours doing something, if you do it all at once, your end result will be far better if you cut that six hours into bite sized sessions. Another thing I want to do is rewrite the GDD for TT since it's not really a real GDD. It's really just a collection of thoughts I types out, which isn't ideal. 

So this week I want to talk about the the text in the game that is going to be describing everything that happens. I immediately realize that I didn't really fit a place for a text window in the UI plan I had drawn up, so that'll have to be redone somewhat. It's going to be a pretty important part of the game I feel so I'll see about fitting it in nicely. But yes, there will be a detailed text log of everything that happens to the player and around them. I recently played a game called Insatiable Hearts that has a nice level of detail in its body growth descriptions. It even recently added clothing size limitations, but feels slightly limited. It's great flavor text though, and I found myself enjoying it quite a bit more for that. So, something I've been planning on having is detailed descriptions for your size changes as they happen. The balance of too much text vs too little is going to be rather delicate because I could easily see changes being too minor in the setting of TT which could lead to a lot of repetitive dialogue, which I have seen avoided quite well in games like Hades where each god seems to have dozens of unique lines for every situation. 

Another interesting mechanic Insatiable Hearts had was its "attune thoughts" menu where you could sort of enforce your character to have fetishes or desires for things. This seems like it could lead to an interesting solution to a problem that I was struggling to come up with a solution to which is how mental changes could be handled. A lot of the text based NSFW games out there have a bimbo effect that can be applied to the player. Most of the time it's all situational, or just creates an extra sex option. Others like Lilith's Throne handle it by modifying the player's text with extra words like "like, " or "um,". It is definitely one way to do it, but is still just a flare to what is otherwise the exact same dialogue. No, what I am looking to do with mental changes like this is to take agency away from the player; a typical no-no but one I think is actually ideal in this context. Having a whole system for thoughts like in IH leads to an interesting idea for a motivation and goals which I'm thinking I'll just wrap up into a thoughts menu. These thoughts can be given percentages for how much you want to focus on them, and if you're inflicted with some sort of mental blockage, say, ditzy thoughts which you'll have to how to balance it. I think it could be interesting if these thoughts had a chance to make the player act unintentionally. Say your ditzy urges make you want to stop and look at something instead of walk forward. Super annoying, I know, but it's literally perfect in context. I could have a focus bar to allow you to overpower these thoughts as well, but that would of course have its limits as well. 

Well I figure that's enough this week. Things should pick up again now that the jam's over. See you next week!

Links to stuff

Insatiable Hearts:

https://owlkaline.itch.io/insatiable-hearts

Things to remember

game jams are cool, join some!

Sleep is at least a little important

If you're burned out you're probably trying to balance too many things