Update 6th Apr '25

Not much to report this week other than more intensive hacking away in the code thicket.

Implementing the clue system for the harlot notebook is a bit of an arse, but I want to get it right at the start rather than waste more time chopping and changing as I work through the harlots. It's possible, but fiddly to do in Twine and needs a fair bit of testing to spot and fix any typos. It's good that I have a good test system in place now as I've had to a lot of tweaking and rewrites to make it concise and easy to work with.

I think I'm getting there. Another rewrite parcelled off some common functions for the standard checks, so I'll only need to add a couple of lines for each check per harlot rather than cut'n'paste whole sections.

The nastiest check was managing the charms and ailments, as both tend to be very stealthy sources of Bad Ends, so I don't want to tip the player off immediately if they luckily meet the right conditions without being aware of it. I think I have that done now.

The last thing I'm fiddling with is a generic passage to combine Physical Stat, Ailment and Charm checks for those hidden checks where all can have an effect (which is most of the stat checks in the game). For that the main check is to determine which was the main factor resulting in the outcome and assign a higher evidence score for that "clue".

I think, fingers crossed, I'm pretty close now and will be able to try it out on a few sample harlots covering all the basic test cases. My plan is to get that out as a release and get feedback on it sometime next week. I'm finding the coding for this fairly tricky, so it might take a little longer.

After that I have a couple of options.

I can plough on with the new features. The things I need to add are Replay Mode, an overall progress score for each harlot, and some form of version control so the player doesn't have to reset progress every time a new release comes out.

I'm just starting to feel a little bit of burnout from all the hours of coding over the last couple of weeks, so I might switch back to writing for a break. I'll see how I feel after getting the clue system in place.

There's a lot of work going on under the surface. Hope to have something to show you all soon.

- mnayeyedhydra