Dev Log — October 2023

Hi everyone!

We're getting an early dev log this month! Last month, I talked about spinning plates and how I've had to consider a number of future systems all at once in order to make sure everything would properly play together, and I've now gotten to a point where I've started implementing several of these systems.

Character traits and effects overhaul

One of the toughest things to change has been to alter how character changes are tracked, stored, and displayed in preparation for dynamic avatars. Even without the dynamic avatars, these changes will bring many improvements to the character system, which I have outlined below.

Traits that describe your character's appearance will continue to be displayed in the inspect menu but will now use a layout that corresponds better to the equipment slots, with effects being broken down into appropriate slots.

Effects that might be relevant to combat or otherwise be immediately relevant to the player or other players will appear as a bar next to the character, with icons recognizable icons to let players know the nature of the effect at a glance.

The new system will also move away from using the turn-time for triggering effects and will instead trigger up to one effect whenever the player spends an action. The purpose of this is to reduce event spamming when players are idle and deprecate the turn-timer, which will be removed with the introduction of the new PvE overhaul.

Class Cards

The next update will lay the groundwork for the PvE overhaul, and I have deduced that in order to make it easier for authors to write PvE encounters, I will need to introduce the concept I call class cards, which is an alternative to spell effects.

Most spells have very particular effects, such as increasing or reducing the size of a character's breasts, whereas class cards will instead define a desired body and mind for a class. For instance, the Hucow class card would have the bovine speech impediment, lactation, and huge breasts on its card, among other potential changes. The strength of this system is that instead of having to consider the character's form and picking a spell accordingly, an author can simply say which card they want to use and the game will find an appropriate effect, in order to move the character's closer to the defined class.

Another advance of the class cards is that during a PvE run the game can punch a class card to keep track of past changes during the same run, so when picking from possible changes in later encounters, it can attempt to pick something that is most likely to fill out a class card and least likely to work against a class card that has already been punched, making changes more coherent throughout a run and gravitating towards completing a class card.

Message System

The introduction of class cards also meant I had to overhaul how spells and event systems were implemented. This update has meant a general overhaul of how spells are executed, and class cards will also be introduced with the next update, where they will be used for the polymorph and mythic spells, and for the Hucow disease effect.

Since I'd be changing how event messages were handled anyway, I decided to change how all player-facing text is handled by introducing a centralized system for handling them. This centralized system takes messages as keys used for a dictionary lookup, which means I can export the dictionary with all player-facing text for an editor or author to review and improve. It also means the game, or at least the game server for now, will be ready for localization/translation, should this become relevant in the future. In such a case, I'd simply have to change the dictionary used to one that matches a given player's language setting. This is more of a happy incident than something I've put time and thought into, though, as I don't expect to translate the game.

I've added another illustration for people who might be interested in seeing how the old and new systems compare.

I might also add that the new system still allows spells to send event custom messages, such as the inflate spell that has a special event for when it fails to inflate breasts further due to them already being at their limit. But universal changes to a character's appearance are no longer handled by the spells, but by the affected character when the change is applied from anywhere in the system.

Next Update

I expect the next update to go live sometime this month. It's been more work than expected, which has to do with more systems being implemented in preparations for the PvE overhaul, instead of being introduced with it. The update is planned to feature a bunch of graphical interface and gameplay improvements, and will also introduce more sex toys to the game and overhaul special actions to be more similar to spells with more information and a better system for selecting which special actions are available. So even though it isn't the PvE overhaul, I expect the next update to be a great one!

Anyway, please enjoy this illustration of a gorgon/medusa players will be able to encounter while exploring in the future, and thank you everyone for all your support! ❤️

Cheers,

Tinon