Devlog #35 Affection

The beginning of a new update cycle is upon us. The next version of Rewind (0.3.4) is tentatively scheduled for the end of January, which may seem ambitious for those of you who have been around for a while, but this is planned to be a pretty minor content update (posing, animating, and rendering scenes is the largest consumer of my time), so I'm pretty confident I can stick with it.

Planned New Content:

•  After much procrastination, the Affection System is finally going to be implemented. This is a pretty straightforward system, where players will earn affection points by interacting with Lani and/or Marla. The maximum amount of affection for each character will begin relatively small and increase as the player hits landmark events, opening up additional interactions as you go along. The tricky part of it is trying to get all of the current events and story progressions wrangled into a new triggering framework and create limitations in the gameplay that feel natural. It's actually going shockingly smoothly. The code for the affection points and their related visuals is entirely finished and the events have been altered with some preliminary requirements. It's now awaiting the continuity corrections before going into preliminary play-testing.

•  Continuity Corrections are very much needed. By this, I'm referring to scenes where relationship status is finalized, girl-talk events that inform the various characters of events that have occurred, and general filler conversations that happen between major events, plus some corrections in existing continuity problems. Part of the implementation of the Affection System requires an examination of the various existing events and the triggers for them, so this is the correct time to look through all of the various timeline possibilities and make sure that character continuity stays consistent and that we don't have girls getting confused about their virginity status.

•  Preliminary writing for future events and story progressions. I'm trying something new. In the previous update, I got myself into a horrible hole by writing things that were all interconnected and had to all be finished in order to release the game. This time, I'm planning to write a lot, but NOT planning to make a lot available to the player. Instead, I'm going to write out a lot of the events I intend to add in the next few updates, pick and choose a handful of important events and render those. Once this update is finished, I'll be able to focus on visual and story progression in the next one. That way we can have two quick updates instead of one huge update that takes forever to finish.

• Sound FX (preliminary study on sound). I'm not intending to do a ton on sound this time, but I am going to sit down with some sound effects (for ui clicks, battle stuff, inventory clicking, etc). I'm intentionally avoiding a large commitment on this front, sooooo... yeah. Expect some clicky sounds and maybe some 'woosh' sounds.

Potential Additions:

• Kermit's Micro-Transactions. These are basically an achievement system. Each achievement will award you a coin that you can spend on buffs or other gameplay improvements with Kermit. I plan to do the writing for this system, but I don't anticipate having time to do the coding for it. If things go better than scheduled, this is on the top of my priority list.

• Remake prologue images. I intend to improve the prologue in the future, but this bullet item is JUST a remake of existing content in order to bring it up to parity with the visual quality of the rest of the game.

And that's what I'm thinking. My list of 'Things I Want to Do' is way longer than this, but I think these are the proper choices to help encourage me to do more focused updates.