Everstone Daycare - Patrol System Explanation

Howdy!

Here is the follow-up post that I mentioned I would do about the specifics of the patrol system. The name isn’t super indicative of what it does anymore since it functions more like a stealth system, but we took to calling it that when we were first brainstorming ideas for how it will work and it just stuck!

It’s a pretty simple system that works like this: certain rooms are assigned to one or more (usually just one) nurse as part of their patrol path. That means whenever you walk through that room, a meter (that represents how much they’ve noticed you) will increase depending on the state of your diaper (as represented by the stamina bar). Whenever you walk through a room that a nurse patrols through, walking around with a clean diaper will increase the meter by 1, 1 or 2 if you’re wet, and 2 if you’re messy. Moving to another room that is not in their patrol path, or hiding yourself in the environment will reset meter (or just lower it significantly in some cases)

Each of the 5 main nurses has their own “stealth value” variable, and in situations where the patrol paths of 2 different nurses overlap, only the highest value will be shown to the player. I had considered making a meter for each of the nurses, or even only showing the meters of nurses with a non-0 value “stealth value”, but that seemed like it would be too much clutter on the screen and I wanted to keep a level of vagueness (but not too vague as to frustrate people.)

That’s basically it. I mostly wanted to make this post because during testing, the testers still needed some kind of explanation for how it worked exactly. I’ll try to explain as much as I can in-game without coming off too game-y and out of character, but I thought making a post like this would be helpful for any patrons who might be confused, and to gather any feedback and changed anyone would like to propose for me to do. It’s definitely basic and very jank (a combination of a very limiting program and my not-so-great skill in programming), so any possible feasible improvements would be helpful!

This was a feature we definitely wanted to include ever since the beginning in some form. As the project went on longer, I did have some hangups and doubts on whether I wanted to include this system at all, since this is at it’s core a porn game, and I didn’t want to make something that would be too intrusive. I do still want to make this a “game”, with puzzles to solve (though its fairly light on that at the moment), and hopefully this is an important step to make this less of a reading simulator.

All in all, hopefully that clears up any confusion and properly elaborates on a few of our thoughts when making this game!

Let me leave you all with a few ideas we went through that we eventually had to scrap:

• One of the first ideas we considered was for there to be an invisible timer that would count down whenever you were standing in a room that was in the patrol path of a nurse. If you stood in a room for too long, you would get caught. This ended up not being possible due to TyranoBuilder (the current program I’m using to create this game) not having a built-in timer function, as well as scenes not being able to constantly refresh themselves (and therefore not being able to make a timer ourselves.)
• Another idea we considered was something similar to the system we have now, except that moving onto a patrolled path would be guaranteed to trigger the caught scene, instead of having ways to sneak through the areas, effectively blocking off those parts of the map. The way you would get around it was to use an object to distract the nurse, temporarily allowing you to move through that area without getting caught. We didn’t end up going with this idea because we considered it a little too restrictive.
• One idea I had brainstormed was for the nurses to actually be patrolling the map, occupying a specific room and moving around when the player does within a set patrol path. If you happened to walk into the specific room that the nurse would be in, it would be a guaranteed catch. It would be more realistic, as it would feel less like the nurses are in every room at once in their patrol path, but there are a few problems that made this less than ideal. The first was that being able to track the current location of the nurses would be a bit complicated and overbearing. Having to check every adjacent room for a nurse seems like a lot of busywork, and making a way to track their current location from a distance would be a bit unrealistic and feels like it would ruin the tension. The next is that it would include a lot of moving parts that would be really complicated to implement and add on to. Lastly was that we wanted to avoid making the system to much of a hassle to interact with.
• Instead of a bar that goes up to 10, with each nurse increasing the bar by 1 to 2 whenever you move into a room they patrol in, the number instead counted up to 100, with each nurse increasing the meter by a variable amount for each individual nurse. We decided against this due to it being too hard to gauge how many “moves” you have left before you’re caught and the gauge, we originally made not being the best at displaying the actual value to the player and made things more difficult because it was too vague.