Progress Report: Main Quests, Barks and Mechanics Freeze

Mechanics Freeze:

The biggest danger for any game, and in particular those funded through subscriptions, is scope creep. It is possible to keep adding mechanics to a game eternally, but eventually this will just cause the game to collapse under its own weight. So, I've decided that the new mechanics end here, I've added what I wanted to add, and believe it puts the game in a good spot. Now it will be all about expanding the content within those mechanics, polishing the mechanics, and balancing them.

Main Quests:

The first of the last mechanics are the main quests. They are based on the EU4 mission system, where they are a tree that you complete during your game and can see all quests in advance. Their primary purpose is to guide new players and give them some clear objectives and hints, while also giving rewards and incentives to complete the bestiary/catalog/logs.

Custom Rules:

The second of the last mechanics is the run customization system. Whenever you complete a main quest for the first time, you get points which can be used to enable special effects in your next run. This can be used to make the early game less repetitive, or speed it up, or alternatively make the game more challenging. 

Barks:

Then finally there are "barks". Taken from Darkest Dungeon, these are small flavourful soundbites from your adventurers depending on their job or situation. They exist in the guild, overworld, and dungeons.

Captures:

You can now rescue enemy humans by capturing them in combat (capture rate depends on their health remaining). These will then follow you through the dungeon until the end where you can sell them off. They won't participate in combat though. 

Streamlining Traits/Personalities/Crests:

Personalities/crests were in a pretty bad spot, they changed too slowly to make changing them worth it, but too fast to take them fully into account. All the decays and influences were also very confusing, and with a rather low impact. The personalities and crests were also somewhat matched, but not fully. So I set out to streamline this mechanic.

The following things are changed:

• Traits are the only things affecting personalities.
• Personalities only affect quirks, curios and a crest growth modifier.
• Crests only grow through either the "advance crest" enemy move or mantras.
• Mantras no longer affect personalities, but instead grow one crest and reduce all others.
• Two crests have been added, so each personality now has a crest.
• You can reroll traits in the Church.

Next:

Next week is also time for a new public release, which is this version but with the bugs fixed. And, as mentioned, it will also be censored. This is a one time thing to test whether the censorship works, an uncensor patch will be released the week after (to see whether that one works). I'm somewhat sorry for it, but I'm very well aware that noone would play the censored version otherwise, and I do need some testing before putting a version on Steam.

At the same time, I'll be working on the first boss dungeon. This is a fully custom dungeon, with obviously also the first boss enemy. No, it's not a new mechanic, the tutorial is also a custom dungeon :)

Changelog:

Major

• Main Quests, serving as a tutorial and guideline throughout the game.
• Custom Rules, you earn points for completing the main quests for the first time and spend these on convenience/flavor/challenge game rules.

Minor

• Your adventurers will bark remarks in the overworld/dungeon/guild.
  
• You can capture rescue human enemies with a portable iron horse and sell them get rewarded for rescuing them. Thanks Haraberu!
• Traits, personalities, and crests have been streamlined.
• Dungeon effects have been removed completely.
• Goals have been refactored internally. This means that the progression of some PDGs is now more linear.
• Skip day now costs one favor.
• You can now see the amount of cursed items in the submission desire tooltip.
• Rescued adventurers will always join and follow the party, even if you already have 4 girls. They will join as reinforcements.
• Added a console command for destiny points.
• Hit chance is now added to the move UI. Thanks Haraberu!
• Quirk removal now has a fixed cost (as if removing on 50%).
• Mantra removal cost no longer depends on suggestibility.

Bugfixes

• Cutins were accidently censored.
• Favor wasn't saved correctly.
• Morale cost wasn't taking discounts into account when checking whether morale was enabled.
• The click mask of dungeon markers was wrong, which sometimes prevented you from clicking on the guild.
• Carry capacity line wasn't added correctly to the farmstead.
• Remove moves didn't work in non-masturbate cases.
• Parasite tooltips now show whether they are natural or not.
• Lower part in overworld blocked mouse clicks.
• Ratkin backhair has been missing since the beginning.
• Not all party effects affected the player.
• Expression layers didn't get hidden correctly.
• [NAMES] didn't get parsed correctly in random dungeon quest.
• Scouting info wouldn't update correctly, keeping old effects and permanently hiding rewards.

Modder Stuff

• Puppet textures didn't get updated when "adds" was used in tokens.
• Desire didn't change right after equipping items which have a min/max_desire script.
  
• Duplicate allow_moves entries weren't supported.
• ENEMY_RACE_ID has been changed to RACE_ID, since enemies and players use the same races
• More scripts for parasites for curios
• Scriptables didn't affect enemy hp.

If you want early access to these changes (and maybe a debug console for cheating), support me here:

PATREON | SUBSCRIBESTAR