Well the voting has ended and player controled combat won. But you can see there is quite a lot of people that prefer for the game to focus on managment aspects. So that makes my job harder. I will work hard to try to find a balance where players that are ignoring combat will still be able to have an experience that feels both fun anc complete while ofering a good combat system for those that want to enjoy it, but it wont be easy and that probabily means that the game will take a longer time to be ready than I anticipated.
Now I want to talk a little about the Feelings system. Feelings include things like obedience and love for the player. Until now I've avoided this important aspect of the game becouse I had no idea how to solve it. The Attribute system does a pretty good job to measure how well a girl will perform her work. But it doesn't cover the willingness of a girl to perform it. This is quite important to the original game. The only purpose of the dungean is to break a girl before you send her to work. Of course there is the aspect of fullfiling a player's twisted fantasies, but as a game designer I can only focus on the gameplay side of things. So today I had some thought about the subject and came up with a proposal to solve feelings issue. First there are 3 main feelings stats:
Obedience - quite obvious, its the character willingness to do what she doesn't like or want to do. If a character wants or likes to do something she doesn't need to be obedient in order to do it. Obedience is always good from a players perspective. Idealy all girls should have high obedience so that they will work on anything the player wants. But if the player needs the girl to work on a job she likes than she doesnt need to be obedient. It might be counter intuitive but slaves will not necessarilly have high obedience. For instance if I capture you and strap on a leash and call you my slave will you do anything I tell you to do? Of course not. And so the same aplies to the game, characters that just became slaves will also not do as they are told. They must be tamed or broken before they become good slaves.
Moral - the characters moral standards. For example having an orgy is not considered ok by a character with high Moral. Unlike Obedience, Moral should not always be low. A character with low moral might be a good whore or torturer. But low Morals also means that the character is more likelly yo get involved with drugs (and so become addicted), but also might steal from you and even betray you. Betrail is a special event where a character receives a bribe from a rival to sabotage your bussiness. So idealy the Moral of a character should be high for some types of jobs and low for others.
Spirit - measures how much a character is willing to stick to her principals, that is, its harder to make a character with high Spirit become obedient or imoral but it also reflects a characters confidence. Basicaly Spirit measures how hard or how long it will take you to break a character but also how much self confidence a character has. During combat if your characters with low Spirit meets a powerfull enemy she might panick and run away from the fight. Or during a stage act (like singing, or striping) a girl might feel too ashamed becouse she doesnt trust in her skill or he beaty enough and might just ran away from the stage. This sort of panick situations do not take into consideration the Obedience since when you panick you don't usually stop to think about the consequences before you do something you might regret. Ideally a player should try to break a girl's Spirit during training (while raising Obedience or lowering Moral) and after training is done, a player should do things to raise the characters Spirit in order to raise her confidence. Some traits are related to Spirit, for instance "Iron Will" will give a bonus to Spirit.
Now some of you may have noticed that the is a conflit in this system. Take character "A" for instance. "A" is a character with high Obedience and high Moral. So will "A" participate in an orgy or some other imoral act? The answer to that is: maybe. While the girl "A" wants to obey her master she doesn't want to go against he moral code. When this type of conflit happen her Spirit will also be taken into consideration. If "A" has a high Spirit she is more willing to stick to her moral code. Now if "A" has a low Spirit she has a higher chance of breaking her moral code. Now lets take a look at character "B". "B" has low Obedience and low Moral. If you tell "B" to do some imoral act, will she do it? Again the answer is maybe. Since she is not obedient she might refuse the order just to piss of the player or becouse she doesnt like or want to do the activity, but since she has low moral she doesn't have any problems with the job.
With this 3 stats the feelings system is not complete. There is still things like happiness, love, hate and fear. Since 4 adicional stats would make the game overcomplicated I reduced it to two adicional stats. Fist there is the happiness. Anytime you do something a character doesnt like happiness will decrease. Anytime you do something a character likes happiness will increase. A character with average happiness will perform normally. A character with low happiness will be less productive and also might take a penalty to Charisma and Beauty. A character with high happiness will improve performance and might get a bonus to Spirit and Charisma. As for love and hate, both are a single stat. A girl can either hate the player, be indiferent or love the player. Hate also includes fear. So a girl that hates the player will also fear the player and so that will raises Obedience. A girl that loves the player will have bonus to Spirit and Obedience. Since love increases Obedience the player might use that to his advantage asking to the girl to perform imortal acts, that will in turn decrease a girls Moral stat. So it will be possible for a player to train a girl while still being good to her.
Obedience, Moral and Spirit will be measured from 1 to 7. Hate/Love and Happiness will vary from -3 to 3. So if Hate/Love is zero that means the character is indiferent to the player, while negative means hate and positive means love. Love/Hate will be displayed on the screen with heart icons. Three hearts means deeply in love, while 3 broken hearts means she prays for your death every morning. Happiness will be displayed as smilies. 3 Happy faces means very happy, while three sad faces means very sad.
The specifics of how, this 5 stats will affect diferent aspects of the game is yet to be determined. But I wanted to layout the basics so you guys could give me some sugestions.