UPDATE July 13:
link
About a week ago a wrote a post on the WMEx thread about how I had decided to write a new WM game from scratch. For those of you that read that post and wondered if I had given up, wonder no more. I worked hard this week in order to get something out. I created this thread so that we can work together on game design (eg deciding how the game will work). I will create another thread to focus on game development (eg writing code). So in this post I will talk a little about the game design so far and what we should focus on for now.
The game design include everything about how the game works, all the rules, interections and so on. But we must not get ahead of our selves. To keep things simple and get a working game out there I think we should focus on a specific point of the game, get that code working, and then move on to something else. This will be a prototype based aproach where if people leave the team (myself included) there will be working code and design rules that others can carry on. Other advantages to this approach include early feedback (its faster and easier to fix things sooner than later), well tested code base (people can test out the features as the game matures, so that the final product is more stable) and a very important point that is to design something we can actually build. Its comom for software projects that do all the design first and code later to have severals problems on the coding fase. For instance there may be technical dificulties to executing a specific design point, and that may lead to redesign or even simply canceling features. Also, the design may become too large or too complex and that will lead to game that takes ages to complete. The prototype aproach on the other hand, will always lead to a working game, even if it has very few features. If a team abandons the project, others can pick it up and have a solid foundation to build features on top of, just like they do today with the current WM.
From now on this post will focus on the design features that I working on. Please keep the sugestions limited to the topic at hand. Will the game have feature X or will I be able to do action Y? We will see when we get there.
I decided that the best place to start will be on the girls attributes. Attributes are the core skill the girl will have. The reason why its important to start here is becouse everything else is derived from this. How good is a girls in doing a certain job? Look at her attributes. Will my girl win a fight in the dungeon? Look at her attributes. How fast will the girl get tired? Attributes. How will this item or trait affect my girl? It will affect her attributes. You get the Ideia.
Anyways, one of my my design goals is to make things as simple as possible. That way the player can easily understand how and why things are happening the way they are. WM currently has some confusing rules under the hood and its pretty hard to understand why things are the way they are. I want the new game to be more clear in that sense. So when you go buy a slave for instance, you can quickly look at her attributes and decide whats is the best girl for the job.
The skill system is WM is very similar to many RPGs. So started from there. Wikipedia informed me about the code attributes that are used in the most popular RPG systems out there. After looking at that and considering what WM actully needs I came up with 5 basic attributes, those are:
Strength (STR): Combat, Combat Damage, ability to carry heavy items (like a heavy armor or weapon), Stamina, can give penalty to Charisma
Constitution (CON) - Health and Stamina, Combat Resistance, Spell Resistance, resistance to disease and vices
Wisdom (WIS)- Discipline, Spell, Spell Damage, Spell Resistance, Charisma
Dexterity (DEX) - Combat, Spell
Beauty (BEU) - Charisma, can give a bonus or penalty to Discipline
Initialy I wanted only 4 basic attributes. BEU would not be one of them. But after a little thought I decided that a whore really needs that. So I had to add it, making things a little more complex than I initialy planned. Also for now, BEU is actually the least important attrbitute in the skill system. I plan to solve that later by adding game features that makes this attribute as important as the others. In adition to the described above all the atributes may give bonus or penalty to how good a job is executed. For instance a strong girl may be better at cleanig. A pretty girl may be a more succeful waitress since more customers will want her to be there attendent. How jobs are going to be affected will be decided when we get to designing the jobs/skill system. That should help balancing the importance of the basic attributes. The goal is that all of them should be just as important and girls with diferent attributes should be better at performing certain tasks then others.
Now for the secondary attributes. All other attributes are automaticly calculated from the base ones. That means that only the basic attributes should be set on girl packages. It also mean that evaluating a girl should be only a matter of looking at the basic attributes. There is one catch though. Traits as well as items may direcly affect the secondary attributes. So a girl with crappy basic attributes but lots of positive traits may actually be a good pick. Are the secondary attributes.
General
Stamina - base STR, CON - defines how much energy a girl has for combat and work. When it runs out a girl has to rest to recover it.
Health - base CON - How much damage a girl can take
Mana - base WIS - How much spells a girl can cast
Job related
Discipline - base WIS, BEU - how well jobs are executed, how fast a girl can learn (get experience)
Charisma - base BEU, WIS, STR - how much custormers like the girls, girls with high charisma will have more succes at tasks that require them to interect with customers.
Combat related
Combat - base DEX, STR - the chance of hiting or defending a physical attack, does not affect damage (comsumes Stamina)
Spell - base WIS, DEX - the chance to hit or defend a magical attack (Comsumes Mana)
Combat Damage - base STR - how much damage is cased on a successful Combat hit
Spell Damage - base WIS - how much damage is cased on a successful Spell hit
Spell Resistance - base CON, WIS - Spell damage taken is reduced by this
Damage Resistance - base CON - Combat damage taken is reduced by this
What I need help with
First I need feedback on the attributes described, should I add one, remove another. Should I change the base attribute thats used to calculated the others? For instance I decided not to add libido. It wasnt very clear how much it affected the game play. You could have a whore with zero libido doing 6-8 customers per period and the customers would all be happy and give tips. Sure you could say things like a girl having sex with no libido will get sad or tired. But is those kind of details important enough to justify adding another attribute, therefore making the game more complex?
Second there is one of the most important points of the game missing here. Obedience. In the original WM Obedience is linked to the girls feeling, like happiness, love/hate and also things like Spirit and Confidence. In this game we are going to have to add fealings and somehow combine that with Dicipline and make things work. I'm just not sure how that should be done. I could just forget feelings and simply add Obedience and be done. But I'm not confident that thats is the best option. So here is where most of the work should be focused next.
One more thing I forgot to mention, Attributes are based on a 20 sided dice (d20) so max is 20 min is 1. Alright in the next post I will talk about how combat works, but I still got to code a combat demo.
I have a working programa that you can play with the attributes. I will post that soon.
Update:
The Attrites demo has been updated so that now I have Revision 1 of the attributes:
http://www.mediafire.com/?pr7ft1elg2650wo