Whore Master Cathexis

[Xela]

i don't really have much to add on to it since it seems my ideas run pretty close to Xela's ideas or at least they have in the past few posts.

LoL

That is likely because I've spent to many time on Indie dev forums and chatroom throwing ideas around... there is a bunch of nominators that most communities want/like in Sims

[graodeareia]

Wow I kinda of disappointed. While the Alchimist Lab/Enchanting Altar can be a fun feature, the main reason for it was to satisfy the players thirst for the "role playing" aspect of the game, so that magic characters fell "magic". But if that is not enough, then we are back to ground zero on that aspect.

The main problem with combat magic is that it doesn't add to the game if combat is auto-resolved. On the contrary, its makes things less intuitive and confusing. The reason that combat will be auto-resolved is because of how long a turn takes. If the player where to control battles, one turn (a week of time) could take as much as a full hour in real time. So whats the problem with turns taking so long? Well I've have read lots of posts in  few threads that crazy linked here. Lots of the discutions are around pregnancy and the children that are born. So if each turn take too long that means that pregnacy will take a really long time in real time. For instance, lets say a full pregnancy cicle takes 40 weeks and the player spends an average of 30 mins per turn. That mean from the time a girl gets pregnant to the time the child is delivered it will take 20 hours of play. That is simply not acceptable. That will make pregnancy useless and since so many people care about that, the game will not appeal to those people.

It is important to notice that I'm not making the game for myself. By that I mean that I want the comunity to enjoy the game but also allow then access to the features they would like to have in the current WM but can't becouse its too complicated/time consuming to implement. I'm trying to design a game where it should be easy to add those features. For intance I decided to save the game to a database becouse amoung other things, it will be able to easily track who is the child of who and also, of course, who is the mother of who. In my mind that doesn't really add to the game play, but it does add to the "role playing" aspect, where people can do things like having a  mother/daugther threesome and stuff like that.

So in summery I thought the Alchimist Lab/Enchanting Altar was a feature that would make magical girls important without adding time consuming micro managment or time consuming combat. But a feedback like "I cannot picture many of those characters working in a lab or brewery" it becomes clear that those features do not fill the "role playing" gap for magical charcters. I guess its back to the drawing boards.

[Xela]

Wow I kinda of disappointed. While the Alchimist Lab/Enchanting Altar can be a fun feature, the main reason for it was to satisfy the players thirst for the "role playing" aspect of the game, so that magic characters fell "magic". But if that is not enough, then we are back to ground zero on that aspect.

It is a great feature! I said that we are also making a WMlike game in Python and it will have both Alchemy and Item Augmentation. It will also have Artifact lab that will play a big role in the game. But it is a fun feature as a filler, not as a main magic outlet, game will 'feel' very incomplete and awkward with just that feature representing magic.

The main problem with combat magic is that it doesn't add to the game if combat is auto-resolved. On the contrary, its makes things less intuitive and confusing. The reason that combat will be auto-resolved is because of how long a turn takes. If the player where to control battles, one turn (a week of time) could take as much as a full hour in real time. So whats the problem with turns taking so long? Well I've have read lots of posts in  few threads that crazy linked here. Lots of the discutions are around pregnancy and the children that are born. So if each turn take too long that means that pregnacy will take a really long time in real time. For instance, lets say a full pregnancy cicle takes 40 weeks and the player spends an average of 30 mins per turn. That mean from the time a girl gets pregnant to the time the child is delivered it will take 20 hours of play. That is simply not acceptable. That will make pregnancy useless and since so many people care about that, the game will not appeal to those people.

What games did you play with FF Style type of combat taking that long? It shouldn't take more then 1 - 3 minutes, maybe 5 minutes tops. Or do you mean by battle some sort of exploration/rougelike engine?

This is an example of a battle engine written in Python for RenPy (Alpha v.5 or v.6): https://www.dropbox.com/s/o4fsd2bphkyztlr/BattleEngine%20Demo-win32.rar

For user guided combat you could simply add something like this and make exploration logical. For example you were talking about 'levels' in Catacombs. You could force player character along with a team of girls to 'clear' a catacomb level first and only then, after defeating level boss(after 5 - 10 fights), could you send normal girls for exploration and item hunting on their own. Also a number of quests given by NPC's in the city that would have to be resolved by player guided combat... Rest? Autocalculate rest of the battles, that way you can insure that player can have some fun fighting but players will also not be FORCED to fight every single turn themselves.

In any case, that is one way you can add combat without ruining the game, similar feature was included in first release of Otherworld and was very well liked. Daisy decided to remove it later since it was to simple and to buggy I guess...

It is important to notice that I'm not making the game for myself. By that I mean that I want the comunity to enjoy the game but also allow then access to the features they would like to have in the current WM but can't becouse its too complicated/time consuming to implement. I'm trying to design a game where it should be easy to add those features. For intance I decided to save the game to a database becouse amoung other things, it will be able to easily track who is the child of who and also, of course, who is the mother of who. In my mind that doesn't really add to the game play, but it does add to the "role playing" aspect, where people can do things like having a  mother/daugther threesome and stuff like that.

WM was supposed to have Mother/Daughter code but that was never implemented. I don't think it is a very important feature to a lot of people, but people keep asking if pregnancy will be a part of every damn hentai sim game on every forum so I guess it is important to add this feature. I would prefer to see user guided combat thou... it is what's really missing from every indie game out there and also something that would make an awesome addition to practically every game.

PS: I know that SlaveMaker has combat but it is to simple to be counted as such

PS2: Another thing you can play with if you decide to go with userguided combat are action points, player will have to decide if he wants to spend those interacting with girls/shopping in town or hunting for items in the Catacombs, I think that is a logical step up for next generation version of WM. But on the other hand you wanted to make a faster game oriented around concept of 'purer' simming that I suggest, also a great design. It's always up to programmer in the end to decide.

[Marquis]

Were you planning on having 'team' combat? For example, if three girls explores the catacombs on the same shift they're considered a team. Two girls on security on the same shift are a team.
If so, magic could be integrated meaningfully into auto-combat at a strategic level.


Let's say a team with a battle mage can inflict damage for a number of rounds before a warrior can close. A warrior against a mage would take damage while closing but if she survives, could easily kill the mage (if she has no combat skill). A healer could reduce damage during the combat helping warriors survive while closing. A warrior with some magic skill might reduce the ranged damage.


All of this can be 'behind the curtain' but gives the player reasons to put a balanced team on security and/or exploration.

[Xela]

Were you planning on having 'team' combat? For example, if three girls explores the catacombs on the same shift they're considered a team. Two girls on security on the same shift are a team.
If so, magic could be integrated meaningfully into auto-combat at a strategic level.


Let's say a team with a battle mage can inflict damage for a number of rounds before a warrior can close. A warrior against a mage would take damage while closing but if she survives, could easily kill the mage (if she has no combat skill). A healer could reduce damage during the combat helping warriors survive while closing. A warrior with some magic skill might reduce the ranged damage.


All of this can be 'behind the curtain' but gives the player reasons to put a balanced team on security and/or exploration.

You can do the same with slingers/archers without magic... Does it make sense for logical combat is the real question?

Another thing, while multiple girls on the team is an interesting concept, the idea here if I am not mistaken was putting a girl in charge of your gangs? Both is an overkill in one game, no need to make the design to complex.

[graodeareia]

  What games did you play with FF Style type of combat taking that long? It shouldn't take more then 1 - 3 minutes, maybe 5 minutes tops. Or do you mean by battle some sort of exploration/rougelike engine?
 

I've never played a community based game that include combat so I don't really know whats out there. My experience comes from playing computer/console RPGs for more than 20 years. Many games that I played have long combat sequences, specially boss fights. I'm 31 at the moment and I started gaming on Atari 2600. Also my favorite games are either simulation games (tycoon style) or rpgs. Since this game is tycoon oriented with RPG elements I believe that my experience could add a lot to the game. Anyways, I think that if there were player controled combat, it would be in the style of a game called Drangon Quest. In Dragon quest boss battles can be quite time consuming. For each character's turn you have a simple menu with options like "Attack", "Spell", "Item". You choose the action for each character, see the results and then the enemy chooses the action for his characters and you see the results, then its your turn again and so on. Its quite easy to implement such combat style and the way I'm designing combat is actually well suited for that. The combat will already be turn based with an action being picked for each character's turn. Instead of the AI choosing the players action, the player would choose. The AI would still have to be implemented for the enemy, so the amount of work would increase. But I think the amount of work needed for the whole game would only increase by something like 10%. Of course 10% of a the total time is still quite a while. One thing that I like to mention is that even if there is player controled battle, the player himself will not take part in the battles. I mentioned the reasons somewhere in this thread. And of course, player controled battles must be optional so that some player can choose to ignore the combat if they want.
 

The problem in regards to time is that later in the game you could have mutiple characters exploring the catacombs. Even if the combat takes 3 mins, having 5 battles to fight in one turn would take 15 mins. If the player has to control the security related battles then that adds more time. If the gang wars are player controled, that adds even more time. And then the player still has to do all the managment required by the other parts of the game. So if you add it all up the turn will take quite a while.

I don't think it is a very important feature to a lot of people, but people keep asking if pregnancy will be a part of every damn hentai sim game on every forum so I guess it is important to add this feature.

In my WM playthrough I always auto-buy anti-preg drugs and simply ignore that aspect of the game. But from all the posts out there it seams lots players find that to be quite important. I can't ignore what the people want. So as I meantioned that forces me to make turns that last only a few minutes in most cases. Also there is the Age factor. In WM age is not important. I WMX I wanted age to be more important. That is, in real life most man prefer younger looking girls simply becouse after 30 or so, gravity takes it toll, wrinkles start to be noticed and stuff like that. On the other hand, there are lots of people that like more mature girls hence the things like MILF fetish. So I would like in game time to progress faster so that girls could become old. That would allow for Traits to have age restriction so that older characters would lose some youth related Traits (eg Firm Body) as they age and gain some mature oriented Traits (eg Wise). If would be cool to have old whores teaching the new ones in a whore school type setting. So ideally, I wanted a single complete play through game to spam something like 50 years. In the end the player is an dirty old man (like the owner of Playboy) with a big house, in the style of the Playboy mansion. I'm still unsure if thats the path the game should take but in theory it sounds interesting.

One last thing. I enjoy turn based combat a lot. I mentioned to you how I was originaly designing the skill system to later reuse in another game. This other game would be like pokemon. It would be in the WM world and the story would be that some inventor created a pokeball like device that can be used to capture defeated girls. So the player would be an adventurer, exploring the Catacombs fighting and capturing the characters and later using those same character to fight other battle. In a context like that combat would be uber important. But WM combat is just one of the forms to aquire more girls and items. Putting a lot of efford in that will just mean that the actuall game takes much longer to be playable. And what I really want is to have a simple playable game that can then take a the direction that is pointed out by the comunity. So instead of making a full featured game and then releasing it, I prefer to make a simple game that allows people to submit new content. And then expand that simple game to include the features that are most wanted. With that aproach I can't really invest too much in any given feature. I'm hoping that the sum of lots of simple features will be greater then the sum of a few complex features.

[Xela]

No userguided combat it is then

 In any case, presentation is what really sells it. Gameplay and interface/controls are at least as important as new features in the game... Those are what really needs to be logical, simple but interesting , repetitive but with small variation to keep players playing without getting bored. Everyone seems to be discussing new features but keep forgetting to talk about what gameplay will be like and what interface controls/graphics will be like.

 Any thoughts or are you leaving those for later? The reason I am asking is that there have been games in the past that were remade with new features, more pics but flailed because controls and interface was poorly designed...
   
 

[graodeareia]

Were you planning on having 'team' combat?

That idea has already been discused in this thead before. While that could be very interesting there are quite a few problem that that could cause. There where also sugestions on how to overcome those problems. But in the end you have to ask yourself how much is combat important in a game like WM? If it insn't that important then why invest so much development time in it?

Also as Xela noted ranged combat can be simulated even without any combat spells. And as for healing, any Warrior can carry a few vials of potion that he can use to heal during battle. The main problem with using this advanced tatics in when deciding a team or equiping a character is how will the player know if the choices he made yielded any results? All he sees is the result and not the actual battle taking place. So say a charater adds a Healer to a team. Then he passes his turn and he sees that his team beat some monsters. Does that mean his choice to add a Healer was tactically correct or does it mean that the enemies his team faced where simply weak? Its hard for the game to give players any feedback on his tactical decisions if combats are autoresolved. Its also hard for a player to judge what character he will send to Catacomb mission. Say he has 2 spare girls and 2 jobs he needs done. One is cleaning the other is combat. Looking at the stats of a Wizard and the stats of a Warrior how can a player really tell which one of those would be better suited for combat? Well he could estimate how much potencial damage the Wizard could deal the the enemy before the enemy closes in. Then he would have to figure out if the Wizard could survive long enough to kill the enemy before he dies. And then make a similar estimation for the Warrier character. But he would also have to consider that the enemy could also be a Wizard in which case his estimations would be completly diferent. So either the player would have to pull out a spreadsheat to help him take that decision or he would have to simply take a change and randomly make a choice. I summery think Wizard character cause more confusion in the player then they add to the game if the combat is auto-resolved.

[graodeareia]

In any case, presentation is what really sells it. Gameplay and interface/controls are at least as important as new features in the game... Those are what really needs to be logical, simple but interesting , repetitive but with small variation to keep players playing without getting bored. Everyone seems to be discussing new features but keep forgetting to talk about what gameplay will be like and what interface controls/graphics will be like.

 Any thoughts or are you leaving those for later? The reason I am asking is that there have been games in the past that were remade with new features, more pics but flailed because controls and interface was poorly designed...

I make bussiness application for a living so I have a lot of experience making easy to use interfaces for many purposes/use cases. So I intend to use that experience along with the experience I have playing hundreds of games to make the user interface as easy to use and intuitive as possible. Of course since the game will be made incrementaly decisions that where taken earlier in the process might become obsolete in the long run, so I will have to constatly go back and fix the interface as the game gains features. But that kinda or reworking is typical in applications that are prototype based and generally considered worth it by the community that uses those approachs (this is called agile development).
The presentation side of things are a whole diferent thing. My graphical design skills are limited at best. Unless we can get an artist or designer in the team that aspect of the game will really suffer. But recently I download Slave Maker 3 and Otherworld and from what I can see in the games, also considering the original WM, I won't be behind that quality of work. In fact I believe my graphics will be of better quality then that. But for instance take the russian wood skin for WM. My work will be much worst then that. I can't even get close to that kinda stuff.

As for planning I'm currently working of the character screen. The one you will see when you click on the "Girl's Detail" button. So I'm making graphics for that as I add content to it. Just like the art work I posted here. As the screen get more content, for instance I'm working on Traits so I will add them to the Char Screen, I will make more graphic assets for it. The goal is for everything to be "ready to ship" as it gets made. Of course things will be enhanced as I go along, but in general I intend to do the Inteface/Graphics as I implement each screen. Using that aproach whatever is ready is usable right away. As I add content the the Char Screen I will post update screenshots here.

[zuhydruh]

ok i am not sure how to do the blue boxes of other peoples text that aside.


About magic if it's not going to be in the game make up some form of story why most forms of magic don't work that well hopefully resolve most of the magic character issues that may come up. though then again i do like more story/depth to the games i tend to play.


i know it was said that turn based combat wasn't going to in the game though i was going to suggest why not give the player a choice if they want to take part in the battle or auto resolve it. for example at the end of week a player sees all the records of stuff that went on that week at the bottom there is a button called resolve battles which brings up a different page and allows the player to choose which battles they actually want to do and which they will just let auto battle if the player doesn't even want to look at it they just check a box in options and the game will automatically auto resolve all battles for them and show the results in the records page.


Aging, pregnancy, and interactions all three of theses are important well to me at least. Aging is an inevitability since time will go by though i am hoping there will be potions, items, and traits that can help with that such as something that will make the user younger, older, or immortal. i don't expect such items to be easy to get plus any item that may add a trait such as immortal could possibly have some nasty side effects. I find interactions with the girls/npcs on the individual level to be important. maybe i want to take a girl to dinner to make her like me some more or maybe different styles of meaningless sex with or without protection (because there are those of us that just want to knock them up). hopefully there will be a good number of interactions a player can do with individual girls. some girls in the original WM gave me enough trouble that i didn't really use them for work since they had a nasty habit of disobeying, killing/wounding people, and well more so over a pain to work with. instead of getting rid of them i just sent them to the dungeon to break their minds or wills preferably their will and used them for myself to knock up over and over again and put the daughters to work or sell off. (yes i can be rather evil)


well those are my ideas and some of my interests.

[graodeareia]

ok i am not sure how to do the blue boxes of other peoples text that aside.

At the top right of each post this is a quote button

About magic if it's not going to be in the game make up some form of story why most forms of magic don't work that well hopefully resolve most of the magic character issues that may come up. though then again i do like more story/depth to the games i tend to play.

I expect that at some point of the development cycle someone steps up as a writer for the team. That person will be resposible for righting dialogs texts, story, descriptions and so on. If I have to do that myself the game will probabily have a shallow story with simple text and dialogs. The reason for this is that I got my hands full already and don't have time for that kinda stuff.

i know it was said that turn based combat wasn't going to in the game though i was going to suggest why not give the player a choice if they want to take part in the battle or auto resolve it. for example at the end of week a player sees all the records of stuff that went on that week at the bottom there is a button called resolve battles which brings up a different page and allows the player to choose which battles they actually want to do and which they will just let auto battle if the player doesn't even want to look at it they just check a box in options and the game will automatically auto resolve all battles for them and show the results in the records page.

Today I decided to take a diferent route for the combat. I will add a pool here and the comunity can decide if they want player controled combat or auto-resolved combat.

Aging, pregnancy, and interactions all three of theses are important well to me at least. Aging is an inevitability since time will go by though i am hoping there will be potions, items, and traits that can help with that such as something that will make the user younger, older, or immortal. i don't expect such items to be easy to get plus any item that may add a trait such as immortal could possibly have some nasty side effects.

What I'm really aiming to create is not a full game with all the content. I going to create all the tools so that the comunity can add content them selfs. The way that that is going to work is that I intend to have a core team of content creators that create the "official" content of the game, the content thats available with each release of the game. But any modder can and should be allowed to create any kinda of content and post those for people that want to download it. The official content comes with the game and other content can be download at will by the players. This content will include traits, girls packages, story, itens and basically most of the games content.
So as far as what Traits or Items will be available, the up to the modders and content team. I will just make sure that all the programing is there to suport that content.

I find interactions with the girls/npcs on the individual level to be important. maybe i want to take a girl to dinner to make her like me some more or maybe different styles of meaningless sex with or without protection (because there are those of us that just want to knock them up). hopefully there will be a good number of interactions a player can do with individual girls. some girls in the original WM gave me enough trouble that i didn't really use them for work since they had a nasty habit of disobeying, killing/wounding people, and well more so over a pain to work with. instead of getting rid of them i just sent them to the dungeon to break their minds or wills preferably their will and used them for myself to knock up over and over again and put the daughters to work or sell off. (yes i can be rather evil)

For interaction I'm looking at some other games for inspiration. Games like Otherworld and Slave Maker offer some better player/character interaction the the original WM does. So you can expect some quite good interections. Of course, as with everything in this game, when I do implement interections I will take community feedback and tune it so satisfy the most demanded features.

[graodeareia]

Ok since so many people (actually only about 4 said they would like to see some turn based combat I added a poll for it. The poll will run for a week or until I start to work on combat, which ever comes first. If you care about this aspect of the game, just place your vote on the poll. Whatever option is most voted will be what the game has.

[Xela]

Ok since so many people (actually only about 4said they would like to see some turn based combat I added a poll for it. The poll will run for a week or until I start to work on combat, which ever comes first. If you care about this aspect of the game, just place your vote on the poll. Whatever option is most voted will be what the game has.

 You're a weird guy

 It's like asking a bunch of bears if they like honey... There is a bunch of features that 70 - 80% of pretty much any community would like to see in the game, ability to fight a good turnbased battle every now and then is one of those things and as an advocate for FF style combat in any new generation sim indies I welcome the poll!

 On the other hand don't rely on public opinion for all of decisions for your game, there is always a danger that game will start turning into something you don't like and you may loose interest in making it. Generally I think you have a very good grasp on game logic and your own concept, going to far off course might not lead to a better game at all...

 It's summer and there are not that many people around, week might not be enough to get enough votes to get a clear picture.

[graodeareia]

It might not even be a week. If I start the combat code I will freeze the poll at whatever it is.
I don't care about a clear picture. Whatever is decided is whats its gona be and that is that. If someone ever complains in the future I will just point out the the poll results and move on.

As far as listening to the comunity I only care about people that are talking in the threads as things happen. There is an expression in my country for that: "You can't arrive late to the train and want to sit by the window". Those people that were involved in the design discussions have a saying, I consider them to be designer along with me. If someone comes in the future and says something about a feature thats already been worked out I will just say that the community already decided on that and that that person is late to the party. But ultimatly the decision is always for the core team to make. And right now I'm the only member of that team. So anything that will go against my plans for the game will simply not be included in it.

On combat especificaly I figured out a way to make turns long and yet allow for in game time to pass quickly. Each turn will pass month of time instead of a week. So if the turn takes 15 mins average, the player can still advance a years time in 3 hours of game play. Of course some people might think that 1 month is too long but in this case you can't have your cake and eat it too. There is simply no way to make a full playthrough last a few decades and have things like player controled combat if turns advance only a weeks time. This is one case where a person saying he prefers that turns last a week won't matter. That is, if player controled battles win the poll, turns will last a month. The reason for that is becouse I said so.

[Zylo]

It took me a while but I finally read through this thread.

I think combat wouldn't be that bad, but it needs to be short, diverse and modern feeling.  I agree that it shouldn't take up the majority of game.  It also needs to be diverse enough to be interesting and modern enough so it doesn't get to tedious.  I'm a firm  believer in features that have an appreciated effect.  I was fine with the auto-resolved battles but now I think about my behavior
 regarding it, i would skip over the summary or I would get frustrated cause the gangs would engage into a battle that they prob. couldn't ever win (Don't know cause it wouldn't display the enemy stats).  I think the nice balance between these two would be controlling the unit maneuvers into combat but allow it to auto-resolve once it engages.  If the battle is still going on by the end of the turn, the player could retreat or press the attack.