Pink Petal Games
Feedback => New Features => Topic started by: null on November 30, 2009, 11:36:01 PM
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First, regarding training, how about redoing the system so that instead of being purely dependant upon how many girls you have training / how long they're doing it for perhaps there could be a max-training benefit determined by the highest stats a girl training currently has? Ie, your best girl can teach the others to be as good as she is but not any better. It'd make having a few girls that earned their stats through leveling a prerequisite to simply training everyone up.
Second, could you maybe halve the count of player actions per turn but double their effectiveness? Trying to actually do ten things per turn really just slows the pace of the game down terribly.
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Since training is the only thing that alters a girls stats your first suggestion wouldn't work.
As for the talk options being halfed but doubled in effectiveness I agree. Wouldn't hurt to even drop it to 3 choices per turn and make them even slightly more effective.
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Training does need looking at. :)
Actually, I quite like the idea. Girls get some on-the-job learning, so training isn't the only source of stat increases. Also, it would allow things like hiring a trainer for a particular stat. And the PCs one-on-one sessions with the girl constitute training of a sort, too.
I think I'd also like to see training be a bit more formal. Currently, it's a bit like a "workshop" approach, where they all get around a big table and compare notes. I think I'd like to see one girl appointed trainer, with maybe 5 pupils max, and probably training one skill (maybe with some minor improvements in a couple of others).
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That could work. I suppose the higher her skills are the more effective a trainer she is? That means at first if you want gains that get higher you'd need to change the trainer out consistently unless the trainers stats increase as well... but maybe at a much slower pace?
I thought maybe you could hire a trainer for a small fee, like send the girls off to a "training camp" for a couple weeks and then they'd come back with higher sexual skills depending on how much you're willing to pay.
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That could work. I suppose the higher her skills are the more effective a trainer she is?
How about the greater the difference in ability, the faster she trains? So if one girl is 20% and the other is 25% it's slow progress. And if one is 90% and the other 95%, it's just as slow. But if one is 5% and the other 95%, initial progress is quite fast, although it slows down quite quickly.
The other thing I sometimes think about is having a "teacher" skill, so that the higher the skill, the more effective the training.
I thought maybe you could hire a trainer for a small fee, like send the girls off to a "training camp" for a couple weeks and then they'd come back with higher sexual skills depending on how much you're willing to pay.
Except... in Crossgate, who would you send her too that you could trust to send her back? I think (speaking in my capacity as a brothel keeper) I'd prefer to hire instructors to come in and teach on-premises, unless I had some guarantee of neutrality from the teacher. On the other hand, offering a training scheme for the other gang's girls and then not giving them back afterwards sounds like a good idea for an event...
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I think I'd also like to see training be a bit more formal. Currently, it's a bit like a "workshop" approach, where they all get around a big table and compare notes. I think I'd like to see one girl appointed trainer, with maybe 5 pupils max, and probably training one skill (maybe with some minor improvements in a couple of others).
While I like the idea in theory, in practice I think this takes micromanagement far, far too far, considering the sheer number of girls. If, between turns, I'm spending twenty minutes organizing my training schedule and shuffling girls around, I'll get bored and stop playing - and I suspect I'd not be the only one.
Training as it stands is borked, sure, but it's simple, abstracted; I don't see that as a particularly bad thing. What I'd do, frankly, is make training cost money (for supplies, hired instructors, et cetera). Not a lot - 10, 15 gold per girl per session? - but enough that it'll add up if you're training 65 girls at once (which I, I must admit, tend to do).
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The fee seems like a good idea. It could even be more balanced if the fee increased with the girl's ability, to show how teaching a new girl the basics would be much less expensive than perfecting an expert's talents.
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Maybe somewhere in between? Set aside some girls as trainers, and others as trainees and let them organise their own grouping. No maximum size for a class, but pupil-teacher ration does have an effect.
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Why not set it so you can assign some girls as teachers (who can teach students up to a max of their skill levels), with each teacher contributing some total number of skill points to be divided among all students (with some minimum per student if students exceed total xp). As an example: each teacher gives 15xp total, assign two teachers and 3 students, and each student gets 10 points to her skills each turn, up to the teachers' max. Teachers could improve their skills very slowly while teaching (slower than working in the brothel), so it isn't a total loss for them.
The player could assign his own girls as teachers or outsource the job, where more skilled teachers would cost more to hire per turn. That way, the player either loses revenue by taking girls off brothel duty or pays for someone else to teach.
If you want higher skills to be harder to reach, assign an xp total to each skill and cost out the skills using a pyramid system (ie, the cost in xp to raise a skill to the next level is equal to the value of the next level - 1 costs 1, 2 costs 2 more, 3 costs 3 more, etc. Total cost for a skill level N = N*(N+1)/2). Skills advance rapidly to begin with and then slow down. The highest levels of skill would take forever to reach (of course dependent on the xp rewards - 5xp per turn using a skill would take over 1000 turns to get to a 100 from a 0). Under such a system, the game might not even need a cap on skills. Time would take care of the problem by itself. It would also be beneficial for girls to specialize in certain activities, further differentiating them from one another.
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Why not set it so you can assign some girls as teachers (who can teach students up to a max of their skill levels), with each teacher contributing some total number of skill points to be divided among all students (with some minimum per student if students exceed total xp). As an example: each teacher gives 15xp total, assign two teachers and 3 students, and each student gets 10 points to her skills each turn, up to the teachers' max. Teachers could improve their skills very slowly while teaching (slower than working in the brothel), so it isn't a total loss for them.
Good enough for me.
If you want higher skills to be harder to reach, assign an xp total to each skill and cost out the skills using a pyramid system ... Under such a system, the game might not even need a cap on skills. Time would take care of the problem by itself. It would also be beneficial for girls to specialize in certain activities, further differentiating them from one another.
Yeah, that's something I've been considering as well. Make those higher levels harder to reach.
Of course the real fix for this is to balance the money supply.
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Of course the real fix for this is to balance the money supply.
This, this, a thousand times this. I don't see training as utterly broken as it sits now, but I DO think it's an issue that I can have two brothels full of girls doing nothing but training while another brothel supports them all with a healthy profit. Money balancing is the real problem, because once you need more girls working in order to keep yourself out of debt, then you'll have fewer girls, by necessity, training.
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This, this, a thousand times this. I don't see training as utterly broken as it sits now, but I DO think it's an issue that I can have two brothels full of girls doing nothing but training while another brothel supports them all with a healthy profit. Money balancing is the real problem, because once you need more girls working in order to keep yourself out of debt, then you'll have fewer girls, by necessity, training.
Well, the plan was, and still is, to address this through the config screen necno is adding with this release. The plan was to add a slider that let players decrease the amount of gold from various activities. So maybe cut brothel income by 50%, movies by 25%. Then I was going to encourage people to have a play with the levels and see what best suited their play style, with a view to creating some presets that could be used like difficulty levels. Hopefully this will be faster, and more accurate that just tweaking a variable for each release and hoping to get it right at some point.
Of course, none of us thought that next major release would be quite this long in coming.
What I can do is add (another) config file to the game and let players edit that and see where that gets us. Not as convenient for the players, but it does move us forward.
Thoughts?
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I like the way this training system is starting to sound.
Interesting idea for the config menu. Letting the player adjust the income themselves. Only problem I can see with that is if you do have unlockables after the game it'll make it far too easy to gain points for unlockables.
If we stick with making unlockables... I think if you have straight up easy/normal/hard/chaos whatever. Then a Free play mode. In Freeplay you can alter the incomes like you mentioned Doc but you won't gain any unlockable points. As you said though, we can have the various players play around with the sliders and we can alter them to affect the various modes that could be added later on.
Most of this is probably FAR FAAAAAAR down the line though.
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If we stick with making unlockables... I think if you have straight up easy/normal/hard/chaos whatever. Then a Free play mode. In Freeplay you can alter the incomes like you mentioned Doc but you won't gain any unlockable points. As you said though, we can have the various players play around with the sliders and we can alter them to affect the various modes that could be added later on.
Most of this is probably FAR FAAAAAAR down the line though.
Yeah, that would work. I like that.
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... would it be possible, that the game read pictures with ( ) in it? (like "Sex(1).jpg" "Anal(10).jpg") so that the rename for the files is easier.
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I'd prefer not, personally. How would the brackets make renaming easier? Maybe we can find another way to do the same thing.
How about something like BDSM__whatever_you_like_after_the_double_underscore.jpg. We don't need numbers in most cases (the exception being the brothel pics) so we could probably set it up so that you could have anything you like there. In fact we do already: LesbianNotANumber.png should get picked up by the game.
So from that, I guess you could do what you want already, although I'd much perfer it if you used a syntax that didn't involved shell metacharacters.
Also, we're going to need to change the naming conventions. Currently the preg pictures are matched on with the pattern "Preg*.j*pg". Which is fine, except that the pattern also matches PregAnal*.jp*g, PregLes*.jp*g and the rest. So all the pregnancy-sex variants are going to wind up being used for pregnant profile pics as well.
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I know about it, and I thought I put in something that should catch those we want and those we don't after it loads.
edit-- I did put in a working, if inelegant filter to only get the preg images and not the preg sex images.
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I'd prefer not, personally. How would the brackets make renaming easier? Maybe we can find another way to do the same thing.
I know what he's getting at here. If you have them numbered with parenthesis, then when creating girls, you can name each pic according to the category as you find them and toss them in the folder. Windows will rename them CATEGORY(n).jpg for you. It saves a bit of effort in the end run. If you have the wildcard searches already, though, it shouldn't be too hard to implement (if you have to do anything at all).
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It's just a pain for non-windows users trying to manage their files.
Oh well, I expect I can cope. In any event, the game should already support the format.
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How would that affect Linux users? It's been a while since I last used Linux, but I don't recall the file management system handling non-alphanumeric characters strangely.
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Depends. If you're an old command line junkie like me, and you prefer to do everything from the shell, then those brackets play hob with things like command line completion.
It's not that important, really.
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Ahh, I see. I never used Linux much beyond a file server/router and as a platform for programming when I was going for a comp sci degree.
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I'd rather we left it as is... for consistency sake. However, if you could get the game to check folders for girls, and in each of those folders look for a Profile, Preg, Sex, Anal, folder inside each girl folder and just load all the images in those. I think it'd make things faster for modders anyways. (Perhaps not so much anymore)
Character>GIRL>SEX>01,02,03,04...
I dunno. I think it's fine as is. But this is coming from a guy who hasn't made his own girls.
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bah, it works pretty well as is, after all, renaming is the easy part, deciding which images to keep and what to throw out is the hard part more often that not, so it's really not much of an issue on my end when I make girls
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Well, it will already pick up pics where the number is in brackets, and has done for a while now. Subfolders seem like a better way to do it, and I might add that in sometime - probably to work in parallel with the current system, at least to begin with.
Training is going to have to change a bit. If nothing else, I'd like some non-linearity to it. But that's going to wait on getting the money balanced.
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I don't want to sound insulting, but if reason for having pictures naming changed to pic(x).jpg really is just because windows names duplicates that way, that is just laziness. It comes out as "Hmm, I'm lazy to rename them properly so why not make them rewrite the code, that way I don't have to bother renaming them".
There are plenty of (free) rename tools that are really powerful. I use ReNamer (http://www.den4b.com/downloads.php?project=ReNamer) when I have bulk of files to rename. But there are others, like Bulk Rename Utility (http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Download.php) and so on.