General Discussion

[Xela]

Let me know if you won't have a choice but to use icons. Those are just examples, I will find a better ones then.

Yeah, all the time I've spent thinking there was something wrong with my code... RenPy still has some bugs to clear I guess. I employed the simplest button that exists in RenPy and it works.

Currently looks like this:

[DarkTl]

Well, I don't know how are you going to build further interface. Where are you going to put icons? I think we definitely shouldn't use only icons without any text, in Alkion there're many buttons without text, and I still didn't get used to them.

[Xela]

Well, I don't know how are you going to build further interface. Where are you going to put icons? I think we definitely shouldn't use only icons without any text, in Alkion there're many buttons without text, and I still didn't get used to them.

I wasn't planning to use icons without text. And we also have tooltip that isn't used as much in Alkion as in PyTFall.

[GonDra]

On the subject of a generic story: How about having earned / inherited (or something similar) a license allowing the player to open and operate a brothel.
It could give the free whores another reason not to work on the streets since they don't have to look after themselves and pay protection money to gangs or police since they are working for your legal Brothel, instead of working in a gray area with a pretty shady reputation sorrounding them.
Also assuming that the town the game is the cultural and political center of the country/region a lot of girls could come there trying to become the maid, mistress or bodyguard (or master of the arena) of the cream of society only to find out that it isn't all that easy to get to them, cue the player providing jobs and maybe a way up the social ladder for them.
(just spouting ideas here)

I am not the best out there with the english language but I would be willing to look over peoples texts / writing small stuff if I find the time for it.

[Xela]

On the subject of a generic story: How about having earned / inherited (or something similar) a license allowing the player to open and operate a brothel.
It could give the free whores another reason not to work on the streets since they don't have to look after themselves and pay protection money to gangs or police since they are working for your legal Brothel, instead of working in a gray area with a pretty shady reputation sorrounding them.
Also assuming that the town the game is the cultural and political center of the country/region a lot of girls could come there trying to become the maid, mistress or bodyguard (or master of the arena) of the cream of society only to find out that it isn't all that easy to get to them, cue the player providing jobs and maybe a way up the social ladder for them.
(just spouting ideas here)

I am not the best out there with the english language but I would be willing to look over peoples texts / writing small stuff if I find the time for it.

Kewl, I am still working on jobs, since I do not have a code structure and every job is unique it is taking a while...

[Xela]

@Dev team

Ok, got a good amount of work done today.. Still far from finished with advanced logic but I think game made it to a point where it doesn't crash every 5 minutes.

0.23 is uploaded to our DropBox dev folder.

Logic behind the jobs:

1) Strippers go first. They relay data to be used in other jobs, that is half implemented right now.

2) Service girls go second.
 Logic behind this one is fairly complex, they take care of bar clients if you have a bar and club clients if you have a club first with a small chance of them cleaning the place up. After that is done, they will clean until brothel dirt is less than 80. Amount of clients heavily depends on how well your strippers preformed in previous job.

3) Prostitutes go next.
 Basically the same old method, nothing changed here. (I think)

4) Service girls go again, but this time they clean the building until it is spotless or they run out of strength.

5) Brothel report is generated, fairly basic right now but should be awesome and informative very soon.

Texts are simply meant to relay as much info as possible at this point of development. I'll change those later to be more user friendly.

There are about 15 things for me to do and improve upon planned out right now... we'll slowly continue to develop this one day (or week  ) at a time.

PS: We're little over 6k lines on code now I think (not counting the battle engine, standard modules and .xml files). Not bad for a n00b coder alongside a small dev team I would say 

PS2: I've created two new folders in my DB folder, throw any trace bug reports you may encounter and stupid stuff that gotta be fixed as well.

[DarkTl]

On the subject of a generic story: How about having earned / inherited (or something similar) a license allowing the player to open and operate a brothel.

Yeah, that's a good explanation why MC bothers with brothel but not something else, regardless of main plot. The question is how he earned it in the first place. I would rather not make another dead-father-brothel-manager, it's an old and boring story 
Any ideas, anyone?

I am not the best out there with the english language but I would be willing to look over peoples texts / writing small stuff if I find the time for it.

I would appreciate that.

[rudistoned]

Hey guys,

congratulations on your progress! I'm interested in the quest/mission system for the warriors and I'd like to code the logic for it. Since nobody mentioned developing it, I suppose work has not started on it yet? I'd hate to duplicate something that already exists.

Goal
Develop a system that allows one or more characters to go on a quest, face several encounters and return with a reward if all obstacles can be overcome.

New classes
Quest
Represents a series of encounters that a party of characters has to deal with to earn the reward.
The quest should have a cost to pay so it can be started. It should also decide which characters in the party face a particular encounter and should define if the reward for successful completion of the quest is just the sum of the encounter rewards or something else.

Encounter
Represents an obstacle questing characters have to overcome. Possible obstacles are monsters to fight, traps to avoid, secure locations to break in, natural hazards to brave or whatever else fits the setting.
An encounter should contain some kind of test, e.g. skill checks, that determines the outcome of the encounter. It should also apply the effects of the outcome to the characters, e.g. reduce character health if they've been in a fight.
It may also provide a reward for success.

Interfaces
This system would need to interact with:
the character instances to apply encounter outcomes and to perform skill checks
anything else?


Questions
* How do skill checks work in PyTFall? In Otherworld, the most basic way to see if a maid cooked a nice meal is to generate a random number between 1 and 100 and check if it is lower than the maid's cooking skill.
* Is the character class already stable, or is it changing often?
* What kind of encounters do you think are interesting?



What do you think? IMHO, this system is quite scalable, meaning it can simulate both simple and complex quests. Just to be clear, this is not meant to be a mini-RPG. A fight can be as simple as checking a warriors martial prowess (however PyTFall measures that) against a difficulty. Nevertheless, if someone decides to expand warrior management into a mini-RPG, this system will be able to accomodate that via more complex encounters, e.g. changing the fight I mentioned before into several rounds of attack and defense rolls or maybe even powering up the battle engine.

For now, I'd start with the logic calculating encounter outcomes and rewards. The GUI needed to make use of the quest system will probably be created by someone else, because I don't really want to learn how to code GUIs in RenPy. Possible additions would be texts describing what happened on the quest to the player (if that is even desirable).

[DarkTl]

What kind of encounters do you think are interesting?

Well, according to game setting, "failed slave revolt taking place in the country that was squashed but with very significant losses so now slaves are not allowed to train in battle magic or combat".

Main plot probably will have something to do with deciding between government and slaves underground, and looking for prewar techs to have enough power.

So if you ask me, things like raiding some slave camp or protect it, or looking for techs in prewar buildings ruins (with traps and locks = checks for agility and intelligence) and so on are welcomed. These are for high-level parties, low-level simple things like a randomly discovered cave with some monsters and gold are needed too.

[Xela]

Hey guys,

congratulations on your progress!

Thanks We're are doing our best as time permits

I'm interested in the quest/mission system for the warriors and I'd like to code the logic for it. Since nobody mentioned developing it, I suppose work has not started on it yet? I'd hate to duplicate something that already exists.

Goal
Develop a system that allows one or more characters to go on a quest, face several encounters and return with a reward if all obstacles can be overcome.

I am completely lost here... Such system comes with RenPy. It's like Tifa's quest only with multiple characters and longer storyline?!? Or do you mean something else? I mean, if we are talking about the same thing, such system does not only already exist, it is an absolutely awesome and resourceful system!

New classes
Quest
Represents a series of encounters that a party of characters has to deal with to earn the reward.
The quest should have a cost to pay so it can be started. It should also decide which characters in the party face a particular encounter and should define if the reward for successful completion of the quest is just the sum of the encounter rewards or something else.

Encounter
Represents an obstacle questing characters have to overcome. Possible obstacles are monsters to fight, traps to avoid, secure locations to break in, natural hazards to brave or whatever else fits the setting.
An encounter should contain some kind of test, e.g. skill checks, that determines the outcome of the encounter. It should also apply the effects of the outcome to the characters, e.g. reduce character health if they've been in a fight.
It may also provide a reward for success.

Interfaces
This system would need to interact with:
the character instances to apply encounter outcomes and to perform skill checks
anything else?

Every single thing you describe here is already available with nearly infinite options and possibilities. I do not have time to write a guide right now on how to create awesome quests as I am using the little free time that I have to code advanced logic for jobs.

Questions
* How do skill checks work in PyTFall? In Otherworld, the most basic way to see if a maid cooked a nice meal is to generate a random number between 1 and 100 and check if it is lower than the maid's cooking skill.

Same way basically, I would take a different approach and create number of meals and required skill girl needs to cook those properly.

Questions
* Is the character class already stable, or is it changing often?

Not very stable and will change and grow for as long as the game being developed.

Questions
* What kind of encounters do you think are interesting?

To many to describe...

What do you think? IMHO, this system is quite scalable, meaning it can simulate both simple and complex quests. Just to be clear, this is not meant to be a mini-RPG. A fight can be as simple as checking a warriors martial prowess (however PyTFall measures that) against a difficulty. Nevertheless, if someone decides to expand warrior management into a mini-RPG, this system will be able to accomodate that via more complex encounters, e.g. changing the fight I mentioned before into several rounds of attack and defense rolls or maybe even powering up the battle engine.

I still do not understand what you're trying to do. Unless I am mistaken, you are thinking about quests development in terms of a game that is being developed from a scratch. That is the case with OtherWorld and PytherWorld but we are using a very powerful framework in PyTFall that allows absolutely amazing capabilities and options for events and quests that can put some commercial games to shame. Otherwise I simply do not understand what you're offering to code here.

For now, I'd start with the logic calculating encounter outcomes and rewards. The GUI needed to make use of the quest system will probably be created by someone else, because I don't really want to learn how to code GUIs in RenPy. Possible additions would be texts describing what happened on the quest to the player (if that is even desirable).

With this, if I understand correctly, you want to code an alternative, automated battle resolving system to the one that we have where player must fight manually. It is quite useful, I was planning to code one myself but basically by simply compare battle stats of both parties with a couple of random elements involved (player's luck, just random chance etc.) but if you are planning to do something more complex, it's even better!

It's late and I may have misunderstood what you're offering to code for the game. Maybe you should explain your vision on quests in greater detail. Also don't forget that there are other more urgent game-elements I offered you as options that need to be coded.

[Xela]

Well, according to game setting, "failed slave revolt taking place in the country that was squashed but with very significant losses so now slaves are not allowed to train in battle magic or combat".

Main plot probably will have something to do with deciding between government and slaves underground, and looking for prewar techs to have enough power.

So if you ask me, things like raiding some slave camp or protect it, or looking for techs in prewar buildings ruins (with traps and locks = checks for agility and intelligence) and so on are welcomed. These are for high-level parties, low-level simple things like a randomly discovered cave with some monsters and gold are needed too.

We already have everything needed to cover both of these quests... no scratch that, we have everything but 'time' to create those  quests but we WILL get around to it eventually. There just so many other things to do right now with advanced logic, features, screens and other GUI elements and so on. Not mentioning systems that are planned for Simbro version but we haven't even started to work on yet...

[rudistoned]

You were talking about things to do for warrior girls. The basic idea was that the player gives money to a warrior, she buys equipment, maybe hires other people if she needs help and wanders off to fulfill some quest. The player is involved as money lender and questgiver and receives a share of the profits if the quest succeeds.
The only graphical elements I propose are a GUI element allowing the player to offer a quest to a warrior and a results screen displaying the results of the quest a few days/weeks later. However, I'm not interested in these graphical elements. I am offering to code a few classes that make coding the logic for quests easier by formalizing their structure into encounters. If that is already taken care of I'm happy.

I would take a different approach and create number of meals and required skill girl needs to cook those properly

That's not the most basic way I was asking for ;-)

Also don't forget that there are other more urgent game-elements I offered you as options that need to be coded.

I did not forget, it's just that those are mostly content-heavy and I'm not good at developing content. I'd rather develop game mechanics. Apart from the content-heavy choices, as far as I remember, the others were tied to this game really closely and I'd rather develop something more modular, so it might be of use somewhere else too. The arena system probably has many GUI elements and I also never played WM long enough to find out about the arena. I'd have to familiarize myself with that first I suppose. The mission system sounded most interesting.


I'm off to look at Tifa's quest now, maybe it helps me understand the confusion here.
EDIT:
So Tifa's quest is all about RenPy being a visual novel engine, which is great. However, I was not talking about quests for the player character, as I thought was clear from the preceeding discussion. I was talking about a system to automatically resolve quests, without player interaction. I fail to see how RenPy makes that any easier.

[DarkTl]

Xela, if I understand correctly, rudistoned talkes about advanced mission system for warriors and parties of warriors, not Tifa-like quests with participation of player. You talked about them yourself in reply #268.

You also might want to take a look at Brothel S.im mentioned in other games thread. It has some fresh ideas, including stats and mission system.

[Xela]

Xela, if I understand correctly, rudistoned talkes about advanced mission system for warriors and parties of warriors, not Tifa-like quests with participation of player. You talked about them yourself in reply #268.

You also might want to take a look at Brothel S.im mentioned in other games thread. It has some fresh ideas, including stats and mission system.

Thanks

@Rudi

Yeah! We were talking about two different things and I did misunderstand you completely. Nothing has been done for the system that would send warriors off to do missions/quests. It is very useful and prolly the first priority right now since I am working on jobs and that is one of the jobs for warrior types.

Interface is on me, don't worry about that.

Options for quests are:

- Escort for a trade caravan (Issued by merchants)
- Guard duty (Issued by local highborns)
- Raid on Monster Nest (Issues by local authorities)
- Quest (Issued by you, on information obtains from NPC's, Events or other means)
- Extortion (Issued by you, on request of NPC)

Options for encounters are:

- Monsters
- Other Warriors, maybe in game characters that are not in players employment
- Magical Anomaly
- Traps set during the war
- NPC
- Other warrior party returning from a mission?


Many more I expect... it's a matter of time and creativity.

Class should keep track of available quests and remove them when time expires. New Quests are added randomly or after an event in game (Like meeting NPC)

It's the general idea anyway.

[DarkTl]

I accidentally noticed that CherryWood has many great pics for schools in his folder. I write this post just in case if I'm the only one who have noticed them.