December Update

Monthly status update:  I have no idea when the next release will be ready.  I'm guesstimating spring or summer at the moment.

K, that's out of the way.  I haven't worked on the game much at all this month.  I've mainly just been enjoying my break, re-reading comments, daydreaming about the game, oh, and actually PLAYING some other porn games.  I've found a few I really like too.  I'll puts some links at the bottom of this post if you're curious.

On the upside, the new computer is up & running.  On paper, it's much faster than the old machine, and in many places it really shines.  However, when it comes time to save my work, it takes forever.  At this point I have to assume there's a bug somewhere that's causing Adobe to hang, or perhaps the virus scanner is going crazy & scanning every block before it allows a write.  Whatever it is, I can see that one processor (or core) is running flat out for minutes at a time, while the rest of the machine sits idle.  I guess Adobe needs to multi-thread the save function?  Frustrating, because I can literally copy the entire .fla file in 5 seconds, but Adobe takes upwards of 5 minutes to save the thing.  What's it doing?

I have been tinkering with something however.  Let me attach a picture below.  See if you can figure it out.  ;P

It's not done yet, but yeah, I'm working on alternate color schemes for each of the characters.  Eventually I hope to have a slider bar so you can make your own color combos as well.  Learning to code this has been both fun & incredibly frustrating.  I'll probably rant about it later.  I like the results, but let's just say that Actionscript2 does not handle setting colors well (imo).

This has also served as a nice time to go back & clean up my lines & such.  The hero sprites were some of the first things I drew for the game, which means there was a lot of draw-erase-draw-erase going on.  It's amazing to me how overly complex some of the curves are because of this.  I'll see what looks like a simple curve, but upon close inspection I'll discover it's being defined by 50 points (should be like 3 or 4).  So, I've been fixing that too.  There's a (small) chance that this will result in a faster game for those of you on older PC's, but mainly this is just about me optimizing where I can.  Damn you OCD!!!

OCD: "You know, you should really set her eyebrow color too"

Me: "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU"


So, what have I been playing you ask?  Let me start with Dusty's Castle.  As far as I know, it's the first game that's ever been finished on the LoK forums, so a big congrats to Gorepete.  Gorepete also added a color slider just before the game was done, which pretty much inspired me to try & do my own.  So I reckon that's a double thanks I owe him.

The next game I'm playing is all Japanese.  The only text I can read says Hikaru Senki, which seems to be what folks are calling it.  I call it 'train your Pokemon to be a rapist', which doesn't quite flow off the tongue so well, but leaves little doubt about the gameplay.  Anyway, I was shocked at how much fun it was.  Game boils down to collecting shit & sexing up enemies.  If you're interested, follow this link.  Be sure to scroll down & read all the menu translations, as you'll need to know how to equip & swap weapons & such.

And the last link I'm going to post is a game called pretty warrior may cry.  Other than the 3D, this is almost exactly what I wanted to do for my next game.  So needless to say, playing this was a surreal experience.  It was like playing a game plucked from my dreams, described to someone over the phone, who doesn't actually speak English.  So yeah, I loved it.  No promises you get the same experience.  ;)

Til next time
DirtyC101

Feedback Loop - Part 2

Ok, I said I'd try to sit down & put the rest of my responses together in some coherent manner.  Well of course that didn't happen, so here's another splatter of responses in no particular order.  ;)


Invincible Escapes:  I'm hearing folks ask for some invincibility when escaping from grapples.  I'm slightly against this, mainly because some of the weapons already grant invincibility with their S attack.  The weapons are balanced around this.  So for example the large 2H weapons are kind of slow in their normal attack & have long recoveries, but they also do excellent damage & have fantastic invulnerability with their super move.  I even tried to set it up so that there's (usually) time to swap weapons after an escape.

So if you're the type who likes to jump into large groups, I assume you're going to pick a weapon with a good super for escaping from being surrounded.  This may be a poor assumption on my part, but I can't quite tell from the comments.  I personally think that if you get surrounded by a large group, then you really should be in trouble, so I'm pretty happy with how the mechanics here are working.  About the only change I'm considering here is granting more space if you die & use a continue.

Game Speed:  On my original computer, the game played at about the right speed when I set it to 20 FPS (frames per second).  What I didn't realize was that the game was actually running at ~14 FPS even in empty rooms, because my computer was really slow.  When I moved to my gaming PC, suddenly everything was way too fast, as the game was actually running at 20 FPS.

So sometime between the last two releases, I reset the game speed down to 15 FPS, which should put the game at about the right speed on everyone's PC.  The problem is a few of you already had nice PCs, and got used to the faster game speed.  So now the latest release seems like it's running in slow motion.  I think the solution here is I need to find the FPS command & just make a slider to keep everyone happy.  In the meanwhile, here's the 0.50 release at both 15 FPS (current speed) & 20 FPS (fast speed):

Current Speed
Fast Speed

If you think the game needs to be even faster (or slower), let me know.  Ideally I'll build a slider into the game to let you pick (assuming Flash lets me change this on the fly).

Arrow Respawn Rate:  Okay, let's rewind back to the previous release.  Originally, your body score moved the grapple bar indicator, and spirit controlled how much damage you did.  Although that sounded good on paper, it turned out I didn't like this system for two reasons.  The first was that Lei Lei's sex scenes ended way too fast, and the other was that you couldn't watch the animations because you were constantly staring at the arrows.

So I re-tuned the system quite a bit, with the intent of fixing both these problems.  Now both body & spirit move the bar, but in different ways.   Body still works very similarly, and moves the bar in your favor if your score is higher than your opponent(s).  Spirit moves the indicator by controlling how often the arrows appear.   So if you want to see the arrows appear quickly, you need to raise your spirit score.

That solved the first problem just fine, but it meant that anyone with a high spirit was still playing the 'watch the arrow' game.  So I re-tuned the arrow game a bit as well.  Now the time between arrow respawns is longer for everyone, but the jump on the grapple indicator is also much higher when you complete a series.  It should play almost exactly the same, the difference is you now have more time to watch the animation.  The message I'm hearing is that folks don't like having time to watch the animations.  I find that really hard to believe, although perhaps what they mean is that they want to constantly be doing something.  I'm more inclined to believe that everyone who is complaining is playing Farah, and don't grasp that the penalty for having a low spirit is long delays between arrow respawns.  I can't prove that though, so I'd love to hear some more detailed responses here.

Character balance:  Folks think Farah is more powerful than the other two.  At this exact second, I'm inclined to agree, although not to the extent I'm hearing.  I'd like to balance this back a bit, without nerfing Farah.  I may further buff spirit in sex grapples, or I may buff the regeneration rate from spirit.  There haven't been a lot of spirit puzzles yet either, which is something I'd like to add.  The key here is I don't want to completely lock Farah out of a section of the game.

Leveling system:  I'm seeing requests for more RPG elements, mainly a leveling system of some sort.  Wasn't planned, but I like the idea a lot.  I'll see if I can crowbar something in here, so that there's yet another advantage to defeating monsters.  In fairness though, there's very few monsters that can be avoided, it's not like you can run around them if they're in your way.  So whatever I do here will be minimal.  I absolutely do not want folks to feel like they have to farm monsters for XP before they can progress.

Damn, that's a long post.  But I think I hit all the big buttons.  If there's something else on your mind, let me know.  I promise I read every comment, even if I don't respond to it directly.

DirtyC101