Category: Harem Collector

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Iron Waifu Approaches….

May is coming, and with it, the legendary contest known as… IRON WAIFU!

I’m feeling pretty stoked, and I’m excited to see people discussing the upcoming contest in advance. However, things are going to be just slightly different this year, so I figured I’d run down some of the changes.

Previous winners will NOT be re-admitted to the contest. If you were hoping to vote again for Therese, sorry, but she, as well as Alina, are retired permanently from the contest. They’ve already won, after all.

Oh, what’s that? Therese hasn’t had a full art revamp done yet? Well, never fear… Therese will be the first harem girl to get new art following this year’s Iron Waifu, so she won’t get left out for long.

Another thing that we’re doing differently this year is that we’re spelling out the rewards for each character if they win. That will be a complete rundown, including any quests, how many new sex scenes they have coming, and the like for every girl in running. As our usual policy goes, nobody is getting any extra, originally unplanned content as a result of the Iron Waifu results, so some girls will absolutely be getting more than others. Still, this whole thing is merely to determine the order in which the content gets done, so don’t be afraid to follow your heart.

Finally, we’ll be drawing the new bracket during this month’s Backer Devstream, the date of which hasn’t been set yet, so if you’re interested in seeing that happen, please remember to stay tuned!

That’s all for now, so until next time, Harem Collector fans!

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Decisions and bugs

Hey everyone, Conash again, wanted to talk about some important bugs/coding stuff that I’ve been working on the past few days. Though I would first like to mention that patreon backers should keep their eyes out since we’re planning to release version 0.33 today!

Next on the table, in regards to last weeks blog post I thank everyone very much for your opinions you shared. Between both the majority opinion and my own agreeing that the praising system would feel more at home with the ‘personal happiness’ it will find itself moved there starting with the 0.33 release. Players will be advised they may need to give a new gift to girls they had praised to get them back up to full gift happiness if they are transferring over their save files. That said, we did get a few suggestions as to ways that we could add further nuance to the praising system, but I’m sorry, with how the code is designed there just wasn’t exactly room to go to really go with either idea… Though I will say that I did make sure to lay a bit of ground-work to add further complexities to the system for when more praising events get added, nothing out of left-field just keeping in line with what the game has already promised (because trust me, without the new additions thanks to the happiness system we WOULD have had to flat out cut out some of the elements mentioned in the praising tutorial)!

Anyways, onto the main reason that I wanted to post two blog posts in a row, thanks to dedication from our tester GameAdam some very critical bugs in the furniture system were made apparent to me. Some of you may have noticed some difficulties getting girls to ‘love’ furniture, this was actually an issue that many people reported that I had put down to them not understanding it, but it turns out that there was actually a bug that made it so that most of the ‘love’ locations would flat out ignore those girls. You could still get them to ‘like’ items if they were set to like those, but that was due to another bug entirely that didn’t properly check if a girl loves/liked a location when determining if they liked/hated an item where it was, this was especially humorous in that it lead Penelope to hating several items placed in the Eastfort Condo. Both of these bugs have been fixed and many of the items that were already in the game have also gotten a once over and had their ‘love’ lists expanded quite a bit. With all of these changes, along with a new girl (and maybe even the ground-work for a few other future girls) in the mix, players will be advised to remove and put back all their furniture if they wish to get the best happiness values out of them, this however is only a suggestion and not actually a requirement and failure to do so will NOT resort in problems with the game.

See, given that I already knew we were going to add in more future girls into the game when I made this system, and how it was precisely designed, I made sure that when you placed furniture down it would store a copy of whatever effects it did (even to girls whom you hadn’t acquired yet), and removing the items will apply the inverse effect ONLY to whatever is stored there rather than figuring out what it ‘should’ do from scratch. A fair amount of aspects of the furniture system were designed with a similar philosophy as to prevent accidentally getting a permanent -2 happiness on a character just because of a coding oversight. It also comes with the added benefit of preventing exploits that would gain you permanent +2 happiness as well, but enough of me continuing to grow the list of betrayals I’ve committed against my fellow min-maxers. Point is, in the 0.33 release there will be a lot of fixes and changes to the furniture system so it would be a good idea to pick everything back up and put it back down, but if you’re happy with the current bonuses you’re receiving you can keep things how they are.

I am also working on adding a bit of an expansion to the furniture system so that new items that you buy from stores (like the Bearskin rug or the Light and Mercy Banner) will be bit more…. Interesting, but right now that whole thing needs a lot of bug testing before I’m ready to promise it’s inclusion.

That should be just about everything. Sorry for all the rambling about more boring code stuff, but I hope some of you found it interesting!

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Praising feedback request

Hey everyone, Conash here. Things are going about how they usually go, so I wanted to take this blog post as an opportunity to ask for some feedback as I’ve done once or twice before this time about the praise system in HC. I’ll do my best to make this easy to understand, but apologies if I don’t succeed!

To start with, I should probably explain how the current happiness system works in brief. Basically there are 3 types of Happiness, ‘Furniture’, ‘Personal’, and ‘Gift’. Each of these are impacted by different things and give affection bonuses independently and all. Originally when the first draft of this system was thought up there were going to be five kinds of happiness to better account for every type of interaction but that was deemed to be way too much. Scaling back however raised a few…. other problems in regards to praising specifically though.

See, when you praise girls at the end of the Manor Invasion, a bunch of things that need to be taken into account, the most important of which here are the bonus for praising the girl and the penalty that other girls get if they feel like your praise was undeserved (such as if you praise Violet or Lilac for example). When putting the system into action I kept going back and forth between thinking that it’d fit better under ‘Personal’ happiness or ‘Gift’ happiness.

Setting aside what might seem more thematically fitting, the issues with it being under the ‘Personal’ happiness is that together with the day end sex scenes it could render various interactions with specific characters (like saving Doll during the manor invasion) as having no impact on the game which part of the point of the happiness system is to make those sorts of interactions have a bigger impact rather than smaller. On top of that ‘Personal’ happiness is the hardest one to influence due to how few sources there are of it for anyone currently in the game, this means that the penalties that can be gained from praising certain characters would hurt the player a lot more harshly, and harsh penalties is something that we wanted to avoid entirely since not everyone likes to play games with the wiki open.

On the other end of the table, putting praising under ‘Gift’ happiness makes the praising system a lot less significant, as while it might help reduce your chore list if you’re fine not getting the highest possible bonus everyday, it does also mean that for many players they might not notice any difference by praising characters. One advantage to it though is that the praising penalty you might incur becomes VERY easy to overcome as you can rely on giving gifts to remove it as an issue, though if you fall behind on giving gifts you might start to feel it.

Ultimately, I ended up choosing to put it under the ‘Gift’ happiness, but I’ve come to feel that was a mistake made in the moment of needing to get a lot of everything else done, though it is one that I can actually pretty easily fix thanks to how I designed the system. As such I would like to hear people’s thoughts on if I should change how praising works to go into ‘Personal’ happiness, stay where it is, or any other ideas you all might have.  Hope I didn’t bore you all with this talk, but given that I believe I already made a mistake once on this, thought it’d be good to get some feedback on the whole issue from the people who play the game before I make any big changes to the system!

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6 AM

So Nekochan woke me up on her way out the door, I had the early morning realization that I didn’t do a blog post yesterday, and now I can’t sleep until I take care of it.

Not much new to report this week, actually. Natya is mostly complete save for some dialogue, although I’m struggling a little with her pre-sex recruitment scene. The devstream this Saturday is probably going to be entirely devoted to the changes we’re making to the furniture system. In general, we’re getting things done, although not in a way that’s particularly notable or interesting.

In my personal life, Nekochan and I ended up purchasing Gloomhaven this month, which is basically like… a legacy version of Descent, which features (among other things) a world map that you fill out with stickers, 20ish unlockable character classes, and from my calculations what seems like about 200 hours of gameplay assuming you don’t ever redo old scenarios in order to grind.

I’m really gorwing to love legacy board games. Even though you can only play them so many times, the experience of exploring a new game with all sorts of secrets to discover and new surprises to be had is just amazing. I highly recommend it, provided you can find some irl friends to sit around a table with you for so long. Or just use tabeltop simulator, where I’m sure all this stuff exists.

Anyway, gonna try to get back to sleep, see you all later!

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Harem Collector v0.32 is live!

Get it here!

It’s been a long time coming, but I think it’s well worth it! Please enjoy!

Changes in this version:
-Two new quests! Send Newts opens when you’ve obtained the Fate Ender, and have completed Cannibal Corps, Get Dumped and Sacrifices for Algernon. The main gameplay for Dude, Where’s My Sword will continue immediately thereafter.
-More sex scene art! A new sex scene featuring Countess Silvayuco plays between Send Newts and Dude, Where’s My Sword, and there is revised art featuring Elaiya (Let’s Make A Deal) and Yamamaya (Mating Season).
-The furniture interface now displays how characters will feel about your placed decorations.
-The way that the sausage lady interacts with the Northmarket dog population has been changed.
-As always, more bug fixes and quality of life changes.

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What’s On Deck for v0.33?

Hey all, just you friendly neighborhood hentai dev, NoMoshing, here!
Then again, I write like half the stuff on this blog, so I guess I shouldn’t introduce myself….
Anyway, we’re already thick into development for version 0.33 of Harem Collector, so I thought I’d just take a moment to let you know what we’re working on.

Priority #1: Pixie Quest
This is actually almost finished- been power-working on it the past week and it’s almost entirely wrapped up. It’s just a small, simple, goofy early game quest that will grant some additional fame and introduce some important game concepts for new players. I’ll probably have it 100% finished later today.

Priority #2: Natya
Our first harem girl addition since Nerys, Natya is the name of your sweet and naive Westcastle shopgirl. She will debut with a single sex scene, a relationship track, and as many chats as I can think to give her over the course of a month and a half.

Priority #3: Furniture
I know, I know, we’ve been promising more furniture for months now. Well, all of March has been set aside for implementing furniture shops and more customization options, so expect some good things in this regard.

Priority #4: Quality of Life Improvements
I’ve already added a significant amount of content to Yeon’s chat interface, but expect several small improvements- more banters, more chats, more random encounters- as I think of them. I plan to add small things of this nature each day until next release, provided it does not interfere with other work.

Sex Scene Progress
On top of Natya’s first scene, expect to see new art released for Yamamaya’s vacation scene (“Test Drive Tsundere”), as well as “That’s Strong Catnip”.

So, yeah, I’m gonna get back to it, so as always thanks for your interest, and hopefully I’ll see you all next week for the public release of v0.32!

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I’m Not Dead, Either

So, it’s been an… interesting? three or so weeks. I’m just writing today to break it all down for you guys, so you know what’s going on, what changes are happening, and what I expect the results to be.
Edit: Also I owe you guys a blog post for last week… and this blog post ended up being twice as long as a normal one so we’re square right?

Okay, so flashback to three weeks ago. My friend who runs the FLGS* where I play Warhammer was going away for a week-long trip to Mexico with his wife. I had offered to watch the store for him, in exchange for a percentage cut of all sales. My *intention* was to bring my laptop and work on some of the less-racy parts of HC when the store wasn’t busy that week, so I could keep up with game dev while also helping my friend out and making some extra dosh in the process.

Oh boy, was that a bad idea.

For the first two days, two of my Warhammer friends had basically told themselves, “NoMoshing will be so bored at the store, obviously we have to plan to spend the whole day there open-to-close in order to keep him company!” So even if I could work on less racy stuff, I basically had these two guys hanging out with me, playing games and chatting and otherwise disrupting my focus. The following day was Friday, so that’s when randos started showing up to game and business really started picking up, so I basically only had a couple of hours to work in the morning. On top of all that, the shop is in an indoor minimall-type situation- think a flea market but the shops in it are less transitory and there are no knockoff Gucci bags or piles of crap that obviously “fell off a truck”. The other shop owners are also very chatty, and I was the new guy and thus, interesting to them.

By Monday I had given up on doing anything work-related. I just had to collect by cut, write the week off in terms of game dev, and rally the following week.

Now, if you’re a backer of a certain tier, you know I was already running behind at the beginning of that week. I was looking at the prospect of catching up one 2+ weeks of work in the six days before the backer release was due to happen. And… I just couldn’t get it done. Performance anxiety and failure paralysis set in, big time. I don’t think I’m normally a basket case, but I basically shut down entirely. I’d sit staring at an open RPG Maker window for hours without doing anything. It was… not good. I missed the deadline, I didn’t write a blog post, it sucked, and was generally awful for everyone. I left that vague message about the delay happening on Wednesday, and went to bed.

I took Thursday and Friday last week off. I had stress nightmares about the release all Wednesday night, and at Nekochan’s urging I just took it easy, focused on other things, and tried to unstress so I could deal with things better the following week.

Having noted lately that I seem to focus better while streaming in spite of having an audience to talk to, last Sunday I decided there was nothing left to lose and I’d started an experiment- what if I went back to silent streaming my work hours? “Silent streaming” was something I tried last fall, streaming the occasional afternoon while I worked with the mic off, and it was just me and whoever came to watch me. As a promotional tool, it seemed to be a failure- only a couple people showed up, and I wasn’t getting anyone new- but how would it do as a tool to assist my work? Having nothing left to lose, I gave it a shot. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I streamed my work to whoever would show up to watch.

I’ve accomplished most of my remaining to-do list in three days.

I’m not even kidding with you. I don’t know what it says about me, but publicly transmitting my work hours was what got me to work two or three hours at a stretch, totally focused and without interruption. Being accountable for my use of every minute got me to make the most out of my dev time, and I’m accomplished an astounding amount of work.

For the rest of the dev cycle, I’ve got to:
-Write a sex scene
-Finish the exposition/animation section at the beginning of the second quest (and even that’s mostly done)
-Program the boss fight for the second quest
-Close out the second quest
-Test and bugfix

I expect to finish that up by the end of today, maybe Friday.

So what’s changed? Well, the delay is going to be a little more than a week. Later today I’m doing the February schedule, and it won’t mention any release dates for now- not until I have my feet firmly under me. I want to official backer release to be as polished and stable as I can make it in a short amount of time.

I’m also going to be streaming a lot more. Pay attention to the BKG Discord and my Twitter Account if you want the exact details, but if you’re ever bored and wouldn’t mind keeping track of my progress come check out the offical BKG Picarto channel. I can’t promise I’ll be interactive- I’m making it a policy to just ignore any comments or questions I can’t respond to in a single sentence, and you won’t hear my sultry? voice- but you would be helping me stay focused and working hard. The main attraction of the schedule Devstreams, now, will be the interactivity, and I’m going to make more of an effort to schedule things I want fan input on for them.

I realize that a lot of the miraculous amount of productivity I had this week is going to be a “honeymoon period” with the daily streaming, but I think in the long term this will be a good thing. I’ll be more accountable to my backers, more focused on getting things done, and less tempted to “just play a little Rimworld as a break” and them be surprised that five hours have passed.

So yeah, hope that helps keep everyone on the right page with regard to game dev! I’ll be streaming my work again shortly and then all afternoon, so if you’re reading this the day of posting, I hope you join me to get some shit done!

*Favourite Local Gaming Store

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I’m not dead!

Hey everyone! Been awhile since I’ve posted a blog post, but don’t exactly have a whole lot to report. Currently I’ve been spending most of my work time focusing on a few other tasks which have been helpful in figuring out how we want to proceed on our next game.

Though I have been devoting some time to finishing up the ‘Happiness Window’ in the furniture menu that should give some feedback about what your furniture is doing that’s VERY much needed. It won’t exactly be perfect, but since a lot of places sometimes have about 10-15 different characters they impact it’s not really possible to give a visual feedback as to who every square impacts, the best that I was able to think up was to have the bottom of the screen tell you which characters currently love, like, or hate a piece of furniture after it’s been placed. I had meant to get this all done during the original addition of the furniture system but my time management skills aren’t exactly the best…

I did also make sure to add some elements to help make one of the new upcoming quests have an extra few elements of randomness, I will however refrain from going into the exact specifics at this time as I have a bit of a habit of opening my mouth quite a bit more than I really should when I get into things.

Not much to report beyond that. I have talked with NoMoshing about some plans for stuff that I’ll work on when for the 0.33 release but why spoil a future blog post opportunity now, so see you all later!

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New Year Outlook pt 2 (SPOILER ALERT)

Alright, so, where was I…?

Last week was not pleasant. I was the worst sick than I’ve ever been in a long time. Thankfully, the goal system I’ve adopted isn’t totally fucked yet. I am going to have to really push to get my monthly goals in, but I don’t think I’m in danger of failing yet.

Anyway, when v0.32 goes to the backers, it’ll have two quests- Send Newts and the finale to Dude, Where’s My Sword? This sets up the end of the Cult Quest storyline, which will probably be the first of the four storylines to close out, maybe by fall, depending on how much of a pain it is to set up the storyline reward harem girl. She will have an alternative relationship system, kind of like Eulania, based on how often you have sex with her, and triggering her Love Quest can happen VERY quickly so all that in mind she might skip the line a little and get new CGs immediately after Orange Kid.

For v0.33 I really want to get three significant pieces of content. One is going to be the Westcastle shopgirl- Nekochan is cooking up a very adorable character design for her, and I’m pretty excited to have a new harem girl in the game, for the first time since… Nerys or Diadira, I think? For the other two pieces of content, one is gong to be an Ancient Mysteries quest, not sure about the other one.

The reason for all the planning is because I want to finish the year at the endgame. Obviously, there is a certain of life RNG involved, but I’m hopeful. What’s going to be really difficult is the post-game- I don’t expect a lot of patreon supporters will stick around for dialogue rewrites, new sex scene CG, and preview art of the next project, but we’ll see? After all, so many of you have supported me this far.

Anyway, I just wanted to expand on my goal structure and wrap up last week’s topic a little bit better. See you next time!

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New Year Outlook

Here’s how my year has gone so far:

January 1st: Nice, relaxing day, got a little bit of work done.
January 2nd: Set out year-long goals in writing, got all the contract work in line for the next month.
January 3rd: Head cold

I am currently writhing with a mixture of frustration and the shivers as I consult the best medical advice available on the interwebs to figure out why the fuck, between Nekochan and I, one of us is basically sick at all times. We’ve tried pretty much everything at this point, and I’m honestly on the verge of bathing the cat in hand sanitizer and setting fire to all our clothes.

Anyway, my moaning aside….

Like I mentioned, I’m writing a list of fairly detailed long-term goals this year, breaking them down into seasonal, monthly, and weekly targets, with a little bit of wiggle room to be revised as needed. I’m still ironing out the details on the “career” goals, but I’m hoping this new method of planning things works out.

Anyway, just wanted to do a quick “check-in”, can’t word good with a head cold so I’m trying to stick to more “menial” game-elated tasks like enemy and map design. See you next week!