I did it!

Hey everyone, I’m here to give you all a run-down of some of the new stuff that’ll be in the upcoming release, of which I only finished my contribution to like 5 hours before this so yay for finishing by the deadline!

First of all, before I go into my typical scripting rant, I’d like to take a brief moment to highlight that the new quest for this release is going to be a big one that’s going to throw the story for a bit of a loop! I’m personally really looking forward to seeing how you all react! Also free e-cookie to the first person to guess which one enemy in the new quest that I designed (NoMoshing handled the others since I had a lot on my plate as is)!

Now let’s get into what I’ve been working on for this release, the happiness system. I won’t get super into details about the numbers of this system (though I might try to set aside from time to do just that on the wiki after the public release) but this system is in general designed to change the existing affection system. See one of the big issues with the existing affection system is that it basically requires that you play Santa to your entire harem every day, and while that might not be too bad with 3-5 girls, when you get above 20 I imagine it’s quite tedious for a lot of you, as such the new system is supposed to, by the end of the game at least, make gifting entirely optional, as you can instead rely on stuff like the furniture system or various character interactions instead to grant you a passive amount of affection per girl daily. Gifts themselves are also a bit less tedious as if you give a girl their favorite gift a certain number of days in a row you’ll reach the max ‘gift happiness’, and from there it’ll take a few days for the gift happiness counter to decrease enough to decrease the amount of affection per day.

Now, as I said I don’t want to go into the exact details here but I will give you all a general hint, there’s more or less 3 happiness counters that are all recorded separately, they are affected by different things and they each have a maximum affection per day that they can give you. The system is designed so that there’s certainly a lot of options and can be difficult to get the ‘maximum’ affection per day on every character at once, but if you’re just playing casually you should be able to stay in the positive happiness values on everyone just fine. I even made sure that ALL love quests were still obtainable with the new system, of which Therese may give some players some trouble as you can’t rely only on gifts for her but even that should help be mitigated with time. Do keep in mind though that you will need to talk to various characters to increase their relationship level, you can’t just leave them in the dungeon waiting until they get to 101 affection I’m sorry to say!

Another thing that this new system will bring is overhauling the relationship meter. Instead of just telling you the value of the affection there will be a meter that fills up for each relationship level showing you your progress. It is designed to update at even 1 point increments though you may not always notice it, we’re happy with the sprites that Kumiho provided for the affection meter! You will also be getting some feedback about the affection per day a character is earning, but it’s not going to be quite as straight-forward, after all I don’t know about you but when I look at someone I have a hard time saying that they’re at +2 affection happiness or +1 affection happiness! You know, whoever designed real life should probably ask me to update the GUI, it’s so hard to understand your stats at any given moment!

That’s more or less it. With the completion of this I probably won’t be doing a lot of big scripting projects for HC at this point. There’s still several scripting things I’d like to do, bugs that need to be fixed, and enemies AI that I can fine-tune, but honestly at this point I’m probably mostly going to be focusing on the next big project and laying out the groundwork for that… Anyways that’s all from me! Hope you guys enjoy this update!