Category: Conash Speaks

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!

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!

So, in the last blog post I talked about the happiness system, and some of you seem to have some reservations about the system. As such I’d like to take a moment and open the floor to some discussion about the matter, here I’ll be very open and express my full sentiments on the matter.

So let’s start with one of the concerns I’ve been getting, which is about gifting. Gifting will NOT be going away, it will stay very much a part of HC. The new system is honestly meant in many ways to improve upon and allow for alternatives to gifting. I don’t know about all of you, but I’ve had many days in HC where I forgot to give Randi some pearls, or decided that Renfeld was just too out of the way to give a monster fang to and I didn’t really NEED to raise her affection to the max, so there would be some in-game days that I simply wouldn’t give out all the gifts to people. When this was coupled with some complaints that we’d get from people who seemed to think of gifting as a chore more than anything, NoMoshing came to the conclusion that the gifting system just wasn’t doing what he wanted. The initial design for gifting was inspired by Dragon Age: Origins, where you’d enjoy giving your characters gifts rather than feel like you had to slog through 30 minutes of chores before you could get to the ‘real’ game. That said, we didn’t want to outright remove gifting because that’s a big part of the game. Instead, we changed it so that instead of gifts giving affection directly, they instead earn you some ‘affection per day’ for a few days. This serves to make it so that you can get the max ‘gifting affection’ by only hopping over to Eastfort say once every 3 days instead of every day so those who forget to give gifts or just want to get to the rest of the game sooner aren’t as hard pressed to do it. That said, gifting is still a major part of the affection system and if you don’t mind the daily grind, you can continue to run around playing Santa and should be just fine. The point of these changes is so that later in the game, as you have more furniture, as you’ve made more choices, as you have more girls than you can count on your fingers and toes, that you have more options than, “Gifting’ or “Nothing”.

This does however bring me to another point about the gifting system that I know won’t be popular with a lot of you. Maximum ‘gift’ affection per day has been reduced. Gifts were always intended to only give +2 affection per day instead of +3, however with how few days were in the game originally this would have made it impossible to get the freedom to actually get to new relationship bonuses for a lot of the girls, let alone their love quests. That said, the game has come a long way since then, so when the affection system was already looking to be changed, now seemed an appropriate time to go ahead an reduce that. I thought that just having a max of +2 per day didn’t really fit in with one of the ideas that the game has a lot of depth for min-maxers while still being pretty simple and easy to play through for more casual players intentionally, which is why I put together a complicated system that’s meant to take place behind the scenes that allows players who work for it to be able to achieve up to +4 affection per day with any given girl. The idea though is that in practice the average character will only be getting +2~+3, but if you really want to spoil your absolute favorite girl, the intention is for you to be able to do just that. If you guys don’t feel that this is an acceptable trade off, feel free to share your opinions on the matter.

Now, this is a part that I glossed over before, but there will also be possible to lose affection per day, this was brought on due to several requests for it. Originally the only way to lose affection was during the Manor Assault if you praised someone who didn’t fight then everyone else there would lose one affection point (though you weren’t when/if this happened), now just as you can get up to +4 affection per day, you can also go as low as -4 affection per day. The addition of this consequence is something that can help make your choices feel more impactful as if the ‘worst’ that you can do is no change that can cheapen your actions. That said, I still wanted to make sure that the game didn’t punish you for not understanding it’s systems right away, so I’ll be upfront in saying that while you can go into the negatives for happiness and affection per day, the system is very generous. For example, the best gifts will give you +4 happiness while the worst gifts will give -2 happiness, this is reflected in just about every aspect of happiness. Something else to help is that you can never go below the ‘minimum’ for any given relationship stage. If you got Larelle out of the dungeon but hate her and have her at -4 affection per day she’ll never go below 21 affection and end up ‘back’ in the dungeon. Perhaps this fails to deal with the problem of having ‘cheap’ choices if the system is biased to head positive, but I at least thought it’d be a good way to add some consequence to the system without making it so that players can get stuck at -1 affection per day their entire playthrough on their waifu just because they made some mistakes.

Another thing that we did get some complaints about is the new visual display. We now have a rather Harvest Moon-esque heart meter instead of flat out telling you the affection values. If I’m being frank, while I do enjoy the look of it, the min-maxer in me doesn’t like that we’re taking away some direct numerical feedback to the players. This has been a point of disagreement a few times between me and NoMoshing where he doesn’t really like giving you guys direct numbers (after all, when you open an animal guide or something in real life it doesn’t tell you that bears have an attack stat of 54 or whatever) and instead prefers more visual or abstract feedback, whereas I’m usually pushing for more and more detailed information getting back to the player which can cause information overload for many. An instance of what I mean by abstract feedback can be seen with the ‘mood’ indicator that tells you if a character is ‘Very Happy’, ‘Happy’, ‘Unhappy’, or ‘Very Unhappy’, see this is how the game gives you feedback of the affection per day that you’re getting, there was some back and forth between me and NoMoshing on what was the best way to do this, and we eventually agreed that this was acceptable as while you can’t really tell if you’re getting +4 or +3 per day from this alone, you do know the difference between +3 and +1. For the most part this happiness indicator serves to give you a general idea as to where you stand and does have enough nuance that you can notice some significant changes to it, but it’s also abstract enough that it’s not full on immersion breaking.

Sorry for the massive wall of text, but I wanted to make sure that I explained things as clearly and thoroughly as it looks like this will need to be. If you have any comments, concerns, or criticisms please feel free to share them.

Hey everyone, Conash here! First, backers should expect the backer release this evening. While we’re working to limit the amount of things that are put off until the public release, we’ve still got to finish up a few things. That said, this release should be relatively bug light all things considered so look forward to it! With that out of the way time for me to talk about the scripting stuff I’ve been doing recently!

First, I should probably open with the CD player. While procrastination has left it so that I won’t have it ready for the backer release, I am looking to have it ready for the public release. The CD player is something that players will buy in a store and then put in the various music discs in the game inside it, from there you can interact with it to open a list of the CDs you’ve put in it and select which one to play. We’ll have it so that it will remember your selection and start up every time you enter the house, best part is that you’ll be able to select a different track for each of your houses for a bit more customization. I plan to also display some info about the music in the menu such as who composed it, how long it runs, maybe the dungeons/quests it’s used for… But I’ll be honest here I’m not entirely sure what sort of information you would want on this kind of thing. I’m not big into music so if any of you have some suggestions as to what information you’d want on the CDs in the CD player menu please let me know!

Next a few weeks ago I talked about combat updates. Well I’ve gotten that more or less sorted out though I might try to fit a bit more in before the public release, but I’d rather not risk bugging out the backer release by working on it further. So far, we’ve got it to display the element icon next to damage if there is one to display, so that you have a better indication what kind of damage you’re doing/taking. Instead of adding in a battle log with custom speed I found a script that just lets you open the battle log to go through it entirely which I imagine will be more useful and help prevent battle from slowing down a lot so that you can see that one thing you’d otherwise miss. I also sped up Elaiya’s attack animations since they were kind of laggy. Finally, I threw in some action shortcuts so that when you’re choosing an action you can hit ‘A’ for attack, ‘S‘ for skills (for characters like Felix, Therese, and Yamamaya who have two skill windows you can press it again to toggle between the two), and ‘D‘ for guard which should hopefully help speed up battles some. I did set up a shortcut for the item menu, but due to how RPG Maker is setup the only shortcut that I really use isn’t properly setup so I plan to include a little text file on the existing shortcuts, various menu shortcuts, and how to set up the item shortcut with the game going forward. That’s all that I’ve really gotten done in regard to combat updates so far, not sure when I’ll be able to finish up the last bits of it.

Beyond that, the only scripting stuff I’ve done has been some custom enemy behavior (some of which may result in future enemies drop random items instead of up to three kinds of items only) and various behind the scenes stuff to get the Awiiabu quest working in a way that wouldn’t become a nightmare worse than the Manor Invasion for NM. Nothing that I should take a lot of time talking about either due to it being a surprise or how it doesn’t impact you directly. Anyway, that about wraps up this blog post, hope you all have a great day and are looking forward to the upcoming backer and/or public releases!

Hey everyone! Conash again! First off, gotta start by saying that the mini-release is going to be delayed, we ran into various issues and couldn’t finish up the new quest in time so sorry backers, we’ll work to get it done as soon as we can!

Now, for the meat of this blog post, I actually wanted to ask for some suggestions from most of you. See, there have been various minor issues with the combat system some new (like how some people would like the skill/item menus to be how they were before) and some old (like the rate that the battlelog text scrolls making it difficult to read). None of these issues are by themselves are big enough projects that I’d set aside a month or two to dive into the scripts dealing with them, but they’re really piling up and I’m planning on trying to deal with them hopefully in the upcoming month (depending on how available my time is). To that end, I wanted to ask you all if there was anything that really stood out to you that was off about the battle system, or suggestions that you had as I want to try to get all of these little issues taken care of at once. Though, I do feel that I should mention that based off of my schedule and how this is more of a personal project, if I don’t have it ready by the 0.29 public release there’s a good chance it won’t be making it into the game before the 0.32 release (in January), hopefully it won’t take that long but we’ll see…

Oh, I almost forgot, given that I am asking you all for suggestions, I figured that I should list out what my plans were! So, in regards to the battlelog the solution seems to be to add something to the option menu to let players toggle how fast it is, this little change will probably be a bit more intensive than the others since I’ll not only have to fight the battlelog itself but also the options menu and will take some tedious testing to make sure everything works right. Next the plan is to find out how to switch the skill/item menu in battle to how it used to be and probably do it, I’m open to the idea of making the old big menus or the new small menus something that players could toggle between but given that’d be about a day or two worth of additional scripting I’m going to hold off on the toggle until I know for sure that there are players who would be interested in having the smaller item/skill menu. Another change that hopefully will be easy to implement is changing the numbers that pop up when you do damage to be different colors based on the elemental damage done, that much shouldn’t be too hard since Yanfly has an addon for that specifically but I’ll have to ensure that there aren’t any conflicts with that, but again that one’s easy once I’m already dealing with the combat system as a whole. There have also been some minor visual hiccups that I’ve noticed, stuff like how if your team has someone with regens or DoTs on them that the numbers stay where their portrait was while the entire party menu on the bottom shifts to the left, or how when you’re using an item/skill on an ally that the portrait of who is using it will cover the final party member, those sorts of hiccups I also plan on handling and while it’ll be annoying to fight with them, it’s nothing that I’m not used to!

So yeah, sorry about the long ramble there, but if any of you have any issues, ideas, or suggestions for a battle system update please leave a comment or otherwise let me know so that I can look into trying to add it into my little combat system update…. Whenever I get to it >.>

Hey everyone, Conash here! First, I’d like to remind everyone that the public devstream is this Saturday! Now normally here’s where I’d talk about my current scripting project, but NoMoshing already gave you all the cliff-notes and there’s not anything more that I can add on the matter. While I do have a few ideas of some other scripting stuff that I’d like to squeeze into this update I can’t guarantee I’ll have time to do those so I’ll save that talk for another time, which leaves me really with talking about the newest task that I’ve taken up, enemy design.

While I’m far from an expert, I thought you all might still appreciate hearing how I go about it. In regard to common enemies I try to think in terms of the various ‘roles’ that the player characters come in (damage, tank, debuffer, and support) and since we’re a fair amount into the game I feel pretty comfortable assuming the player is properly equipped to handle a ‘full deck’ of enemies. I make sure to talk about what types of enemies we’d be fighting with NoMoshing and try to figure out a good range to fill those various roles. On top of that I also like to fit in little tidbits about the enemies in their design (surprised no one’s pointed out yet that the Devout Clerics have a bit of a surprising magic selection). Beyond that there’s not a whole much too it, I make sure that their various strengths/weaknesses both make sense and are consistent with that type of enemy among other things.

Bosses however get a bit more thought put into them. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I personally like my bosses to have a unique feeling to them, they should be a boss in more than just numbers. With the last quest, I had to play around a bit including changing enemy behavior in the entire game to be able to pull it off that the main boss would switch between an offensive spell and then a support spell with his two actions, throw in that the offensive spell goes from single target to an AoE once he drops below 50% health and you’ve got a very good incentive for players to take out the other bosses first. It might be a bit light in terms of being unique behavior, but with four boss enemies you can’t really go too over the top, whereas the upcoming boss for the Cannibal Corps finale I’m probably getting a bit too hands on with them…. Let’s just say, I’m not exactly a fan when bosses become RNG-dumb.

Though, another thing about these sorta boss gimmicks that I feel is important is that the player shouldn’t be caught completely unaware of it, whether you can figure it out if you pay attention to the story of the quest, by seeing some minors have a weaker version of the behavior, or maybe even I bug NoMoshing to throw some dialogue in somewhere hinting at it, I feel that a player should be able to get a good idea of what to expect from the boss’ behavior before it’s risked wiping out their entire party. I might give up on this particular little practice later on so that bosses aren’t easy to predict, but I imagine many of the less observant players may have a few surprises in store for them.

Anyway, that’s probably more than enough rambling about enemy design for you all, see ya later!