The largest update yet

Well, could say that the update to the new look with the solar system was big. It was, code wise. But this is the largest in terms of content being added at once, and there being so many little game changes.

Game:
-Fixed male gender icons being displayed for all NPCs.
-Fixed scenes not exiting when a piece of clothing wasn’t worn.
-Fixed a bug where the writing parser would describe something similar to “___ and ___ and part” instead of “___ and ___ part”.

-When joining a new Zone, the camera is centered on your new position. This should also stop you from ever being able to see your position.
-Added some styling to the tiles to make it more clear that they’re clickable to move. Removed the outlines so it looks less like a crossword puzzle. D:
-Added a few small things to my dev tools, like being able to see a total word count for each Event, and updates to the display of an Event’s flow. (More detail below)
-Added a method of storing and manipulating event-player variable pairs. IE, you can set and change a “fondness” of an NPC for a player and change it over interactions, or whatever sort of numeral variable a writer may need to set, change, and reference. This is used for the new male NPC.
This is a complex algorithm for something that can be run very often. It’s about 20 lines of code compared to the 1-8 that other Event functions are. I’ll need to run benchmarks on that piece of code later, since my current code for it looks heavy.
-Added support for a scene/item to add a randomized list of adjectives to a body part or clothing, instead of just a single word.
-Added support for scenes to modify character body adjectives, like could be done with clothes. This is used for one of the quest lines to make a PC’s orifice egg-filled. I’ll add the same for cum-filling on some previous content that was added before this was supported.
-Additional improvements to how the writing parser describes things, with more varied language and randomization.

Content:
-Fixed injector scene writing for Lia. It was using some things from an old setting that she was in.
-Fixed dialog option for a dick-less character visiting Gail for the first time.
-Did some editing on the injector scene writing for Sluishtha that Swapper contributed.
-Fixed the “A New Best Friend” quest not clearing out upon completion.

-Sluishtha is no longer a rapist. (There’s now a no-sex option)
-There’s finally a male character, Macsen. I started work on an NPC that’s just west of were you start in the Wilderness, next to Gail.
There are a lot of sex scenes with him. Some of them require very specific criteria to meet, such as him liking the player’s character a certain amount along with having a certain level of quest competition, or in-completion as it were.
-Added a lot of content for Gail, the female researcher.
-Added some misc content here and there to take note of somethings competition, or repeat visits.  A lot of these are pretty place-holder-y, sorry.

Gail is getting more like how I intended things. I think I said before, to have something like 10k-40k words per NPC? She’s grown to over four thousand words, with that mostly being story content.
In retrospect, the original demo I had, back when the layout was all plain white, was around 11,000 words total across the 6 NPCs. The content just in the Wilderness Research Station is now nearly 30,000 words. The median length of a book is 64,000 words.
That 10k-40k number comes from how I want a players “relationship” with an NPC to grow. More than that, I want the players relationship with other NPCs and the world to change that NPC, or other players to change them. All those words are so you can keep coming to an NPC and get a different experience, not just because of something you did but often because of what other players did.
It’s still missing world interaction, since I’m just not sure what should trigger an Event with the story in those areas now. Maybe if this was a sort of “Saloon Town”, then you could have players helping one side or another, and the power dynamic shifts would then change the NPCs. But here that doesn’t apply. To any effect, I can’t write that much more myself for just one character at the moment. :p

Currently there is over 20,000 words of content in The Wilderness, not counting Gail’s and Macsen’s writing.
Macsen has over 4500 words of writing, and Gail nearly 4500 words.  So those two alone represent almost 1/3rd of the content in that area. There’s still some placeholders for them that I need to finish, but they’re confirming my original guess that 10,000-40,000 words per NPC was about what I would need in most cases for them to have a good amount of variation, less repetition, and room for a different experience based on choices. They’re nearly at 5k, but still need quite a bit more added.
I think that also confirms that around a million words is what LEWD needs to start feeling “complete”.  Many millions would be better, of course, but I have to shoot for something obtainable to start with. A million words is what the largest Visual Novels or what 9 inch thick Novels tend to be. Like I said earlier, 64,000 is the mean count for a book. But with how the engine works with all the different potential planets, or asteroids, stations, and other points of interest there are, it could handle having many millions of words of content and not feel like too much. Since so much content is never seen based on the Player Character and choices, there needs to be lots extra.

Here’s a shot from the development tools I’ve been making along side the game, showing the current flow of the Gail scenes.
gail_thumb
I’ve shown something similar before, but it’s been updated. All the sheet icons on the right correspond to the collapsed scenes that I have on the left. It makes a sort of flow chart so it’s easier to see how things connect for the person that’s making the scene. For Gail, there’s 27 different Scenes in the Event, which you’d never see all of on a single character.
I’ve also updated this tool. Before the sheet icons were too small and things were cluttered. I made it show the number of functions at the top of sheets, which can also direct to another scene so sometimes they have lines drawn.  I also changed how colors are generated so it always makes a visible color, while before it often made greys. In the future, I want to do some sort of color coding so it’s easier to read, though.

Still, even with the improvements with the colors of the lines, and the larger icons, it’s hard to follow the flow. I know I could have the lines exiting outside the bounds and looping around when they’re linking to another set, that’d be easier to follow. I’ve been starting to wonder if I might need to make some sort of 3D GUI just for making the content, since they can and will be a lot more in depth than the Gail one is. I also know I need something where you can hover the “pages” to give a better idea of what scene it is, and hover the connections to see what they are leading to. That’ll all happen in time.

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