The Ongoing Struggle

My incredibly busy week has finally come to a close. I do still have a couple more social obligations that will continue to distract me, but I should now have the time to stay at home and recover some mental bandwidth so I can return to work properly.

It's probably a good thing that I've been out of the house as much as I have been, though. Seasonals set in a bit early this year, and spending all this time with friends and family and hobbies has gone a very long way toward preventing me from rotting at home while staring at game script like it's supposed to do something on its own.

Spending all this time away from work has left me mildly unfamiliar with everything I was putting together, so the few chances I've had to open it up and work on the things that weren't quite operating the way they should be, I've had to spend more time re-learning my own script than actually making progress on it.

Which is originally where I wanted this post to end. I would've been a little upset with myself for the lack of meaningful progress over the past week, but I'd have resolved to put my nose back to the grindstone, get the training system properly implemented, and get to work on the rest of the new content for Redemption Harem v0.2. Maybe mention the new scenes that would be available or sharing thoughts about some of the ideas I've got for how to present the new quests.

Instead, the only individual I've ever banned for harassing me decided it was a good time to resume harassing me.

I'm not normally one to make my suffering a public matter. It's why I try to avoid talking about my financial struggles unless it's in aggregate, like the amount of money Maids & Masters cost me to make, or generalizations, like simply stating that I am struggling. It's also why I try to restrict any mention of my mental health to lines like the one in the second paragraph, or simply stating that treating myself better is something I have room to improve on.

Harassment, however, is not okay - no matter the subject or severity - and sometimes I need to put thoughts somewhere other than my head so I can stop myself from dwelling on them and spiraling.

So, if you want some drama, like context, or just don't have anything better to do, keep reading. 

If you don't care, this will hopefully be the last you or I ever hear of this, and you can stop reading here.

Just be warned that this is an exercise in venting for me. I no longer want these thoughts inside my skull, and this individual no longer deserves my kindness. I'm going to do my best to stick to facts, but this individual deleted most of their own posts, and having them blocked means I can't view what they didn't delete, so I have to operate from memories I'd rather not recall. You may be able to see them for yourself on my Patreon page, as I never deleted anything myself, but some of this back and forth is in a community chat, which you need to be an active Patron to see.

First, some context - this individual joined my Patreon page at the VIP tier before they were reworked. That meant this individual represented more than 20% of my monthly income at the time. While they were an active Patron, they became the first and only person to make fan-works (that I know of) for Maids & Masters. They stole some of my custom assets to create at least one of those fan-works, but if they'd asked, I'd have said they could use them with no strings attached, so I let it slide. Past that, the amount of money they were giving me left me in a position where I felt pointing out I should've been asked first was putting my livelihood at risk, so it wasn't worth the confrontation.

And I had reason to think it would be a confrontation. This individual regularly left comments that were generally the sort of mild offense that you'd expect out of the worst customer you have to deal with at your job. They're out of line, they're making everyone else the bad guy, they're telling you their way is better, and they're following all the rules so there's nothing to be done but try and avoid further interaction. This became regular, but again, this individual's pledge was the difference between being able to afford groceries and starving, so it was in my best interest to ignore them.

All of this coming from someone with a username that pushes an agenda. The sort of name people put in tiers where creators say the names of supporters of a certain tier out loud at the end of their videos, even if it's just a prank like Mike Oxlong. This wasn't a prank or anything positive, though. If their screen name was "Trans Rights Are Human Rights," I wouldn't complain. No, this individual's full username was "ByogenLivesMatter - HealinGood Precure is ableist bullshit - Junko Komura is objectively evil and caused real life damage!"

If you're somewhere between confused and bewildered, so was I. I still am, really. I can understand supporting a cause. Y'know, free Palestine, release the Epstein files, love is love. But this?

To save you the time, Healin' Good Pretty Cure is a standard magical girl anime. The Byogens are the bad guys. Junko Komura wrote it. I don't blame you if you've never heard of it; neither had I, and I've been part of the anime community for more than 20 years. I was even anime club president in high school.

So why the profanity and trying to cause harm to a person this individual likely never met and knew nothing about? Turns out there was a mild controversy among a small sub-set of fans over the anime's ending. The TL;DR there is that the main character was sick before becoming a magical girl and refused to let "king virus" inhabit her body after she defeats him. 

That's it. That's the whole story. This username is so long it breaks things on my Patreon page's back end when it appears. It hurls accusations and insults over a woman having bodily autonomy. The individual harassing me made their whole personality "why wouldn't the author force a terminally ill girl to be terminally ill again so the pandemic allegory wouldn't die?"

But I put up with it, because if they canceled their pledge, my income would destabilize, and I'd start having to choose between being able to eat and being able to leave the house. 

Eventually though, I did gain enough support to not be riding a knife's edge. While I'd normally say empathy is a good thing, this individual was trying to get me to rewrite the start of Maids & Masters so that rats wouldn't be an enemy and Master would love them instead of hating them. I never had any interest in doing this but I'd never said as much for fear of losing the income. Rats seem more important than people to whoever this individual is, so if I ever outright refused, that'd likely be all the excuse they needed, and I'd be trying to figure out how to keep my bills paid.

When I finally had the room to lose this individuals support, the next time one of these comments came up, I didn't have to be afraid of defending my creative decisions, so I explained myself.

This I remember clearly, and won't need to look back on old posts to give you the whole story.

It was on the poll for which character should be used in the promotional image for one of Maids & Masters' love shack updates. I mentioned in the original post that I'd re-render the image, both to re-frame it so Celine would fill the image in a wide-screen aspect ratio and to remove Master so you could see her.

Removing Master from the image was apparently this individual's breaking point. Removing Master wasn't malicious, it was so the image felt more like an invitation for you, the player, to spend a weekend at a cabin with Celine. Keeping the back of Master's head in the image would both make it harder to see Celine and at least partially remove the idea of that invitation, as there's already someone else there. 

This individual's response was to go off on a rant complete with examples to "prove" I was wrong, and when I pointed out the intent of the composition of the example, they proceeded to delete nearly every message they'd ever sent, cancel their pledge, and start hurling accusations of sexism in a community chat room within my Patreon page. Their tantrum needed to be in front of as many people as possible so I'd be thoroughly painted as the villain. My response at this point was to block the individual on Patreon and apologize to my community for the drama. As far as I was concerned, it ended there.

Unfortunately, it didn't end there. Once this individual realized they couldn't cause chaos and displeasure in a way that might directly damage my livelihood, they created a long post about how rats actually aren't disease-carrying pests, complete with a link to an article about how useful literal lab rats are.

Look, if you think rats are cute or maybe even have one as a pet, good for you. Most of my personal distaste for rodents comes from their propensity to break into my house and leave droppings all over my cookware if I don't keep traps baited.

For this individual, though, it apparently makes me evil on the same level as the terminally ill magical girl that refused to surrender her bodily autonomy to a living plague and the author who wrote that piece of fiction. You'd think that an individual so concerned with rats being an enemy in a video game and had so much empathy for the villains of an anime would object to lab testing, but the point wasn't that I'd wronged them or offended their lofty morals, it was to harass me. They'd posted the same article with the same rant on at least half a dozen of my post recent posts trying to promote Maids & Masters before I blocked them on Twitter, too.

For a few months, that was the end of it. They couldn't damage my income or harass me on Twitter.

Of course didn't sit right with this individual, so they made another account and joined my Patreon as a free follower. In hindsight, I should've blocked them again as soon as I saw it, but shame on me for thinking people should get second chances. My personal bias toward empathy was even rewarded, as they didn't say a single word for close to a year, maybe longer.

Until this weekend. I mentioned that I'm still struggling financially and was debating opening a new potential revenue stream. Obviously they couldn't tolerate me doing anything but struggling, so they copied a bunch of text so if I changed it they had proof I was being manipulative (I assume; my stance on giving me money has always been very transparent) and said it didn't make sense for me to offer commissions if people couldn't afford to pledge to a Patreon tier. 

I called them out for circumventing being banned from my page, but went on to explain myself anyway, just in case anyone else genuinely didn't understand what I'd said in the post.

This individual, true to their character, called me nasty and aggressive, called themselves polite, dug up the past, and said I'd lied and viciously attacked their moral character.

Needless to say, I've blocked the new account on Patreon and ensured they're blocked everywhere else I'm on social media to (hopefully) prevent any more attempts to undermine my trying to do more than just barely scrape by because I'm continuing to give away the vast majority of my hard work completely free, only asking for financial support from those who feel I truly deserve it and who can afford to provide it.

If you see anything this individual posts about negative interactions with me or reasons you shouldn't support me, you can assume it's a false allegation intended to cause me harm as revenge for the crime of having an artistic vision that doesn't line up exactly one-to-one with their world view.

And if you're the individual being talked about here, I sincerely hope you find the wherewithal to reflect on your actions and grow some accountability. The performative empathy you've been putting on display doesn't hide how toxic and manipulative you are. There's a decent person in there somewhere, but if you keep putting the blame for your own actions on everyone around you, they're never going to make it. I genuinely hope it isn't too late for them and you find the strength to change.

Return Post

I'm officially back home!

I've actually been home for a couple days, but this is a very busy week for me, so I sadly won't be able to get much development work done. Yesterday was the first day since I left that I had a full day to myself, and all I was really able to do development-wise is remind myself of the issues I ran into getting all the new training mechanics implemented, which means I need to re-learn how I built the system so I can fix those issues.

Though to be clear, those are very minor issues. It's things like the random chances for the "skip" option and the soft stat caps not quite correctly using the random numbers that get generated. All I need to do to fix it is do some math, adjust the conditional branches, and test it again. The main hurdle is the amount of time it takes to do all that math and test it again rather than not knowing how to fix it. The final mechanic will still work exactly as described over on the Patreon/Subscribestar post.

 

Speaking of, this Friday's post will likely be a poll about possible render commissions. While offering commissions is something I've generally avoided, the two biggest reasons I've been avoiding it are my confidence in my skill level and the time commitment. Now that I've been doing this for five years, I'm significantly more skilled and more confident in my skills, which leaves time as the last obstacle.

It is quite the obstacle, as time spent rendering commissions is time that could be spent developing instead, but the economy being as rough as it is understandably leaves fewer people able to support me, and in situations where someone has to choose between paying a bill, feeding themselves, or giving me a few dollars, the last thing I want them to choose is giving me a few dollars. Commission work would open up a new possible revenue stream for me, and would give those who can afford it a means of supporting me while still getting something they want.

I'm honestly still fairly torn on the idea, but that's why it'll get put to a poll. It'll be easier to make a decision after I know if there's any interest in it.

 

And hopefully by next week I'll have more time to put into work and I can start telling you about the new content that's planned for Redemption Harem v0.2.

Away Post

As much as I'd love to yap at you some more about everything I've been working on for the rest of Redemption Harem v0.2, most of what I've been working on are implementing the things I've already told you about and new maps, and it's kinda hard to say more about new maps than "they exist now."

 

I do have some news, though it isn't related to game development - I'll be out of town to help family for most of the next week. I'm trying to get something close enough to done that I can give a little bit of a preview for the Patreon and Subscribestar post this Friday, but training still isn't as fully implemented as it should be and I still have to pack today so I can leave tomorrow morning.

I'll still put something up if for no other reason than I know not everyone that goes to Patreon and Subscribestar also read this dev blog, but there's a good chance it ends up just being a text post instead of a teaser image like I want it to be.

 

Since being out of town means I can't get any more work done, next week's blog post is highly likely to just be "I'm back," but I hope I'll see you here next week anyway. 

Redemption Harem - Reworking Hunting for v0.2

Getting hunting fully implemented was surprisingly difficult. I had all the mechanics functioning on an individual test animal in time for the Patreon and Subscribestar post last Friday, but when I tried to get things copied into the existing animals, some were fleeing the moment I stepped into the map, some would stand completely still if another animal was triggered to flee, and all animals would respawn immediately on re-entering the map rather than disappearing until the next day. A few wouldn't even correctly despawn after fleeing.

 

It took all weekend, but all of that is fixed now. The reason some were fleeing immediately was due to a scripting issue that kept their self-switches activated, so all animals were reworked to have a fail-safe layer that turns those switches off. That didn't work at first because there was a coding issue that was operating the self-switch of other events, and that code has been updated to refer to "this map, this event" rather than specifying the map and event in question. With that (and some investigating that led to the fail-safe being implemented), multiple animals finally behaved the way they were supposed to, so all that was needed was to rework their drop tables to take your hunter level into account, then copy/paste the new reworked animals to replace the old ones.

I still need to do some testing to make sure I'm not missing something else that I haven't encountered, but reworking the code does mean I'm now able to do things like cause groups of animals to flee if you scare one of them. That's not a mechanic I intend to use often, but it's nice to have it as an option.

 

Hunting and farming were the two big new mechanics for v0.2 that were missing from v0.1, so from here on out, it's mostly new content. I say "mostly" because there are some additions to old content I need to make still.

For starters, Nadua doesn't really have her degrade or euphoria events. I think they can be triggered (I haven't tested it yet), but nothing happens, so those scenes need to be rendered and written. Related to that, since consent is important, I want to put in a choice for the player to either go along with the "attack" or literally fight them off, similar to how you get that option now if a captured character degrades to the point where they're "too far gone" and you have to fight them, but it's now your choice if you actually want to kill them. 

Off the back of that, I want to rework training a bit so you have the option of Sparring in addition to "Training." As is, you can spar with Nadua and you can "Train" with Asgina, but you can't "Train" with Nadua (you can replay the scene and restore her Condition if you haven't done your daily training yet, but she doesn't get stats from it) and you can't spar with Asgina. Sparring with Nadua is also just a fade to black and a random number roll. While I want to keep that as a "basic drills" type of option so you can skip having to actually fight, I'm also thinking through how to eventually let you teach your party members each other's skills, and sparring manually will likely play a role in that.

The basics of that idea right now are still pretty early in the idea phase, so I don't want to get too in-depth here just yet. For now, all you need to know about training updates is that you'll still have a "skip - fade to black" option, a manual option where different outcomes (such as knocking out your sparring partner vs "capturing" them vs losing the fight) will have different effects that you should have at least some control over, and the "training" option to replay a scene that will have a different effect from sparring if you haven't trained yet that day and no effect if you've already trained and are just replaying the scene for your own enjoyment.

Redemption Harem - Starting Development on v0.2

Development on v0.2 has actually been underway since the moment v0.1 was deployed, but who's counting?

 

Most of that time has been spent rebalancing things a bit - the Tie Down skill now upgrades the existing Bound state and only does damage if the target isn't Bound at all instead of being a damaging skill with a higher chance of Binding the target, for starters. That means you won't accidentally kill some of the weaker enemies after needing to use another damaging skill to get them Bound in the first place, and you won't need to spam that skill after spending eight turns Guarding in order to actually capture things.

Tie Down is also cheaper now that its use case is narrower, and you now get roughly double the TP from successfully parrying enemy attacks (even if you miss the parry and only guard). All together, these changes should make capturing enemies considerably less tedious without making an impromptu shibari session the most effective way to fight tougher enemies. 

 

Also, as a follow-up to the farming post from last Friday on Patreon and Subscribestar, I was able to get the farming system completely set up over the weekend and have been testing it to make sure I didn't miss a variable somewhere. I can't test every possible combination, as there are 16 plots and 8 available crops, and if my math is right, there are almost 13,000 of them. 

This is why I so deeply appreciate those of you who report any bugs you find.

I haven't found any bugs in it yet, though. If you read the post on Patreon/Substar, I was able to get everything set up as described there; you can plant whatever, and while it'll take longer to grow by default to offset the larger yield, you can water crops to speed up growth. 

The only potential issue is that I've been kicking around the idea of a weather system in my head to go along with the day/night system, and with how the garden is set up, I can't think of a way to make the crops count as automatically watered if it's raining. It won't be that hard to do the mechanical effect of watering the crops if it happens to be raining, but stopping you from watering them anyway to get double the effect is a bit trickier. That's a problem for the future, though; I'm still not totally sure I want to bother with a weather system anyway, since other than rain auto-watering your crops, there may not be any mechanical effect to it. And if I put the work into making a weather system, I'll want there to be some kind of mechanical effect, even if it's just characters being indoors when they're normally outside.

 

The actual next mechanic I'm working on is the Hunting system, which will be the first profession you have to find out in the world. Doing that won't be anything intense, you just won't start the game with it.

If you want to know more about that, go click one of the Patreon and/or Substar links and keep an eye out there. Depending on how much trouble it gives me, I might need to talk about something else while I work the kinks out of it, but I'm hoping to get far enough along to be able to tell you how those mechanics will work this Friday.

Redemption Harem - Following Up on v0.1

Redemption Harem's v0.1 release seems to have gone well enough. Better than Maids & Masters did, but given that MnM was my first game when no one knew who I was, that's not much of a comparison to make. The real measure will be the public release when v0.2 goes into early access and the general public gets their hands on it. I would say I'm trying to not let my expectations get too high, but I don't really know what to expect. I know it won't be a disaster, but I doubt it'll be an explosive success either, so I'm not really giving it much thought.

 

That said, I am looking forward to v0.2 already. At least one bug snuck past me and into the v0.1 build that's already been identified and fixed, and there's another that I need to investigate to see if it didn't get fixed properly, but they're both minor annoyances more than something completely game-breaking.

There's also a few balance changes I want to make already. Capturing enemies in combat - particularly non-boss enemies - is harder than it needs to be. Part of that I think I'll address by updating the Tie Down skill you can learn through the training dummy so it force-upgrades the enemies Bound status rather than simply having a higher chance of applying the state, but I might end up going in a different direction with it. 

 

I may also put some SP regeneration on the parry system so you can use techniques more often, because - especially when you're trying to capture an enemy - the optimal strategy is to sit there and Guard repeatedly to get your SP near max, then use the next 2-3 turns dumping it into your capture skills. That's... boring, frankly, and not what I want that gameplay loop to feel like. At least against the random encounter enemies, I want the capture mechanic to feel more like taking advantage of an opportunity that's presented itself rather than the "I'm actively being attacked by this wild animal, let me stand here and make faces at it for a minute or two before I do something about it" that it currently feels like. The parry system is supposed to avoid that feeling, so putting some SP gain in it might solve this other issue. I'll need to test it out to see how that actually feels, though. There might be a completely different solution that will work better that just isn't presenting itself to me right now.

 

I'm still very happy with the game overall, though. The day/night system feels right - sitting in the fortress doing prep work takes a day or two to fully finish, which means it's also a great way to fill time when you've hit the "come back tomorrow" points in quests. The survival mechanics feel a smidge harsh, but at least to me, aren't so harsh that it becomes a pain in the ass, it just pushes you out of the fortress to forage for supplies and explore (which is exactly what the survival mechanics are meant to do). The economy balance is in a much better place compared to the demo, and while you can theoretically do things infinitely and break the economy, it kinda sucks the fun out of it. While I was playtesting, I only really wanted to go looking for fights when there was a specific enemy that dropped a thing I needed for crafting, and it only took a few minutes for me to run into the type of enemy I needed to find and capture them to get the thing I needed. It's still a little rough around the edges, but it all fits together very nicely.

Of course all of that will smooth out even more as the game progresses and you gain access to more things and level them up, like farming giving you more food as you unlock plots and the Hunter profession giving you more loot as it gains levels for capturing enemies.

Plus the ability to hunt animals that you find outside of combat. I want that to be part of the v0.2, but I'm still working out exactly how I want that to work mechanically, which means it'll probably be the reason v0.2 still isn't out at the end of September. It's a mechanic I really want to be part of the game, though, so I'll have to figure it out sooner or later.

 

Anyway, v0.1 early access is out right now, and you can get it on Patreon, Subscribestar, and itch! 

Redemption Harem - Testing v0.1

There was one last system I needed to rework before v0.1 was completely ready, and it's taken all weekend to rework properly, but I'm currently in the process of testing it and now it too is one of the many things that's working out fantastically. I still have a little bit of rendering to do before everything that was in the demo is done for v0.1 (mostly because reworking this system took a fair bit more time than I expected it to), but that should all be done today, leaving the rest of the week for polish and bug hunting.

That's right! Nothing when horribly wrong and v0.1 is still set to release into early access this Friday,  August 21st. If you want to get your mitts on it, Patreon and Subscribestar are the best places to do that. It'll be going up on itch as well over the weekend, but since I need to create some new assets for the new early access page, set up the lifetime key that the Supporter tier gets, and will likely be taking the time to redo some assets for my other pages while I'm at it, and doing all that will take me more than a few minutes.

Everything should get uploaded same-day after this week, though. Launching a new title into early access just takes a little extra work. 

 

The same should apply to v0.2 and onward - one of the biggest reasons I'm releasing v0.1 three weeks after I wanted to is because I've been building all these new systems, but now that they're built, I'll be able to put all that effort into new content.

Though with that said, there are a few things in the demo that won't be in v0.1 right away. For starters, now that I have access to the profession system, hunting and farming will tie into and rely on that. Since I moved to a zero-xp system, those can also be extra progression systems. With them also not being strictly necessary for progression, that kinda turns into a cascading effect that allows me to use them to reward you for engaging with the game, which I feel is much more interesting than the more straightforward (but also kinda boring, a little game-breaking, and sometimes frustrating) way they were implemented in the demo. Not being able to hunt the deer yet means I need to implement an alternate way to complete Nadua's hunt quest, but that's fairly simple by comparison.

All of that in turn means I'm not completely done developing new systems, but developing one or two new systems alongside new content will be a lot less work than needing to rework basically everything the game does from scratch, so v0.2 onward will hopefully still not take me nearly two months to make and I can get closer to the monthly updates I want to aim for (even though my Patrons are amazing patient people who have so far unanimously voted to let updates take as long as they need).

Anyway, that feels like enough rambling for this week. Go get acquainted with one of the links above so you're ready for v0.1!

Redemption Harem - v0.1 Release Date

It feels both a little overdue and like I'm still missing something, but I'm finally far enough along with v0.1 that I think I'm comfortable giving it a release date. It'll go into testing this Friday for V.I.P.s and Producers on Patreon and Subscribestar this Friday, August 14th. v0.1 will then release into early access the following week on Friday, July 21st.

Since it's been a while since the last time I've had an update release into early access, if you're not familiar with how I do that, I do rolling early access. That means that v0.1 will stay in early access until v0.2 goes into early access, then v0.1 will be available for free for everybody.

The same applies to itch.io, where there'll be an early access page available for purchase that'll get you lifetime early access that'll go up, and the existing demo page will have the most recent public build. And like I did with Maids & Masters, I'll offer a lifetime support key for Redemption Harem that can be redeemed through itch.

 

With all that said, the only meaningful development news is that the parry system has been implemented and not only works exactly how I wanted it to, but is fairly easy to adjust. The current assets are probably going to end up placeholders so I can make something a little flashier and/or prettier even if it ends up being slightly less intuitive. Everything else is just the time-consuming fiddly bits, like finding typos and making sure all the quest log and journal updates appear correctly, and updating item and skill descriptions so the formatting matches, etc. etc.

I'm extremely happy with it as is though, so let's talk about that a bit. It gives combat exactly the sort of skill element I wanted it to have so that you can "dark souls" your way through combat without any upgrades if you get good at it, making all the exploration and crafting upgrades optional, but still extremely useful. While I want the perfect parry to be generous enough that you feel like a combat genius hitting it fairly often, it being too easy trivializes things and can have the opposite effect when you hit it even when it feels like you shouldn't. 

I feel like I've hit that sweet spot, because combat is still dangerous, especially since food items can backfire (there's an Overfull debuff you get by over-eating) and other forms of healing are much more restrictive. Aside from the perfect parry window, there's a "guard" window where you'll get a temporary guard state to take half damage, and between those there's a "perfect block" window where you'll prevent closer to 20% of the damage. This little misses result in taking chip damage, so instead of being mauled by wolves, you're able to power through (thanks entirely to how good at the game you are), but going through 3-5 of those fights can still result in a game over if you're out of healing items. Unless, of course, you're really good at the game and parry everything that dares approach you into the dirt where they belong.

At least to me, that feels great. It encourages preparing ahead of time, such as buying camping supplies so you can stop to rest in the middle of the area (I literally got to the "tutorial camp" and thought to myself "dang, I should've bought supplies so I could heal"), or buying up materials to craft healing items, or taking things in parts so you can forage for stuff to sell or craft with. In those situations where you haven't, or you under-prepared, or you had a fight go wrong early on but you're too far in to just back out, then you lock in and turn into the patron saint of parrying - it's exactly what I wanted out of the system.

The new time system makes this work even better, as now it's actually possible for you to go into the first map, grab everything you can see, then back out to sell what you don't need or call that good enough and spend the rest of the day researching, or whatever else you feel like doing to properly prepare before committing to diving three maps deep into random encounters.

It's hard to put into words how great it feels to have everything fit together so nicely in the early play tests, especially since it's taken so long for me to get everything implemented the way I want to implement it. But I have, and everything works, and I've barely had to compromise anything, and... it's so nice. I really hope those of you who get your hands on it are as happy with it as I am.

Redemption Harem - Finally Out of the Fortress

After almost exactly a month of development, I've finally gotten past the first 15 minutes of the game and out of the fortress. That doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment, but in reality, it means that all of the core systems that aren't part of combat and exploration are done. That doesn't leave a lot of work left to do, and v0.1 is getting very close.

I'd like to say the v0.1 test build will be coming on Patreon on Subscribestar this Friday, but that feels like tempting fate. 

 

While there is very little left (basically all I have to do for the game to be playable is finish adding in the quests), as tends to be the case with a thing as complex as game development, every few steps forward leads me to a new problem that helps me empathize with Sisyphus. 

The most recent example of this is how exploration is handled. I wanted a way to visualize how much of the map you've explored, both as a means of displaying the gathered information so it's easier to reference and to incentivize you to explore areas. It gives me more ways to reward you as well as something easier to design around, as the natural gamer instinct when you're given an incomplete map is to try and fill it in.

The plugin I found to do that flat out doesn't work. The code was obscured by the person who made it, so I can't attempt to fix it myself, and the error being thrown is a code issue.

I spent today redesigning the map exploration checks to make sure I could implement another solution, but the other solution I have is very fiddly and requires me to make a ton of custom assets, and may delay v0.1's release another week or two while I figure it out unless I cut it so v0.1 can release sooner. The feature is probably still worth taking the time to implement, but I already feel like v0.1 has taken me too long to finish and I still haven't gotten to trying to implement a parry system to combat. Which, based on what I've been able to find so far, is not going to be a simple process either.

 

That's really all that's left, though. There are still a few events that need name boxes added, I need to finish adding the quest logs where they need to go, and I still need to make sure the capture system will work the way I want it to and get that fully implemented, but adding name boxes and quest log updates is a few hours of work at most, and the capture system shouldn't take more than a day. If I'm able to get parrying to work the way I want it to quickly and easily, that's just two days of work, and Friday is technically three days away. If things don't cooperate and I run into other issues it might take a week to get set anyway, but we don't need to spend more time on that.

I might be missing a few other things that will need my attention before v0.1 officially ships into early access, but that's what the testing period is for. It still feels like too much of a long shot to say that testing period will actually start this Friday, but we're very close.

Redemption Harem - Significant Progress on v0.1

Although I haven't managed to escape the first 15 minutes of the game in terms of what's ready to ship quite yet, progress is still being made, and lots of it.

Last week I mentioned one of the hangups was the professions tab not correctly listing known recipes. Since then, I ran into another hangup that prevented professions from gaining levels and experience. Fixing the second issue also fixed the first issue, so now you'll be able to view your learned recipes from the Professions tab like I originally intended.

I ran into a similar issue while troubleshooting auto-discovery for your Journal entries. While I still need to do custom entries for the People tab, I've gotten the Bestiary and Conditions tab (which hold all the information for enemies and the game's states respectively) working as intended, but with the addition of custom notes, so you get all the lore I'd otherwise not be able to include with raw enemy stats.

I also mentioned the research system, which is now complete and partially tested, and that worked exactly the way I wanted it to, which is a welcome change of pace from some of the hair loss I experienced over getting some of the other mechanics working. There's still a little building out I need to do, especially for cooking, but it's nice to have development (mostly) going smoothly again.

 

The remaining major mechanics are the things I'm not confident will go quickly, because they're reliant on plugins I've never used before and/or may require me to implement a more complicated solution.

The first is a map system. The plugin I found claims to be able to create maps that show you how much of an area you've explored, which will work as a great alternative to the way I currently provide exploration rewards. Everything except a visible map is already implemented in the demo, but visualizing it is a major quality of life change that would make finding and getting exploration rewards so much more intuitive. The trouble being that I'm not sure how easy it'll be to implement or if it'll work at all, so this may require some retooling or may not even make it into the game.

The second is parrying. If you've played Expedition 33, you're already familiar with the general idea (and if you haven't, you really should, it's a phenomenal game). In short, if you "perfect parry" you'll counter-attack, with the next step down being a perfect block, and the next step down being a partial block, ending with you taking full damage if you miss entirely. This is something that I feel the new direction requires, so if I'm not able to use a plugin to make the process easier, I'll have to explore methods on doing it the hard way, and doing it the hard way is likely to be rather time consuming.

 

That's just the big mechanics, though. There's still lots of little things that need attention, like making sure name boxes exist, balancing combat according to how the parry system works, entering all the quests and making sure those entries are fully readable since the scroll on those boxes won't work, trying to balance out the economy so you aren't able to completely break it but you also aren't constantly struggling to avoid starvation, and probably at least half a dozen other things I can't name off the top of my head.

Those smaller things will generally go pretty quickly once they're identified, though, and won't have a meaningful impact on overall gameplay even if they're enough to notice (like missing name boxes). 

Progress is coming along pretty nicely, but I'm still very much in a space where I can't say exactly how much longer development is going to take before we actually hit v0.1. Since we're at the end of the month, I'll be putting up a poll to help me understand how you want development of v0.2 onward to function. The TL;DR on that is finding out if you want monthly updates no matter what, or if you're okay with a "it's done when it's done" approach. If you have an opinion about that, head over to Patreon or Subscribestar and consider supporting me if you aren't already. That poll will be going up this Friday.

Redemption Harem - Still Developing v0.1

I was hoping to have made more progress by now, but having a clearer vision for all the mechanics I want in Redemption Harem than I did for Maids & Masters means there's a lot more to do to get the game to a playable state, and all of those things take time to implement, even if the implementation is relatively smooth.

And while the vast majority of things have gone pretty smoothly,  there have been a few hiccups.

 

The first was with the crafting system. I wanted the "recipes" tab to show you your professions info as well as your learned recipes, if that wasn't obvious by the name. Something in the plugin is apparently broken, and regardless of whether you start the game with a recipe known or you learn it later on, it doesn't appear in the tab the way it should. I haven't been able to find any documentation about getting it working, nor have I been able to troubleshoot the issue to find a fix, so I've had to remove that. You'll still be able to see the information about the professions, but you won't be able to see your learned recipes unless you're in the middle of crafting them.

Next is the auto-discovery for your Journal. I know how to do it all manually, so if I can't get it working, it's not a big deal, but I really want you to be able to learn about enemies either by encountering them or by researching them, and the auto-discovery will save me a lot of work on that front. I haven't gotten as far as working on combat yet, so I haven't been encountering enemies yet anyway, but it's supposed to work for party members as well, and so far all it's done is stay empty and erroneously claim I have 100% of entries unlocked. So I have to figure that out still.

More recently, I ran into trouble with the video player plugin. It's the same one I used for Maids & Masters, but when I first started to add the re-rendered animations, the video refused to play despite the commands being correct. This I was able to troubleshoot to get working as intended, but it still made what would otherwise be copying and pasting a few lines of script into place take an entire day to get working.

There's also the quest log, which is supposed to allow for scrolling text. It does scroll, but I'm having an issue where it will "bounce" back to the top as soon as it tries to scroll anywhere, leaving the window to think it scrolled properly when you're still looking at the same text. I can work around this if I have to and just reduce text until it all fits on screen, but the preferred option is to get it working, which means I need to learn some javascript and do a bit of coding to get it working the way it should.

And this is all for the first 15 minutes of the game.

 

That might sound like a lot of negativity, but I want to assure you that's just because it's taken up a lot of time, and development is generally going really well. The crafting system, for example, worked almost perfectly on the first try and gives me a lot of options for future implementation. The visual style took way less time to reach than I was worried it would, and editing the videos for Asgina to make her properly transparent was significantly easier than I was anticipating. You'll have to be a supporter to see the images, but since the test build is unlikely to be ready this Friday, I'll be putting up a preview for that on Patreon and Subscribestar. 

Another thing I was really apprehensive about but ended up working perfectly is the Condition system. I wanted to have each character's Condition be easy to view, especially if they're in your party, but I didn't have an easy way to display it without added a new custom menu screen. As a separate issue, using a zero-XP system means I needed to get rid of the level display in the menu, since that would be useless at best or cause confusion at worst. A happy coincidence is that I'm able to rename what "level" is called in the back end, so I simply renamed it to "condition." Now you can see your party's condition in the menu and I don't have to figure out how to rip that out of the menu. That was also an extremely easy transition to make; I was worried moving that number up and down would undo your earned stat boosts, but thanks to setting it up the way I did, that also worked perfectly on the first try. It does put a few limits on what I can do, since your condition now can't go below 1 or above 99, but I want to implement mechanics where getting below 10 or above 90 can have consequences anyway, so that all works out with relatively little friction.

There are lots of other little changes that I've been able to make, too, like updating the visuals for the text box (which is a small change, but it's something you'll be looking at for the entire game, so I'm happy it worked out), and adding name boxes (another relatively simple change, but one that's time consuming to implement). Name boxes do present another issue, as the plugin I use to let you hide the text box doesn't also hide the name box, so if I want to have that happen, I need to learn more code to get that working, which will take even more time, but my point is that development is going very well despite the amount of time it's taking to make it all happen.