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. 

Redemption Harem - Continuing Development on v0.1

I've reached a point where I'm comfortable enough with the crafting system that I'm ready to move on to building out the other systems and getting v0.1 to a minimum viable product for a test build. Which means instead of having over one hundred things to do for a single system, I've got just 3-5 things to do for what feels like one hundred systems.

 

Obviously that's not quite accurate. I'm sure I could interpret things generously enough to say the game has at least one hundred unique systems in it, but my point is that there's still a lot left to do. The quest system gave me a bit of grief, largely because the system I was using for Maids & Masters required an extra compatibility layer that I'd prefer to avoid using for Redemption Harem. I found a few plugins that would've had more features, but they all - either in whole or in part - didn't work, and required me to do more work to achieve the same effect as the more basic plugin I'm ending up using. While the compatibility layer method would grant me access to a lot of things that would make life a little simpler, it also creates other problems, such as making a mobile build impossible, and I'd like to try and make that happen for RH since I couldn't for MnM.

 

I did eventually find a new quest log system that works and is easy enough to use, but it isn't quite as robust as the one in MnM, so I can't do things like script calls to determine what steps of the quest have been completed. That means I need to rely on other variables and switches to track that information, not only so the game knows what to do as you progress, but so I can put things in place that allow the rest of the game to change and how to change as you go. If I can figure out enough about how the plugin functions, I may be able to do script calls to determine if a quest has been completed or started or not, but that's kind of superfluous if I need to use variables and switches to track progression anyway. It's not the worst thing ever, but it does limit me in some ways unless I can find a workaround - which I think I have, but I haven't had the chance to test it yet, because the quest log is just one of the half-dozen things I needed to do in order to start testing the introduction sequence of the game.

 

Development is chugging right along, though. I'm hoping I'll get far enough in the minimum viable product to be able to start working on combat so I can talk about how progression and fighting will go for the Patreon/Subscribestar post on Friday, but that still feels pretty far off, so I might end up talking about the more general improvements that are being made relative to the demo. Which is a lot, given how old the demo is.

Redemption Harem - Starting Development on v0.1

I have to admit, it feels very good to be back on actual game development. I should really be running from rooftop to rooftop yelling about Maids & Masters being finished and an official strategy guide being available, but I've always been terrible about promotion.
(but if you could yell from your own rooftop or even just tell a friend that'd be super cool of you)

I also sadly don't have a convenient blog title meme within reach for posting about RH like I did with overusing ampersands with Maids & Masters, but oh well. Maybe something will present itself with time.

 

As for how development is actually going - pretty slow, though pretty well. The demo for RH didn't rely on any plugins to exist, so all of the systems that did exist and can be made simpler using plugins need to be transferred to plugins, the quality of life plugins (like input rebinds and the ability to hide the text box) also need to be added, and the systems I wasn't able to implement without plugins for the demo (most notably the Journal and Jobs (this game's encyclopedia and quest log)) need to be set up and added.

 

Getting all of that done will make the game much easier to play, as accessing information will be much easier and the UI for things like crafting will be vastly improved, but it also gives me opportunities to do things like require you to learn recipes for crafting, create "improved" recipes so you can possibly recover some items when you fail to craft things, and all sorts of other little things that you might not even think about while you're playing the game.

These are all good things, but it requires me to go in and set up all of it. Setting it up takes time. A lot of time. Just getting the alchemy recipes transferred has taken me all weekend, and I'm still not done with it yet, nor have I properly started on cooking, smithing, tailoring, any of the other crafting skills that are hinted at but not used in the demo, or made any decisions about turning things like farming or gathering into skills. I feel like I want to, at least for gathering, since that would give me a bit more control over how easy or difficult it is to get the items you need to craft things, which would in turn make it easier to balance the game's difficulty and economy, but my point is that all of that's still several steps down the road in this process.

 

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned anything about combat, or the day/night system, or adding new content yet, either. That's because I haven't been able to get anywhere near those systems yet. Though you can definitely rest assured I'll be blabbering about those as soon as I start working on them; I do have ideas, and hopefully what I have in mind will be fun and intuitive, because I really like the ideas. I just have to get that far first.

There's also things like redoing character designs a bit and using all my significantly improved skills to do things like replace the animations in the game with proper video, but if you want to know more (and maybe see) about that, that'll mostly be happening over on Patreon and Subscribestar.