Dev Log #6

I made some good progress on adding Emily as an NPC this week but not enough for a new version. NPCs are still in a bit of a draft phase so a lot of what I'm doing is cleaning up my messy code so future NPCs are easier to add.

I also need to work out which bits of NPC art are useful and which ones are barely (if ever) shown. Right now Diana has almost 40 unique pictures and less than half are used. The 3d rendered versions are quick to make but once I need to start drawing the final art I don't want to waste time with twenty micro expressions no one will ever see!

In one of my earlier posts I mentioned that NPCs would have more complex feelings about the player than a single number that goes up. That ended up being more complicated than I expected and the payoff was almost invisible, so I'm abandoning that idea. NPCs will still be more complicated than "put attention in and sex comes out", and every NPC will react differently, so I'm still happy with the way things are going.

Related to that I've been working up a conversation minigame. It's all procedural so the text will be descriptive rather than specific. For example, "you talk about movies" versus "Emily admits she secretly liked Morbius". As the player you'll need to set your interests (and disinterests) early in the game, and all NPCs will have hardcoded opinions so they are consistent. The early tests are feeling pretty good but I don't want to do too much work on this system until Emily is a working NPC.

One problem I'm working on is what to do when you reach the end of an NPC's story. In other open world life/dating sim type games there's always that point where an NPC has no further events and they revert to doing the same thing over and over. While I can't make NPCs feel like living, conscious beings I feel like there will be a way to keep them interesting once you reach maximum affection. I'm happy with the sex minigame, and the conversation one is coming together well, so I'll probably try to come up with another minigame that "feels" like an ongoing relationship.