Metro 2032

Hello everyone, it's time for another update!

I got a couple questions recently that involve roleplay mode, and since I haven't really shared much on how that's going to work in the blog, I thought I'd go ahead and make a post on it. So without further ado, let's dive right in!

What is Roleplay Mode?

Basically, it's one of the approaches I've come up with to help vary the AW experience and increase replayability. Long ago I noticed that a lot of the fun I've had with life-simulation games--and erotic games in general--is what I call the roleplay element. You're playing a character, much like you would in a traditional RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, and essentially having fun creating their story. Of course, in an erotic game, you're also injecting your own kinks and creating scenarios and situations that you find sexy.

I believe that AW gives you a lot of freedom to do that for yourself, creating your own character both in body and personality, and placing them in different situations. That said, the freedom available can make it more difficult to play more constrained scenarios, or even challenge yourself. (Who here has tried a virgin run?)

This is where roleplay mode comes in. It gives you some new objectives and/or constraints that allow for a different play experience within the same AW universe. We've even got plans for how new roleplay modes could be created by players themselves, really expanding things (see the next technical section on how that's possible). I think it's worth noting here that I've decided to combine what you might call 'challenge' or 'hard' modes into the same system as the more roleplay oriented ones. We'll probably use a simple number system to indicate if a particular roleplay mode makes the game more or less challenging.

Roleplay mode will use what I'm calling the Switchboard System to control several aspects of the game's mechanics, and also inject some additional brief story segments and make special 'bad' ends available. It also has the option of constraining character creation to some very basic choices such as hair, eye, and skin color, while choosing the rest for you. This all comes together to allow a lot of different possibilities in terms of special scenarios!

Here are a few examples of what I mean when I'm talking about roleplay modes:

• Being required to stay a virgin until some biological defect in your new body is cured at the end of the game.
• Having to avoid pregnancy unless you want to be stuck as a woman forever.
• Having to avoid pregnancy while having your fertility set to overdrive.
• Starting as an unattractive woman but also having a high libido and Lilith's Porphyria.
• Beginning the game with strong drug addiction.
• Even just something as simple as increasing difficulty.

What is the Switchboard System?

Before explaining what it is, let me first summarize the problems it's intended to overcome. Having tons of different checks related to different roleplay modes would quickly become an unmanageable mess. It would also be time-consuming to add new modes and scenarios that each require a whole new set of checks and adjustments. Finally, it would be very difficult to create a mod interface that would allow players to create their own roleplay modes. As a side note, adjusting the balance of the main game itself would also be time-consuming and bug-prone without a centralized way to do so.

Enter the Switchboard System. The basic idea is to insert a series of 'switches' into all the game's mechanics code. I call them switches, but they really are a couple different types of checks, triggers, and modifiers. I use the term 'switches' to differentiate them from all the same things that are part of the basic system. (Something like arousal, for example, has checks for different personality traits with modifiers, as well as a probability section and triggers at key levels.) Switches also can be small bits of executable code, which allow unique things to occur when a trigger goes off (for example: perform X if the PC becomes pregnant).

These universal switches are controlled from a central location, the 'board' portion of the switchboard. It's actually just an organized data object that you could liken to a bunch of game settings. To create a new roleplay mode, we just have to configure the switches to match what we are trying to create. We do this using a 'modifier template' to change the status of the switches away from default. This is important because we want whatever basic balance changes we make to the default to be maintained in all the roleplay modes without any extra work.

As far as the switches themselves go, there will end up being quite a few. Just for arousal as an example: we'd have a modifier for the rate it is gained, a modifier for the rate it is lost, a trigger with a variable threshold, an on-off for that trigger, and an executable segment for that trigger. Universally we can use the rate modifiers for balance purposes and to change difficulty, but the trigger setup allows a modder (or ourselves) to easily make something happen if a certain threshold is passed. Like a switchboard, the whole thing will be a rather complex set of controls, possibly even intimidating at first. But it will be infinitely easier to work with these from a central, standardized location, than having to add things to various places in the tens of thousands of lines of code making up AW!

This seems like a giant-enough blog entry, so I'll leave it at that. :D

As always, thanks for your support!

o7

ThaumX

The Hatch

Hello everyone, ThaumX here reporting from Germany. I've been doing a good deal of traveling lately, and now we're visiting inlaws and friends here in Deutschland. It's been quite a while since I've visited friends and family, so there's a lot to do. As far as AW is concerned, we've also got the first ever meet-up with Besty and me happening next weekend in Koln. :D Working without air conditioning is certainly different than I'm used to, but luckily it hasn't been too hot over here yet!

As far as AW goes, I'm excited about the prostitution that'll be available in version 24, which is coming along nicely. For this update, I'll talk briefly about adding an escape hatch to the game.

The concept is basically to add a way to escape from the current screen in the game. Of the game-breaking bugs we've seen in the game over the last year, a majority have been game-breaking primarily because they interrupt the progression of the game, leaving the player "trapped" on a screen. While the bug itself may be very minor and not cause any problems, being unable to continue IS a problem, obviously. Adding an escape hatch will allow players to circumvent any of those situations they encounter to continue playing.

The button is set up to be visible from just about any screen in the game. It calls an escape function that checks the current game area and executes code to escape based on that. This should make the function more reliable in terms of not screwing up the game, as the steps to escape from the sleep screen, for example, are different than the steps to properly exit the job screen. 

Once the game gets close to the 1.0 release we'll probably either remove the escape hatch entirely or at least leave it as an option that must be manually enabled. 

That's pretty much all I've got for you this time, so I'll leave you with a couple hatch things Besty made :D

Business Negotiation

Hello everyone, it’s time for a new dev blog entry. This introduction is being written from the road on the way to the Smokey Mountain National Park in Tennessee. How did I end up here? Basically, my job has a home leave program because I live and work on the remote island of Guam. I’ve been accumulating home leave for the last three years, and now I’m using it to spend some time in the mainland United States. (I’m also going to be spending some time in Germany as well, which is where I met my whyf.)

I’ve always been a big fan of the mountains; the scenery, forests, and outdoor activities. From hiking and white water rafting in the summer to skiing in the winter. I have a lot of fond memories of the Smokey Mountains in particular, and I’m staying there a few nights to let my kids experience it themselves for the first time. I’m super excited!

I worked some over the weekend, so here’s the AW-related portion of the post I prepared Sunday:

Prostitution

Because where would a sexy life sim be without the option to sell your body for fun and profit?

Like everything AW, I’ve put some serious thought into handling prostitution as well. I believe that our design will allow us to simulate different types of prostitution in a way that gives the player freedom while maintaining a high overall ability to add new content easily.

The oldest profession takes several forms, particularly in the United States where prostitution is largely illegal. Prostitution is still illegal in 2032, and it hasn’t been legalized in Appletree (though the authorities are more permissive of it, particularly in its more mild forms). It’s impossible to represent all the types of prostitution out there, but I’ve distilled things into three main “genres” to experience in Appletree.

The Massage Parlor

In Appletree in the adult district you’ll find the Fairy Tale massage parlor, where you’ll be able to get a job as a professional masseuse. It goes without saying that you’ll be giving your customers plenty of happy endings, and perhaps a little more on occassion. This is the mildest and safest form of prostitution, and as such you won’t exactly be getting rich. You will be making pretty good money as far as jobs go, especially if you earn tips from customers and taake on some bonus services. You’ll have to deal with extra arousal and a lack of satisfaction in exchange, and of course it isn’t exactly a career with a lot of advancement opportunities.

The Oldest Profession Club

You guys knew there was something up with that school, right? The OP Club is a members-only escort service (a prostitution ring). The OP club vets clients, provides security and transportation for the girls, and handles the money. Working as a prostitute in the OP Club is a lot safer than going freelance, and has a lot less for the player to worry about, but is also considerably less lucrative until (and if) you manage to build up a reputation that demands higher fees. After all, more time is spent on and with each client, and the fee is shared with various members of the organization beside yourself. If you do manage to build up a reputation for quality service, however, you’ll start to earn a lot more.

Freelance Hooker

Of course you can always sell yourself on the street corner. This option is the most free, set your own prices and limits, and choose your street corner. The risks are more severe, but the money is better and more immediate, and it’s something you can do on occassion when you need some extra cash, or you can make it your main source of income. This option is going to take some more effort on the player’s part to do well, but that effort is rewarded with cold hard credits.

That’s about all I’ve got for now, you can look forward to some prostitution in version 0.24!

o7

ThaumX

The Silicone Release - Version 0.23.0 Changelog

Welcome to the Silicone Release!

This release has focused a lot on customizing things, from customizing the PC's body with cosmetic surgery and transformatives to creating custom clothing in Tight Threads. There's also a selection of more normal new stuff, such as a new event sequence for the S.P.E.R.M. job, or additional world-building in the form of new pharma companies complete with encyclopedia entries. We've also finally got autoloading for mods so that you don't have to manually load them each time you load the game.

Changes

Words:     1,824,459        Characters:     10,784,438

Code:      176,579 lines    Pharma Corps:     8

• Greatly expanded the medical district.
• Several new transformative medications are available in the private practice area of the medical district.
• Traditional cosmetic surgery is available in the hospital.
• You can now visit the emergency room if you have critical health or mental stats to get your character healed up. (The emergency mental help is particularly amusing...)
• You can now book weekly appointments with a psychiatrist, and visit them to help your mental condition.
• There's plenty of different things to see or have done to you in the medical district, you can even visit your general practice doctor.
• Tight Threads now has a custom clothing creator tool to create your own clothes inside the game.
• When you create custom clothes, they are available immediately to purchase and wear.
• You can also export your custom clothing as a clothing mod to reuse or share with others.
• There is a tool in Tight Threads to allow you to import custom clothing mods into an existing saved game.
• There are several new tutorial images describing important game mechanics in a friendly fashion. They'll show up with the other tutorial images when you start a new game.
• Game mods can now be autoloaded using a mod-package file.
• The game comes with a default file containing the official mods.
• There is a tool in the game to create your own mod package available on the mods page.
• All mods packaged into mod-package.awp will be automatically loaded when you play the game, removing the need to load mods each time you play the game.
• New encyclopedia entry on the 8 main pharmaceutical companies found in the world of AW.
• The game has 8 new company logos for each of these companies.
• These companies produce the transformatives and drugs you'll take in the game, such as the catgirl transformative from Nekomatics.
• New Event chain in the S.P.E.R.M. career path.
• Includes multiple related events that happen slowly over the course of several game weeks.
• One event features an original animation of something you uncover at the Institute.
• Lots of bug fixes and general improvements.
• Minor content additions here and there, such as new churches to be found downtown.
• We did a bad job of keeping track of all the little things we did this month, so there are undoubtedly some things we've forgotten here...

I hope you all enjoy the release!

There is a bunch of in-progress artwork that I worked on this month, related primarily to in-game events or to the TV shows you can watch. Because there's a bunch of other artwork I've worked on that I haven't put into the game yet, I figured I'd share a random selection. :D