Lust Harem 0.30 devlog

A short devlog. Mostly technical, although it does show some previews and changes and gives info about the next update. Some things are invisible to the player, others are not.

0.30 progress

It's been almost four months since the release of 0.27 (9th of May) and usually the update would be up by now. 

All events but one have already been finished with the release of beta for supporters (24th of July), and it is only the final, party event that's left. It is also the longest and biggest one I've ever done. Far bigger than Willow's arena wargame, although on the uptake this one doesn't include messing with tens of monsters. There's other issues though, like technical difficulties, crashes, the studio taking 5-10 minutes to open due to large number of characters, time constraints.

Main idea behind it is the seduction's circle party, introducing a few characters taking part in it(not all, few will remain as simply a casual fling, at least for now) and giving the player something to do if he chooses not to participate. It also makes a heavy push with the main story, although this depends on some of your previous choices.

Now, the release date. I don't wanna throw exact days I may or may not make. Overall, the final event is about 50% done and will probably take another 1.5 to 2 months. This is a somewhat half realistic, half optimistic date. I definitely wanna get it done before Halloween.

I wish I could release it today, or a month ago, but it wouldn't make sense with all the party stuff being half done while the build up for it is already there.

All that said, feel free to read on for some technical changes.

Game hints and event triggers

Initially, with the game being much smaller in size, adding new events was a rather straightforward task. Put some event triggers on every location and add a hint into the glossary. It looked more or less like this:

if helen.story ==2 and time == morning:
jump to event

This is more or less a simplified look for an event trigger with glossary hints looking the same. This is the simplest way of throwing events into a game and it's worked well for a long time. (And why change something that works well, right?) Issues arose with more content and the addition of world map hints.

Adding hints to the world map was a must, lest the player wander lost and give up, but this meant I needed to make 3 entries for every event. 1 for the worldmap, 1 for the trigger and 1 for the glossary hint. Couldn't reuse them as they worked differently.

Another issue and more entries arose with the stories merging. Sometimes to proceed with a character, you need to proceed with other character's events. This meant throwing more entries into the glossary telling the player to proceed with another character's events.

With 0.30, I've automated most of the glossaries and merged the event triggers with glossary hints. Map hints are still a seperate thing for more clarity, but overall it works well and reduces work amount for new events. The game now specifices more clearly what character stories you should follow, for example Varess story 4 (watching porn together with the DOA girls) required completing Asuka's, Asara's and Helen's events, but only stated 'Proceed with other girls'. Now it's more specified and tells you what girls exactly are left.

This is mostly a thing for easier development but it should help a bit if you ever find yourself lost.

Skill system

When the game first came out (patch 0.10) it only had 2 skills that caused no conditions. Over time I slowly added more and more stuff, that piled up and made a mess of the code. 

A lot of scripts have been redone and improved. In general, the player won't see any changes, except for less lag. I eliminated pointless checks and looping when checking skill and condition effects, and whether anyone has died. There is a slight improvement in performance, especially when fighting a lot of enemies. Also less prone to breaking when new stuff gets introduced.

Quality of life changes:

This concludes the devlog. Thank you for reading and your patience in waiting for the next update. Hope to see you soon and that you'll have as much fun playing it as I have making it.