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rngtan

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A member registered Apr 09, 2020

Recent community posts

Since you are still relatively early in the process of the development, you might be interested in some prompts.

There are about two ways you can frame the Exhibitionism genre: Do you want to stay hidden, or do you want to expose yourself?

The first kind of game is the most straightforward to develop for. It is all about navigational stealth challenges or puzzles. Try to reach one or several location nodes without being seen naked. This format benefits from small and tight levels with predictable NPC patterns; sometimes just getting from one side of the building to the other can be a sufficient scope. The main gameplay will be avoiding stationary or patrolling NPCs. You can spice it up with pickups or 'shields' that slow you down and raise suspicion but protects your 'confidence' enough to pass areas without cover.

One example that comes to mind for that is that Nagisa Kusanagi game.

The second kind of game is basically a Social Stealth Sandbox, and it is actually a bit hard to come up with a gameplay loop that actually requires a wide open level. The best I can come up with is designing the challenges around getting into position, doing a stunt (or several), then escaping. Try to de-emphasize instant failure conditions; if you are not physically getting caught, you should be able to continue. Objectives should depend on the nature of the map; for example, if the map is sparsely populated, a goal could be to seek out a number of guys, give them a good scare, then shaking them off, and how hard you have to shake one off depends on whether they prefer to pretend minding their own business, whether they chase and search you, or call other people.

If that sounds like a lot of work for little gain, you'd be right. A lot of solo dev projects die on Open World design, since it is hard to not only come up with a fun game, but it is also hard to implement technically. Even Seleka/Manaka, for how polished they are (relatively), are bundled with a few questionable mechanics that are probably very poor fit for the genre. The health pool is too small to allow you to meaningfully engage with the social/crowd aspect, and the stamina serves more to prolong the traveling time rather than providing meaningful gameplay, since you 'die' too fast for it to ever matter. For how many locations there are, the objectives are at large just copy-pasted from one to the other. The games actually came out at all, which is neat, but it feels more like a game of the first genre with a lot of useless fluff attached that get in the way.

If you are still interested, then the first challenge to clear is probably to produce a robust NPC scheduling and reaction system. Make a test room for different kinds of reactions before throwing them into a proper map.

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According to the description, all combat should be avoidable. Does it apply to Chapter 1? Unless we are missing something (and we probably are), the maximum amount of money you can find without combat is 630, which is slightly short of 650 to pay off both the guard in the Thieves Guild and the Pink Ticket.


Edit: Nevermind, we found another 50 c in the private quarters of the Thieves Guild.

Is the "An alleged witch" quest completable? It is possible to have obtained all ingredients after the capital sequence, but the game doesn't seem to take notice.

"Watch Jogger" Level 1 at the park will consistently brick the save file. Invoking the map will incompletely load the map and trap you there, and you can't skip time afterwards.

Thanks, just caught the addendum. I will wait until the next release (although I hope I won't have to redo the entire save file).

It is pretty hard to trigger the last Maki event in the latest build. Does anyone know what the conditions and the triggers are? All other events have already been seen.

About the win cutscene: If you die right before you trigger the cutscene, the game will be broken; the camera is displaced and frozen on spot while you otherwise have control over the character.

It was probably not a good idea to bake the Happy scene hints into the music. The voice is barely audible behind the background music. It would probably slightly less frustrating if it were played as Sound or Voice so that we can mute the music.

Compliments to the dev. The exhibition genre pretty underrepresented right now but offers a lot of gameplay opportunities.

I'd like to ask which direction you want to take this game. You cited Hitman as one of your inspirations, but going back a bit further, a Tony Hawk style progression system makes perfect sense for this kind of game (and to be honest, the modern Hitman achievements since Absolution are basically Tony Hawk likes). Basically, every map has a checklist of goals, which can be straight up score runs, but also something more specific goals like "Lead this specific character for x meters/to this location", "Scatter this specific group of punks and get away successfully", "Get the attention of this super persistent character and survive for at least x hours", "Level x Orgasm at this hard to reach spot", or "Drop clothing at a variable amount of predetermined spots" (with later maps probably requiring a larger amount of pieces than the standard outfit has) - you can go nuts there. Every goal credits you with a set amount of points, and reaching certain milestones unlocks goodies, cosmetics, and eventually more maps with their own set of goals.

On the technical side of things, do the NPCs have schedules? As far as I can see, they seem to walk on determined routes, but kinda randomly so. For this kind of game, that would be one of the things I'd tackle early since this would be one of the way to give the maps character, and would also set up a lot of achievements that require (at least some) reliable NPCs.

Not referring to you, but another dev who secretly updated the game and then proceeded to remove any user who pointed that out. You have been pretty forward when questions, which is commendable.

Would have been better to mention that somewhere in the patch notes, but I understand that that could have some vague ramifications. 

Thanks for answering it. Last time I asked that question I got permabanned, so I was hesitant at first.

Are my memories playing me a trick or did Dark Matter's breasts expand? I am aware of the Leary situation on Steam but this one could be just me being paranoid.