WIP - (Re)Workin' It

For this WIP post I don't have any artwork to show, just some gameplay and area reworks.

University Rework -

The University area was really bugging me, so I've been reworking it. Instead of having to select from a menu to be brought to different parts inside, it's all one big area now.

I'm pretty sure I said this in another post, but just in case I didn't, I originally had the selectable areas instead of just having it as one because of the original 4:3 resolution. It was the default RPGM resolution, and it was just way too small to have everything in one area. The screen was too close to the player and it would have been easy to get lost and confused. But since it's now 16:9 and 720p, there's plenty of room. I may still change things up a bit, but here's what the area is looking like now.

This is it zoomed out.

And here it is in-game

Now the area should fit in better with all of the others in the game.

I mainly just copied and pasted all the individual areas into one big one, but I did make some adjustments. Like now there's a desk for the teacher in each of the classrooms. Which I mainly added in because of Ms. Hartley. I made her character CG as if she was leaning on a desk, and some of my other teacher sketches have the same thing. Mainly because I wanted to do something other than just standing, and having teachers leaning on a desk makes more sense than for most other characters. But there needed to actually be a desk there lol. I'm also considering putting the actual desk into the artwork, but I'm not sure yet. I've never really done wood in this style before and don't know how long that would take. For now, I'm more worried about getting everything done for v0.1.2 and v0.2.
Anyway, I've also added something to the wall of the classrooms to help differentiate them from each other, I've made the gym bigger and added in the swimming pool area, and there's a path leading to the teacher's personal office in the classrooms. You can't actually go into the offices. I just put those there so it wouldn't be weird to be like, "You go into their office to bang." When there isn't anywhere that there could be an office. It was okay when the areas were broken up, because it was easy to think there were just areas you weren't going to, but with everything in one I wanted to add that little detail.

I was originally going to wait until v0.2 to do this rework, but decided to just go ahead and do it now. I'm doing more to add polish and add a bit more to the game now, and to give a sort of tutorial for the pregnancy system, I decided to add in a storyline involving a teacher here at the school. Both the teacher and the first character you can impregnate were planned for iterative updates, but the story wouldn't make as much sense if you had to select the specific area.

To give a little bit of a preview for the story, there's a teacher in the medical dept who is looking for a male volunteer to help with her research into fertility. Specifically making a drug that will let infertile women get pregnant. She's just got a bit of a reputation throughout the school for taking her experiments a little too far. So she's having trouble finding a volunteer. To help, she's dressed in skimpy clothes and started cat calling students as they pass. Which is how you can run into her. As you walk by the medical office, you'll see her, if you get close enough, she'll call out to you and you can volunteer.

If you could only select areas, this wouldn't make much sense. I'd have to have some other way to tell you about the experiments so that you would go directly to her. So I just decided to rework the area now. This way I could also maybe get some feedback on the area.

I know it's probably a little weird with those large spaces with nothing, but that's temporary. As I add in more teachers and students, I'll add in more larger offices and classrooms as needed. I set it up so I could add in a second floor if needed as well. I thought about just adding in everything I think I should need now, which is why there's an extra classroom and the gym area was expanded, but if I did keep adding to it, it would just be an even bigger empty area. I want to keep it as small as possible until there's enough characters to fill the space.

v0.1.2 Gameplay Changes -

I've been making a lot more gameplay changes than I expected for v0.1.2 as well. Mainly because of Rinko. She's the start of the group of women you unlock with the apartment, so I had to do a lot of testing, and that just naturally led to some rebalancing. Then I tried to take feedback into account and make it a little bit less grindy. Like I made the Business Suit only $800 now, down from $1000. To make it a bit easier to buy. I've also made it so your stats are overall higher and nerfed some of the women's "attacks". This should all make the game a bit easier and require less grinding.

I've made a lot of other smaller polish changes too. Like Angela's sprite now moves with you when you enter the house. The signs in the art gallery now display exactly how many of each set there are. And when you go into the commercial district from the neighborhood, I moved the spawn point forward by 1 block. That way you shouldn't accidentally go back into the neighborhood anymore.

I have a whole list of patch notes that talks about the specifics that I'll release once v0.1.2 releases for those interested.

I'm hoping that I wont have to do as much heavy rebalancing or reworking for future updates. At least for iterative updates. It's taken a lot of time away from doing artwork and led to a lot of really long days. My goal is to release v0.2 as quickly as possible. My current art upload schedule is 2 a week, but I'm trying to finish more than that while I'm unemployed and have some extra time. The goal is to release v0.2 with more content than expected. I had considered either doing bonus art posts or holding v0.2 until every piece of art was released, but ultimately decided against it. I'd much rather get the game updates out faster. I really didn't expect so many people to try out the game so quickly, and I really want it to better reflect the game that I want it to be, rather than more of a proof of concept like it is now. By v0.2, it'll definitely be a lot closer. Then by v0.3, some areas should be filled completely and there should be some storylines. It'll be a lot smoother of a gameplay experience too. And as for why I don't do more art posts, I already am starting to think I make too many posts each week. Especially when there's new polls and everything. I really don't want to clutter people's feeds even more by doing more than 2 art posts each week. I've considered changing it to only posting once a week, but I couldn't really figure out a way to have it be fewer total posts. Since character intros are free, and scene CG is for certain tiers, they can't be combined into one or anything. And while I could hold the artwork and post it all one day, it would just be more posts all at once, which just makes things worse. So instead, I have a specific number of scenes I want to add into the game. Once they're all done and in the game, I'll go ahead and release v0.2 with everything. Then all the higher quality art will be in the full scene pack. And then I'll do one big post with character intros for all of the characters that didn't get one. That way no one misses anything, the feed doesn't get cluttered, and everyone gets a bigger update early.

Back to work -

That's it for this WIP post. I'm mainly just working on the gameplay stuff, so that's all I really had to share this week. I don't get to talk about gameplay stuff that much, so I thought it would be an interesting change. I hope you look forward to v0.1.2! Coming this weekend for Waifu Early Access supporters!