Delayed End of February Update and Plans For March

Okay, so, first off, sorry for the delay. I hate to make excuses, but real life has been tying my hands and taking me away from working on this project. So I won't lie, I haven't gotten as much done as I had hoped. That being said, I have some things to report, a lot of which has been posted on the discord in private channels, but let's review anyway!

Hiding Mechanics

Hiding has gotten a big upgrade. Giantess now have a new state that has a chance of triggering even if they aren't fully aware. It's called "Alert", and a little icon appears on their avatar when they are in this state. While in this state, there's a chance that they might spot you if you try to leave the area. This is where hiding comes in.

You can hide from giantess in alert states, provided there is something to actually hide behind or under. While in hiding, you get a pretty clear message telling you how effective your hiding spot is. You can choose to stay in hiding to try to reduce their awareness bar even more, or you can come out of hiding if you've hidden long enough.

Whenever you choose to stay in hiding, you run the risk of being found. Only Alert giantess can find you. The chance of being discovered by an alert giantess depends on how aware they are.

This brings what I think is a much needed sense of dread to encountering a giantess while also not hindering fast travel. If you stay poking around an area where a giantess is, you risk them becoming alert and only then do they become a bigger threat to you. Though, some unaware stuff can still happen even if they aren't alert.

This applies to climbing as well, since you are more likely to trigger an alert state while climbing a giantess.

This incentivizes players to take advantage of risky hiding spots while on a giantess, such as in a pocket or underneath a beltloop. Hiding in these places comes with inherent risks as well, such as, for example, the chance a giantess might sit down while you are hiding in their back pocket.

Moods

Different from affection, moods can change throughout a day and are usually scripted things. For instance, Olivia has a chance of starting her day off in a few different moods. Whichever mood she's in, determines how she interacts with you if she catches you. This is a simple mechanic meant to add variety and unpredictability to encounters.

Moods can be seen when clicking on a giantess avatar, so there's little mystery before engaging a giantess what mood they will be in. To keep things simple, I've restricted possible moods to the following: happy, hungry, angry, playful, mean, peaceful, ???.

Most of these are self-explanatory. Angry and Mean may seem similar, but mean is intended to represent a more sadistic mood and is in that way different from simply being angry. ??? is meant to be mysterious, unemotional, detached. The dialogue that appears in the avatar is straightforward in describing the giantess's current mood.

Tiny NPCs and Shops

Lastly, Tiny NPCs are finally in the game. Players can chat with NPCs and even buy or sell from their shops if the NPCs have those options. I plan to include crafting as an option within NPC shops. This will mean that crafting will be centered around particular NPCs. For example, Gregor at the Forge, Aretha at her Alchemy Bench, Miles with his Looms, etc.

The intent here is to simplify crafting and to take a step away from base-building. While the idea of base-building is great, I can not even remotely imagine adding that to my workload at the moment. So for now, it shall remain as a very distant and probably lost feature from the quest version.

In the vein of simplifying crafting, a new, very important NPC is introduced. Apollo the Junk Dealer is an NPC you encounter the first time you enter Sanctuary. He offers a service. He will store and lug around all of your scrap and crafting ingredients, making them accessible from any shop where you can craft. He offers this as a free trial, but eventually expects some form of payment. Avid users of WinZip may know how this ends.

Crafting has not been implemented but it is on the priority to be implemented next. Considering how quickly I was able to setup buy/sell, and that I won't have to worry about save data with this system, I expect to be able to more or less lift the code logic straight out of the quest version and get this done quickly.

Summary

So, that's sort of it at the moment. A lot, but also not as much as I'd hoped by this point. We're almost midway through March now and I feel the pressure to release Pre-Alpha 2. There have been other changes but nothing notable, mostly bug fixes, test renders, and QOL improvements. I'm still eying a lot of the work cards on trello and intend to have all or most of them reached by the end of March.

So yeah, I am planning to release pre-alpha 2 by the end of March and I don't expect another public release until I feel I have a solid Alpha. I am qualifying a solid 0.1 Alpha as a game with an intro, character creation, some basic interactions, and a 95% complete save data system. That last one is the key. Right now, as I work on things, I keep adding more and more data to be saved to file. The more I do this, the harder it is to create version compatibility between saves. I want to have the majority of save_data that will be written to file per player save file to be ready. I can tweak it later as needed while maintaining version compatibility, but it will add an extra step when I write the code to add new data to be saved, so limiting the amount of times I have to do that will make things easier for me and reduce problems later.

Little wordy, sorry about that. Tried to keep it short. Patreon makes it awkward to post pictures to a text post like this, so I will be posting some screenshots later tonight in a separate post, though remember I don't post any lewds to patreon just to be safe, so always keep an eye on the vip-preview channel on the discord.

Thanks again as always for sticking around. If you have any questions, please ask away.