10/4/17 and More Streamlining

What? A unicorn? WHAT!? Even rarer? Another SQII update!?

That's right. I don't know how interesting this will be to some of you, but you know what they say, no news is good news. But the extended part of that quote is no news is good news, unless it's news about that spanking game.

As you all should be aware by now, the vast majority of changes in the PTC edition of the game have been to give the world of the game more depth, specifically your interactions with the characters. The familiarity levels, the dominance stats, the personalized stats for them, etc. However, it's been hard to strike a balance between adding depth and making sure making a new character doesn't take a week. Because of that, the vast majority of my time has been spent to kind of "automate" the process, so that when I do want to add something new that is complex, I can just fill out a pre-made blueprint of what I know it should look like. It's the reason why each event where the player is spanked is only a single block of code. Granted, that block is large enough to be printed in a windows users manual, but it does the job. In essence, for a long time I've worked on making it so that the characters are unique and fun to interact with, and I can still make them without pulling out my hair.

I've taken more steps toward that today. For starters, the gifting system was something that really tripped me up for a while. Giving an NPC any item or implement meant they would have to have their own unique reaction for item and how it affects them. I was able to put this reaction and registration of the item you show them into one handy line where I can drop it anywhere I want. This is at the cost of, say, a person who already has a cane, and you give them a cane, before I could have them say, "but I already have one" and give it back or something. Now they will always take the item and have a more generic response to it. Honestly, not much was lost for the sake of keeping things tidy. 

The second thing I completed today was the new and improved familiarity system. I described it a few posts (weeks) ago, but I'll summarize it: Level 0: never talked to them before, Level 1: basic interaction, unlocked when talked to them once, Level 2: Builds up gradually through interactions, no "direct" means of triggering, also unlocks potential to talk character into spanking, Level 3: Max level, reached after SUCCESSFULLY completing a spanking (read: didn't struggle to escape or cried through fun scene, or successfully impressed/punished the npc). At level 3, you'll be able to do more crazy stuff like gift them implements, do more daring scenes (like the public spanking with Ruby), the non spanking related punishment options I'll be adding later, etc. They'll also be way more receptive to normal spanking interactions.

All in all, it's pretty similar to the last system, just simplified. The thing that might trip you up is level 2. To reach it, you need to just interact with the character normally. Level 2 has it's own mini-friendliness stat which has a limit to reach before unlocking the level. The limit will generally be higher for older/more mature characters (it makes sense as the more we age, the less we tend to open up and trust others). Points to this limit are added by several ways. Starting a conversation, talking about topics, talking about rumors, all help a little. Certain compliments or buying something from them (if they are a vendor) will help more. And gifting them stuff will help depending on the gift. If you gift a character who was just spanked (by you or any other npc) some lotion, they'll get a big boost to their friendliness. You won't see an active counter of this new stat for each npc, and you won't have to. This addition isn't supposed to be a new obstacle you need to clear, but more like a natural process that can be reached without you knowing. It's meant to simulate you actually getting to know the character, so you can't just walk up to someone for the first time and go "let's do spank thing". Now you can brute force this by just mashing the dialogue options, but it won't be necessary, it'll take at most 10 times entering and leaving a conversation to raise the level, something that can be done in a minute or less.