Harmony Girls v0.5.2 Development Update #3

Last week was fun for development; I feel like I was able to get a lot done. I created a couple of new animations, both from the content poll you all voted in. You can see the new animations in the teaser images for this week. Development on the minigame changes was full throttle last week, and I've mostly finished everything I wanted to do. I altered a little bit of my original vision, and things may still change once I've had time to balance test the early and late-game. These changes set the minigame up for faster play, where less turns are needed to achieve the same effect, something that's needed to add the card game aspect to it. I still need to add the story mode difficulty, a feature I've felt was necessary for those looking for a more traditional VN approach to games. So let's get into the nitty gritty details about the new minigame changes.

The biggest change involves lust and arousal. Lust is now a value between 0-1000, and at 1000 lust the minigame will end in a success. Arousal is now passively earned, gaining 1 arousal for every action performed. This may change in the future once I've integrated the card game mechanics. Actions will require a certain amount of arousal to be performed. I modified my original idea to make perk points, money, and experience gains tied directly to lust at the end game, as the programming would've taken more time than I would have preferred. Instead, I've increased the values of these gained with each action across the board as the minigame will now have less turns overall. This is one of the things that may change as I balance test. The UI for the minigame has received a minor change with arousal to represent the new changes. Perks which previously used arousal in their function now use excitement, a new minor mechanic that is passively gained every 100 lust. This mechanic will eventually be displayed on the lust bar once the UI overhaul is finished. All-in-all, these changes will see the early game videos still dependent on pleasure, but late game videos will now most likely reach max lust easily before pleasure becomes a concern. Videos should no longer last 40+ turns in the late game, instead ending much earlier since lust is now an end condition.

I've also made some changes outside of the mechanics of the minigame. I stripped away the old end game system, something I felt a lot of players would just skip through since it had repeated text. Now, players are simply prompted to choose the end game animation they want to see, and afterwards they'll see the results screen. Speaking of which, I totally revamped the results screen, adding more information and a text box at the bottom for changes to character status and challenge mode results. This is a change I wanted to do before the GUI changes since it felt like this was lacking some information I felt would be nice to see.

With all that out of the way, it's time to wrap things up. I'll be making a new animation poll after this post and it's something I have yet to put in the game yet, so make sure to check it out and vote! That's all I have for this week; Thanks for the support and I'll see you all next week!