Hard Mode Poll

Greetings!

Last week’s poll has concluded, and it looks like the succubus won! I’ll be featuring her in the next scene I do, and I already have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be :) 

I kind of expected her to win to be honest, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much love there was for Ana out there! I’ve been trying to make sure to include scenes with her, but I wasn’t sure how much interest there was in ‘em. I’m glad to know she’s still pretty popular :D

The rest of this post is kinda tl;dr - if you just wanna get to the poll question, skip to the end!

Plugins

I started writing the scenes and dialogue for 0.6.2, but most of my development time this week was actually spent making plugins. I finally decided to learn how, and it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d feared. Plugins let you expand RPG Maker MV’s capabilities through the use of custom JavaScript. My releases have been featuring more and more custom code over time, but I’ve mostly done it through the use of script blocks they provide you in the editor. This isn’t the most elegant way to do it; the script blocks are meant for little snippets of stuff, but I’ve sometimes been using them for much more. I avoided making plugins up ‘till now because I thought it would probably be really complex and take a huge time investment to figure it out, but I was wrong!

I got my feet wet writing a plugin to help manage the Broken Augur’s Orb messages, and I’m in the process of finishing up a plugin that will handle the central mechanic of the dungeon (not telling what it is yet :) ).  What does this mean for you? Better performance and fewer bugs. It means I’ll be able to do more complicated things than I’ve done in the past (I’m going to think about starting that threat plugin project, for starters). It also makes it much easier to reuse some of this stuff, so you could see the same mechanics show up again later in the game. Basically, it should make the game part of it better.

Hard Modes

One of the complaints I heard - frequently - during the early stage of this game’s development was that it was too hard. I don’t think people found the RPGM-style combat difficult, but some found the minigames very frustrating. I think part of it is what people go in expecting - I guess people think of TPE as a ‘porn game’, and while a lot of porn games may have repetitive grinds you have to go through to get to the bewbs, they’re usually not difficult.

The thing is, I really hate repetitive grinds. They always bring to mind Skinner boxes, and I don't find that a very flattering way to think of myself. So when I made a game, I decided I'd rather gate content through the use of challenging encounters rather than "keep doing X over and over until something interesting happens". 

I think a lot of folks enjoyed the challenge, but clearly a number of folks didn't. Some found 'em boring, some found 'em irritating, and I guess it gets really frustrating when you try and repeatedly fail to complete a task in a game you otherwise like. People play to have fun and/or fap, not feel bad about themselves. And, of course, there were some folks who had problems with 'em because of physical disabilities.

I tried to solve these problems through the use of easy modes. For pretty much everything I thought could be challenging within the game, I added a way to make it almost trivial. (When you see torches in odd places, that's why they're there.) There's a cost for using them, though - while you'll be able to see all the story content through easy modes, there are a few H-scenes you won't be able to see (Note: only dungeons have this penalty). I figured this was a good way to balance my own desire to make a challenging game and the interests of folks who couldn't or wouldn't complete those challenges.

Still, 'normal modes' were never intended to be incredibly challenging. It occurred to me that some folks may enjoy an especially challenging experience, so I started exploring the idea of hard modes.

My Vision For Hard Modes (And the Poll Question!)

In hard mode dungeons, everything would be harder (who'd have guessed?). Enemies would hit harder and/or have more challenging abilities, the challenges (aka minigames) and boss fights would be less forgiving and maybe have one or two extra mechanics to deal with.

So what do you get for beating a dungeon on hard mode? It was tough figuring this part out - I don't want it to be extra story content; the story should be available to all. I don't want it to be extra H-scenes; those should be available to normal mode folks. So hard mode rewards would end up being things that are neat to have or that let you do interesting things outside of combat, but are not particularly relevant otherwise. I'm thinking things like new outfits or items that lets you violate certain game mechanics. And I suppose more powerful gear so that you'll be able to beat other hard modes.

Before I get too far down this path, though, I want to see how much interest there is for this sort of thing. My poll question is:

Should I make a hard mode for the dungeon in 0.6.2?

Thank you for your support!